I’ve been working on a project that’s required me to full immerse myself in the world of gradients, textures and making user interface widgets look shiny, chiseled and/or chunky, so this was a refreshing reminder that 8-bit art is still wonderful.

They’re a little steep at US$16, but it’s nice to know they’re out there.

If you stash your iPhone by your bed at night, here’s a handy way to keep it charged and functional: designery home products vendor Areaware sells Alarm Dock, a clever holder of sorts that displays the phone horizontally in a familiar presentation. The company even has a companion app that displays the time just like a clock radio.

The product copy says, “The Alarm Dock uses a nostalgic product language to meet the progressively thin and disappearing profiles of consumer electronics. It is at once a critique and an accommodation to new technology.” Uh, yeah. Anyway, I bought one for my girlfriend, and I’m happy to report that it’s a substantial object, meaning the wood (real beechwood) is solid and of sufficient weight to keep it from being easily yanked by the cord. Buy it here.

Earlier this afternoon I posted this on Twitter and it proved pretty popular, so I thought it worth posting it here too: Gawker has an excerpt from Walter Isaacson’s forthcoming biography of Steve Jobs that gives some background on how Jobs came to choose this uniform. Read the article here.

I figured posting it here would also give me an opportunity to reprint one of my favorite quotes from David Byrne: “People will you remember you better if you always wear the same outfit.” I’ve always liked that one.

It looks like I’m going to write about every project that John Hilgart turns out. I’ve already written a few times about his 4CP and Comic Book Cartography blogs, and now he has a new one, mining similar territory: Supertype! features big, beautiful scans of old comic book mastheads.

Though I was familiar with a handful of these already, the scale of each image makes me appreciate the hand-lettered quality of the logos and lettering in a whole new way. Browse them all here.

Just released today, Verb is a new instant messaging app for iOS that improves greatly on AIM for iPad and AIM for iPhone. It’s significantly more elegant, but even better it’s a multi-platform client much like Adium, one of my all-time favorite programs, which means it works with Google Chat and Facebook as well as AIM.

In spite of all the alternatives and its diminishing cool, I still rely heavily on instant messaging, so I was happy to see this released. Plus, today only, Verb is just US$0.99, which is a bargain for a universal-class app; Verb runs on both iPhone and iPad. Find out more here.

When I was starting out as a designer all I wanted to do was sit at my Mac and do design all day and ignore everything else about the messy world of business. In a way I’m still a little like that, but somehow I got to this point in my career where I’m building my second company and spending more of my time, energy and passion on the mechanics of business than I ever have before. And it’s been incredibly fun.

This coming Thursday I’m going to be talking about that journey as well as sharing some thoughts about design entrepreneurship in general. I’ll be doing this as part of Tech@NYU’s Startup Week here in New York City, and I’ll be appearing onstage with the amazing Ben Pieratt, designer extraordinaire and founder of Svpply. The event was announced this past week but it was sold out before I could even blog about it. Thankfully, the folks at Tech@NYU found a bigger venue, so they’ve just opened up a whole new set of seats. You can get your ticket here.

(By the way, people have been asking if the talk will be recorded or streamed. Currently there are no plans to do that, sadly.)

New York artist and friend Ariel Aberg-Riger is one of my favorite artists right now. Her doodle-like portraits of serenely chic twenty-somethings and her portrait-like collages of peaceful abstractions are simple but delightfully specific.

She has a new portfolio site with lots of her work, and you can visit her blog here.

Architect and designer Kirsten Hively started this project late last year to photograph New York City’s many neon signs. She says, “I have been told that New York’s neon is unexceptional in comparison to Chicago’s or Portland’s. I wanted to prove otherwise. I also wanted to demonstrate (mostly to myself) that the quirky, independent New York is still here — it’s not all chain stores, standard-issue vinyl awnings and luxury condos.”

The images are really quite lovely, and she’s right, they do evoke a quirkiness and idiosyncrasy that many people complain has been drained from New York.

Hively blogs about the project over at this Tumblr blog, and she posts her pictures over at this Flickr set. Even better, she’s just released an iPhone app that shows you what neon signs are near your current location (provided of course that your current location is somewhere in New York City) and even lets you add your own photographs of neon signage to the database. Download the app here.

A beautiful new typeface apparently of Lithuanian origin, and full of incredibly elegant, fluid ligatures. Here are a few:

The kicker is that Magnola costs only US$8 from Myfonts.com. Cheap. See the project page at Typography Served.