Pass the popcorn: Y Combinator startup caught stealing from 37signals

Here’s some developer drama for your Saturday morning: Curebit, a Y Combinator startup that just closed a round of funding from Dave McClure’s 500 Startups fund, has been caught red-handed stealing HTML code, images, and the like from 37signals.

37signals, for those of you not familiar with the inner workings of the machine we call the Internet, is a web shop founded by Ruby on Rails creator DHH (short for David Heinemeier Hansson) and Jason … Continue Reading

Fab.com gears up for huge expansions: open doors, new shops, international ops

Fab.com, the design-focused flash sale site, has been going gangbusters lately. Today, the company announced a slew of changes aimed at a global takeover.

The company’s news is fourfold:

First, the site is nearing the 2 million member mark and should hit that target “any day now,” according to the company blog.

For an invite-only retail site, that’s huge. It’s also huge when you consider the site’s growth trajectory over the past few months; they’re … Continue Reading

Google to release optional design guidelines for Android 4.0

Google is planning to release a new set of design guidelines for the latest version of its mobile operating system, Android Ice Cream Sandwich.

Many critics have pointed out that Android doesn’t have enough unifying elements among third-party applications (unlike Apple’s iOS), which leads to a broken user experience. However, a set of design and style guidelines could give Android more consistency that would in-turn improve usability overall.

The guidelines will offer developers in-depth instructions … Continue Reading

And now, Mr. Carsonified will teach you how to build a website in 5 minutes

Ryan Carson, the web design guru behind Carsonified, wants to teach you how to code. And he says he can do it in just five minutes using a web-based game.

Carson’s latest endeavor is Code Racer, a multi-player game designed to teach simple web skills through live-coding.

In an chat with VentureBeat, Carson explained that the game teaches total beginners how to code a basic web site in as little time as five minutes. Players … Continue Reading

Flipboard for Android isn’t here, but Google Currents is way cooler, anyhow

Hey Android (and iPad/iPhone) users, check out this glossy, sexy new way to browse through high-quality, magazine-like content: Google Currents, which is available for download now from the App Store and Android Market.

With this free app, you can get professionally produced content from around 150 initial partners, including Forbes, PBS and others, each of which create special editions of their content optimized for tablet and smartphone viewing.

If that kind of media sounds too … Continue Reading

Here’s a first look at the “New-New Twitter”

Thursday morning, Twitter started its launch of a brand-new interface.

The changes are fairly drastic, but they have a surprising and delighting effect (as opposed to a shocking and awing one). It might remind you a bit of the design of Facebook’s Timeline or the sadly underrated Yahoo Meme.

Here’s how you can get it for yourself right now: If you have an iPhone or Android device, download the new app from the App Store … Continue Reading

How infographics jumped the shark

We’ve tumbled headlong into the era of infographics.

Visual presentations of data are everywhere, popping up on every type of online publication (even VentureBeat). There are so many infographics on the Internet that some bloggers are lashing out against the trend, and there’s even a subset of infographics mocking the uselessness of infographics.

“I think you’re going to see infographics on the side of milk cartons, if you haven’t already,” said Visual.ly co-founder Lee Sherman. … Continue Reading

White is the new black — on all Google products

Leave it to Google to dispel the myth that one shouldn’t wear white after Labor Day. The search giant and social network contender has stripped off the ominous, horizontal black bar hovering atop its pages to reveal a milky-fresh new hue for each of its web-based products.

The new Google bar occupies the same space as the Google logo and search box in most products and now provides people with one- or two-click access to … Continue Reading

Art can pay: Minted raises $5.5M to expand graphic design and stationery business

Minted, a marketplace for community-sourced paper products like custom stationery and wedding invitations, has raised a big pile of the green kind of paper you can spend.

For anyone whose parents told them to stop doodling Celtic knots or obsessively repetitive graphic designs and focus on doing schoolwork so they could get a decent job, that must come as encouraging news.

“I love the creativity of the community,” cofounder Mariam Naficy told me today.

Minted … Continue Reading

“The ugly cousin” no more: inside Android’s beautiful new design

For too long, Android has been the ugly cousin to Apple’s iOS in terms of design. But with the release of Android 4.0, a.k.a. Ice Cream Sandwich, all that is changing.

For perhaps the first time, “The way things look and make people feel are just as important as the speed and features,” said Matias Duarte, the Chilean-American designer who currently serves as Google’s director of Android user experience, in an interview with VentureBeat.

“Every … Continue Reading

Web design framework scales your site for any device

Foundation, a new framework for web design, helps you make beautiful, consistent experiences across all kinds of personal computers, TVs and mobile devices, including tablets and a range of smartphones.

Seeing Framework’s magic in action is, well, a bit magical. As the screen resolution (or browser window size) changes, links become buttons. Images automatically resize. Layouts morph.

Try it out yourself; go to one of the many sites built on Foundation, then manipulate the size … Continue Reading

Big-name designers dissect Facebook’s timeline

Facebook’s Timeline is possibly the biggest wholesale design change the site has seen. So we called in three top designers to critique the concept and execution.

Last week, we chatted with Facebook product chief Sam Lessin about how and why Timelines came to be, including design inspirations and influences.

Today, we have brought together UX expert Chuck Longanecker of Digital Telepathy, former Google designer and current Backplane co-founder Joey Primiani and Flipboard co-founder and design … Continue Reading

Adobe’s new Creative Cloud service offers fresh ways to collaborate, pay for software

Adobe today announced its Adobe Creative Cloud service, a new way to share creations as well as access the company’s applications and creative services. The service will launch in early 2012 and be available for a monthly subscription fee.

Creative Cloud members will be able to sync, collaborate, get feedback and share work they create with Adobe software, including its six new mobile Touch Apps, the various Adobe Creative Suite applications, and its HTML web … Continue Reading

Why was the first Kindle so ugly? Because Jeff Bezos loved his BlackBerry

The first-generation Kindle e-reader was a revolutionary device, but it was far from pretty.

Now the reasoning behind that ugly design has become a bit clearer: Jeff Bezos pushed his designers to replicate elements of his beloved BlackBerry, the New York Times reports.

“Jeff Bezos would come into our design meetings and say he loved his BlackBerry and the ease with which he could find e-mails and respond to people,” a former Amazon designer told … Continue Reading

Turntable.fm gets a new look, makes it easier to land a DJ spot

Hot social music startup Turntable.fm has updated its main page with a much-needed redesign that will make finding a spot to share your tunes easier than ever.

The new homepage is much slicker than Turntable.fm’s previous entry, which was fairly bare bones. Now, in addition to finding popular rooms, you can easily find rooms that need DJs and mark and access your favorite rooms. The redesigned homepage also lets you easily see if any of … Continue Reading

Demo: DHE Media’s dInk platform makes creating tablet kiosks easy

DHE Media is taking a different approach to tablet publishing with its dINK platform. Instead of focusing on the design aspect of publishing for tablets, dINK lets companies approach publishing as an information workflow problem, allowing them to easily deliver relevant information to customers and their employees.

The platform also allows companies to easily turn tablets into kiosks, with all of the user permission controls and administrative features that go along with kiosks. Ultimately, dINK … Continue Reading

Design site Fab.com launches pop-up shops

Fab.com is borderline famous for its design-focused flash sales, and today, it’s launching pop-up shops.

These online pop-up stores are accessible via special tabs at the top of the site. Each pop-up shop will focus on a specific theme and will run for around 30 days.

For its first pop-up shop, Fab.com is partnering with Fast Company for that magazine’s special edition on design in the United States.

Called the Fab.com & Fast Company Magazine … Continue Reading

How to do objective-based user experience (video)

Chuck Longanecker of Digital Telepathy is one of our go-to experts when it comes to design and user experience, and today, we invited him into the VentureBeat studio to talk about how web design is evolving.

Longanecker had a lot to say about the principles of objective-based design. When his firm developed the digital concept and website for The Lean Startup, Longanecker said these principles got put to good use in creating a “minimal viable … Continue Reading

New site design fuels Amazon tablet launch speculation

In yet another example of how tablet computing is drastically changing the consumer landscape, online retail store giant Amazon is testing a new website design geared toward tablet users, reports The Next Web.

The new design could be in response to rumors that Amazon is working on an Android-based tablet that could be serious competition with the Apple iPad, which was first reported in July.

Based on the images in the report, the new design … Continue Reading