Debbie Millman's popular podcast Design Matters begins its 4th season today with an interview with Malcolm and Joyce Gladwell. Tune in to VoiceAmerica Business from 3-4 to hear from these influential thinkers.

The Design Box: Brochure Design Cards is a handy, first-of-a-kind card deck of 50 professionally-designed brochure layouts. It provides hundreds of ideas for designing marketing pieces for a diverse variety of business types. These at-a-glance cards can be used to help dial in client preferences, or as a design resource for the office or studio. The box also features a CD containing fully-editable digital sample templates from the StockLayouts design library and a quick-reference fractions-to-decimals conversion chart.

Designer Brian Sooy just sent me a fun link to The Onion store. These fake boxes were designed by Arik Nordby, who has his own humerous golf-merch site called Bogeypro.com. The idea behind the boxes is that you put a real present inside, but when the recipient first unwraps the gift, they'll wonder what kind of drug you were smoking while Christmas shopping this year.

from Wired

Pecha kucha—pronounced pet-shah coot-shah—is an onomatopoeic Japanese phrase meaning "the sound of casual chatter."

But for a small but growing band of international designers, artists and creative types, pecha kucha is nothing less than the buzzword of 2006. For these people -- and since last Tuesday I'm one of them -- pecha kucha has come to mean a chance to get out from behind your computer, meet like-minded people, show them your work, and exchange ideas -- all in a six-minute slot. More.

Check out this amazing interactive origami Christmas greeting generator from RG/A. As you type in sentences, the site creates matching origami shapes. I tried typing the word Monkey as part of a sentence and it made an origami monkey face!

In a tribute to the golden age of animation, House Industries is introducing Burbank, a versatile new collection of 20 fonts. The collection will be available January 1, 2007.

The collection features Burbank Big, in three widths and four weights, and Burbank Small, in four weights of both Roman and italic. Designed for mixing and matching, Burbank offers a nearly endless array of combinations.

From Scientific American

Despite those who romanticize depression as the wellspring of artistic genius, studies find that people are most creative when they are in a good mood, and now researchers may have explained why: For better or worse, happy people have a harder time focusing. More.

Wired just posted a sneak peak at the beta version of Photoshop CS3 that looks at the application's new features, some interface enhancements and its improved ease of use.