Franklin & Marshall launched a new design. While the new version isn’t that striking, it sure looks much better than that previous one. The site has also accomplished the unified look and feel across the board, something GW is trying to do.

I am not sure when Harvard University launched its new homepage, but I really like the simple layout with such a minimal set of links.

Sign the letter telling the Supreme Court not to divorce 18,000 California couples.

We now have a fan page for simplexpression on Facebook. Thanks Joseph for pitching the idea.

The following excerpt is taken from the introduction of Ken Robinson’s The Element:

An elementary school teacher was giving a drawing class to a group of six-year-old children. At the back of the classroom sat a little girl who normally didn’t pay much attention in school. In the drawing class she did. For more than twenty minutes, the girl sat with her arms curled around her paper, totally absorbed in what she was doing. The teacher found this fascinating. Eventually, she asked the girl what she was drawing. Without looking up, the girl said, “I’m drawing a picture of God.” Surprised, the teacher said, “But nobody knows what God looks like.”

The girl said, “They will in a minute.”

Lil Wayne told Katie Courics in their interview.

Paul Boag ‘s “10 Things a Web Designer Would Never Tell You“:

Working with web designers is a nightmare. You will never meet a more opinionated bunch of snobs. They are always going on about ‘white space’, ‘composition’ and how they went to art college (like that counts as a proper education!).

I was in a two-hour meeting with a web design agency to take a peak at what to come at gwu.edu and all GW’s web sites. The direction will be a unified look and feel across the board to give users a better experience throughout GWU web sites.

The new site is nothing spectacular, but it does look promising in term of organization and structure. It will be powered by Vignette, a content management system. Since the new direction will be unifying all of GW’s web presence, the School of Business will have to follow the template. As much as I hate to work with a template, this move will make a much smoother experience for the users.

In addition, once the brand is established, the content could be concentrated on more. So even if I have to dismantle all of our sites and start over, I’ll be glad to for the benefit of the entire university web sites. I do hope that the university will stay firm with its direction. So far, I have not seen a university web site that has a look and feel across the board. As soon as you go into the academic programs, the sites begin to branch out on their own. We’ll see things go.

Quite a striking story from Zeldman:

While my great grandfather hid in a rain barrel, a Ukrainian villager raped my great grandmother. Some time later, my grandfather was born.

Malcolm Jones on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue:

Why this album? Out of the thousands of jazz albums ever recorded, why does “Kind of Blue” maintain its hold on our imaginations more than any other? The simplest response is to say, because it’s beautiful.