I like how Boing Boing’s “top” story on the home page is about advertising hell. It’s conveniently buried beneath a giant block of advertising. I realize sites need ad dollars to stay afloat, but this is just silly.

Artist Lee Bretschneider from www.adventuringcompany.com has been busy crafting some serious Lost love!

If you dig these and send em, consider participating in Lee’s fundraiser for Haiti. (Link via @popcandy)

See many more cards>

You Should Judge A Book By Its Cover Interstitial from pborelli.

Patrick is a very funny comedian and knows a thing or two about design. This video features book designers Steven Heller, Rodrigo Corral and Chip Kidd discussing classic book covers like “Cooking with Pooh.” Deelish!

“In his one-man multimedia show, You Should Judge A Book By Its Cover, Borelli takes on non-classics like Cooking With Pooh (featuring Winnie the Pooh stirring a batch of brown cookie dough) and other gross miscarriages of literary design.” More>

Hopefully this show will be hitting the Philly area soon. We’ll keep you posted!

Follow Patrick Borelli: @patrickborelli

Letterheady is the new site from Shaun Usher who has been collecting “offline correspondence, specifically letters” for a good while now on his  www.lettersofnote.com site. This new online showcase highlights the design, not the content. Good, I’m tired of reading.

There’s only a handful of pieces up now, but I’m sure more sheets of 24Lb bond goodness will soon follow. You can submit samples, too. Long live paper!

Website: www.letterheady.com (via neatorama)

Twitter: @lettersofnote

Enjoy browsing hundreds of scintillating sci-fi book covers from Penguin Publishing. Artwork and photography by the likes of René Magritte, Max Ernst, Victor Vasarely, Adrian Chesterman, Véronique Rolland, Franco Grignani and many more.

Website: www.penguinsciencefiction.org

Sears Tower “The Ledge” – 1,350 feet above ground (photo by José M. Osorio). More Pix>

Grand Canyon Skywalk – 4,000 feet above ground

Look at the green and blue spirals. Incredibly, they are the same color.

“WTF? This cannot be true! Impossible! Everything I hold dear in life must now be a lie! Let’s burn this at the stake!!”

Relax. Discover Magazine will tell us how this is possible.

Don’t You Dare Complain About Your Job: “Waahhh, my reports didn’t format correctly!”  “Waahhh, the conference room is double booked!” Yes, that is devastating, Rick, but at least you’re not Sulfur Mining in an Active Volcano.  Speaking of volcanoes—and who isn’t—here’s one that might remind you of the kick-ass lava-spewer I crafted in fourth grade. Remember that one? Baking soda and vinegar all up in your face? NASA Volcano Image Shows Atmospheric Shockwave.

Site for Sore Eyes: 45 Beautifully Designed Book Covers

More Eye-Soothing Goodness: 50 Amazing Gig Posters Sure to Inspire

Not So Eye-Soothing: Soviet Russian Album Covers:

Warning: Contents May Be Hot! Want to see the largest fusion device on Earth? “During a reaction, nuclear fuels are held away from the walls by electromagnets, and reach temperatures more than ten times hotter than the core of the sun.”

That’s great nerds, it gets real hot, but what is it good for?

…it’s being used as a test bed for a new reactor, ITER, which will generate electricity from fusion, using fuel found in ordinary seawater. Just one cubic kilometre of seawater contains enough deuterium – used as a nuclear fuel by JET – to generate more power than the world’s entire oil reserves.

New Favorite Jingle: “Todd, Todd Barry… Todd, Todd Barry!” Rock out to 35 seconds of Todd Barry from the “Tim and Eric” DVD.

Listen: The almighty Ted Leo on The Best Show (also appearance by villainous Brush Man).

Eric is Making a Salad and Busting Out His Ponda Baba Costume: Star Wars Themed Picnics @ The Mann Center?

Do You Love Movies? Doug Benson does. Download his entertaining podcast.

Watch Some Videos: Blooper and TV’s Gay Friend Obsession.

U-Stay: Our pal Chris attempted to use U-Haul on his big move, it did not go so well. I’ve had similar problems with the shady business. Please don’t use them, I think they charge extra for a truck with brakes.

Well-Spent $5: The Weakerthans – Live Session on iTunes

Your Daily Dilemma:

I wish I could still enjoy reading the Huffington Post, I really do, but my peepers won’t allow it. When the site pops open in my browser I expect circus music to start playing and confetti to drop from the ceiling. Within seconds I am  stricken with a small but painful eye seizure (picture cartoon eyeballs doing 360s in opposite directions) due to the insanely jam-packed and gaudy images-and-icons-a-poppin’ presentation that attacks every bit of design sensibility I have left in this old body. Everything on the page demands attention… except for the actual article I want to read.

The layout is  so breathless and so claustrophobic, I feel like my browser might explode at any second, covering me in a vomity, pixelated mess of Madge, Cramer and Palin.

Let’s break down a page from this this traveling carnival of a website, shall we?  (Click the image above to enlarge).

Scroll Scroll Scroll – For starters, there’s certainly a lot going on up top. The excessive navigation, photos,  ads,  social media buttons, expanding Flash-based ads and other nonsense  STOMP push the  main story content way way down the page, below the fold on most monitors. I have a 21-inch monitor (not bragging) and I barely get the top two lines of the story. Boo.

Menu Mania! The Logo/Header/Banner Ad area is sandwiched in between two layers of navigation on top and below. The top “BIG NEWS” navigation bar is  a bit odd, is this news about “CNN, ABC and Newspapers” or news from these sources? Either way, I’ll skip it, too broad. The two-tier main menu navigation is fine, even if the Twitter, Email, and Homepage links break convention. Based on HP’s usual lack of restraint, I would have expected a much bigger Twitter presence, like a 250×300 button atop the sidebar. The third section of top-level navigation is the popular “photo links”  to the latest stories. These sure are pretty, no big words, look there’s Suri again! So cute!

Love This NOW! The glaring problem with the placement of the “Like It/Don’t Like It,” “Buzz Up” and “Digg It, Stumble It, Stroke It, Fellate It” buttons is simple:  They come before the actual article. As much as I would love to share your wonderful article with others based solely on the super duper headline, I really need to read a bit of it before I can tell my peeps about the insightful reporting on the Ashton vs. CNN Twitter fight.

TAGS! TAGS! The same goes for the  “tags” placement above the story:

Read More: Cnbc, CNBC Obama Jim Cramer, Jeff Zucker, New York-New York, Rick Santelli, Media News.

Whoa… slow down! I might want to read more on the topics discussed, but not just yet Huffy. Too many tags are just silly and make your post seem very spammy to search engines. Here’s one example of how HP went bonkers with tags, making sure the reader wouldn’t miss a related tea-bagging incident:

Look, I have web-based ADD just like everyone else and I can easily leave a story I clicked on without reading it  because of something shiny and pretty in the sidebar calling out to me (Is that Gwyneth blogging about the financial crisis? I’m so there!). I don’t need  help being distracted, but HP doesn’t care. They love the sensory overload. In fact, they don’t cares if you read the stupid article at all, they just want you to click on something else on their site (Page Views!) or promote it elsewhere.

Sorry Photo, We Have Interactivity to Promote: The photo used to be the star of a newspaper article, where your eye was immediately drawn, creating a nice balance with the headline to give the reader a pleasant,  illustrative glimpse into the story. Not on the HP.

The photo is an afterthought crammed in between  6 calls to action. Oh well, at least there’s another “Share” option here. Thank goodness. I already shared this Pulitzer Prize-winning piece using the 20-odd social media links above, but I was still in the mood to impart this goodness to others. I will also print it, take it to the bathroom, wipe with it and snail mail it to a friend.

Slutty Sidebar: Love the subliminal “BJs” ad above the porny nude Padma pic. Classy.

Comments: So you finally get to the article and now you want to read the all-important comments (let’s see who calls who stupid, grossly misinformed or gay). On a good website comments are placed directly under the article. It makes sense for many reasons. HP, in keeping with its “promotion first, usability ninth” mentality place the comments section about two feet under a bunch of other odd bits of beguilement.

Look, more grey-faced bloggers! Some are even celebrities! With opinions! Love it!

Comments soon, we promise, but first: Don’t you dare forget to Digg one of the “surging” stories you haven’t read before you go any further. We want to knock that video of the Chipmunk going “nom nom nom nom” off the top of the Digg charts, so help us out!

Okay, finally made it to the comments. I’d love to offer mine, but I’m a bit tired. Maybe later, I want to check out that dubious Ad by Google above. It  seems like a good place for financial advice.

Look kids, I know there are worse sites that look and function just like the HP — the busy tabloid look with lots of photos and interaction — I get it, it sells and people are used to the frenetic “lots of news coming at ya!” presentation. But newspapers will be the thing of the past very soon, and I just want a calmer and more efficient way to read the news. Here’s a start:

• Move the content up a bit and decrease the header area.
• Get rid of of the excess interactivity.
• Relocate the “calls to action” to an area below the story.
• Banish all ads I need to manually close.
• Use better photos and less of them. 40 photos on the homepage is a bit much, even if 23 of them are that cute Obama puppy.
• Inject a little breathing room between all the stuff you got going on.
• Add circus music and a Rip Taylor photo or two.

Scott, you write for these guys, make this happen.

If you like fairy tales and infographics — lots of them –  you’re in for a treat.

Slagsmålsklubben (sponsored by destiny) by Tomas Nilsson (via currentconfig)