A few months back I was tweeting about the fact that I’d won a MailChimp t-shirt in their online draw. At that moment a mysterious Twitter account named @hipstery started following me. A few clicks later and I was concluding their checkout process. Don’t talk too loudly about it, but Twitter marketing works.

The concept

In a nutshell, The Hipstery “liberates you from the burden of choice” – specifically, you tell them your t-shirt size, fill in a fancy-dan quiz about your tastes and their t-shirt scientists go find you a t-shirt and dispatch it to your door. The t-shirts are sourced from various cool designers and are usually from rare, limited edition runs.

The delivery

A couple of weeks later (The Hipstery are in Germany and the UK post were probably on strike) a mysterious brown paper bag dropped through my door. In fact, it didn’t drop through my door at all. Instead, a red “sorry you were out and we can’t stuff a t-shirt through your letterbox” card arrived and I had to take a trip to the Royal Mail depot to collect it. So, eventually…

So the mystery is slightly compromised by the fact that the envelope is carrying The Hipstery’s branding but it was the start of ‘the experience’  – not something you usually experience when buying things online.

The grand opening

Using the time-honoured combination of my fingers and opposable thumbs I tore open the package to reveal the goodness inside.

As promised, the primary part of the delivery was the mystery t-shirt – on arrival it was wrapped in a natty plastic bag that is missing from this picture.

The cotton goodness

So, what of the t-shirt itself? What had the t-shirt scientists selected for me? In an attractive shade of grey, my selection was the runner-up of the 2006 London Design Festival’s t-shirt design competition, The Draw – “London Spirit” by Blaise Coutaz. You can read an interview with its designer over here (warning, that link is a PDF, abandon all hope ye who click). The t-shirt is cool and unlike something I might have chosen for myself – all good things.

Here’s a poorly-montaged close-up of the design.

As well as the t-shirt there were two old postcards…

Unexpected but standard enough? Except for the strange coincidence that at the time of the delivery I was wading my way through Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, in which the main protagonists reside in Windsor Castle, the subject of one of the enclosed postcards. Ooooo…

The conclusion

The Hipstery is an excellent way to acquire a t-shirt, I will shop there again. Go forth to theHipstery.com, buy yourself a new t-shirt, feel the burden of choice lifted from your shoulders. Many thanks German friends.

1. For A Beautiful Web by Andy Clarke (@Malarkey)

Let’s start with a no-brainer. Andy Clarke’s blog is informative, well-written and entertaining too. It’s also lovely to look at. I’d particularly recommend the slides of Andy’s Walls Come Tumbling Down presentation and his write-ups of the New Internationalist design process.

2. Veerle’s Blog by Veerle Pieters (@vPieters)

Veerle’s Blog has appeared on countless ‘great blog design’ lists and those honours are richly deserved. But the real highlight is Veerle’s content, particular her Illustrator and Photoshop posts. For me, as a relative Illustrator amateur, it’s fascinating to see (and learn) how effects are achieved.

3. Hicksdesign by Jon Hicks (@Hicksdesign)

As I vaguely recall it was Jon’s blog that first alerted me to designing with web standards instead of tables and Dreamweaver – it was a long time ago. I’ve been a keen reader ever since. Jon blogs less then he once did and his subject matter is as likely to be cheese as it is design but it’s always worth a read.

4. Bokardo by Joshua Porter (@bokardo)

A new entry for me, Joshua Porter writes insightful posts on all aspects of interface and user experience design for the social web like microcopy, avatars and Gall’s Law. Consistently excellent stuff.

5. CR Blog by Creative Review (@creativeReview)

Boo to the corporate publishing entity amongst the talented individuals – I’ll let them off. The Creative Review blog is a great source of quality creative design work across all fields which will inspire and irritate in equal measure. They do interesting ‘questions of the week’ too.

So there’s my five. Any suggestions for a follow-up list?

Tired of your desktop selections for your machine? I stumbled (via Twitter) across the fantastic Desktoptopia a couple of weeks ago. Courtesy of it, this is my current wallpaper:

(70s Wallpaper by Zack Warner)

Desktoptopia is a little system tray application for Mac or PC. Drawing from a pool of excellent quality wallpapers guaranteed to appeal to those of a designer persuasion, the application cycles through the desktops at any frequency you like and allows you to rate or reject each image. The application also detects your resolution automatically so the images look perfect by default – works beautifully on both my work PC and my Macbook Pro.

Something I’d love to see from the program would be a user account. It would be great if by rejecting an image on my laptop I could be sure that it wouldn’t be next in the cycle on my work PC. Plus the iPhone app they mention in their FAQ, that’d be nice too! Would also be nice to be able to follow desktops by a particular designer.

Desktoptopia is an awesome little addition to your machine so download it and give it a go.

Adhering perfectly to 37 Signals Three State Solution and making me feel better about the fact there’s no juicy data to see yet! No wonder Google liked the look of them all those months ago.

TechCrunch announced last night the demise of Pownce and the acquisition of its people and technical resources by Six Apart – I don’t tend to get involved in too many startup communities and this is one of the first I can remember from start to finish despite the fact I only got as far as signing up and clicking around for five minutes.

On my brief look around after a clickthrough from Digg I really liked the clean and characterful design of the site and the extra functionality it added to a Twitter-style core. But eventutally that seems to have been its downfall. Whilst the world and his significant other are waking up to Twitter (including late-starters like myself) a social network who’s core function was something very similar was always going to have a hard time.

In the arena of websites and applications every company is competing for the most precious asset of modern life, customer’s time. It seems that Pownce didn’t grab the time of enough people in its relatively short tenure and has left behind it a collection of time-invested disgruntled former customers. Promises to “come back with something much better in 2009” are all well and good presuming you can convince the prospective users of your something that this time they can rely on you.

You can see all the covers here. Apparently though, it wasn’t the story of the day in every corner of the world. Third from last on the page is Newcastle’s Journal – leading with this explosive alternative:

I blame John McCain.

EDIT: 700 front covers and not one of them went for “McCain‘s had his chips”.

Apparently one of the most tumultuous days in recent world finance history is a good day for UK-based credit-card-company-come-payment-processor Barclaycard to release their new visual identity.

As a first impression I do quite like it, the new typeface is nice and the shade of blue appeals in a finance 2.0 way.

The Barclaycard press release talks about the globe depicting “a world that is calm and confident on the outside, whilst warm and vibrant on the inside.” Unfortunately for me the globe looks a little like it’s falling apart… maybe very prescient given the current situation. Also, as alluded in my blog title, it’s very hard to look at this and not think of AT&T – even over this side of the Atlantic!

Overall though, for me it’s an improvement – it’s maybe a little too shiny and contemporary and it will be interesting to see how it pans out in the future but the new simplicity and clean lines are a definite step forward from its curvy credit card predecessor!

Nice grass effect, nice button, but I’m not sure that error message and the associated tooltip really give you all the information you need to proceed from here.

Jon’s put a cool animated process graph on his blog and the MailChimp blog has a write-up of the whole process. Although, no amount of secrets of the process can help with the initial character sketch which is cool enough in itself!

WalkIt is a route planner for pedestrians. As an example here’s a route between two of my regular Soho beer haunts: the relatively flashy Sun & 13 Cantons and the no-nonsense Green Man on Berwick Street.

The route gives you distance, duration, calories burnable as well as CO2 avoided as well as turn-by-turn instructions. It’s a great little web application planning routes now in London, Birmingham, Edinburgh and more.

Fingers crossed there’s an iPhone version is in the works?!