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Recently, Time magazine published a list of the 100 best novels. But the praise of professional critics hardly matters to the book-reviewing readers at Amazon.com. A compilation of the best of the worst… about the best.

Jed wrote poems. Here’s one that was turned into a music video, described as “[a]n unsolicited music video for the band Grandaddy and their song of the same name off of the album The Sophtware Slump“. The punchline? Programmed in Applesoft II on a 1979 Apple ][+ with 48K of RAM. Seriously. It’s brilliant. Seriously.

If you’re looking for colour inspiration for your latest website design, look no further than ColorBlender. This tool mixes and matches a set of six colors based off a main color that you adjust with some very slick Red-Green-Blue color sliders. For the seriously inspiration-impaired, there’s the “Load a random blend” link. It also provides Pantone colour matching, and auto-generated Photoshop and Illustrator palettes. Extremely useful. Below are three palettes I generated in about 15 mins:

If you’re working on a new design and are stuck for colour inspiration, this short post has a great hint: Pixelate a favourite photograph.

The basic concept is that a photograph, being a natural juxtaposition of colours and shades, will render up colours that naturally complement or contrast with each other without looking garish. I gave it a try to see what it would produce.

1) Find a photograph. This part’s easy.

2) In Photoshop, go to Filter > Pixelate > Mosaic, and adjust so the mosaic squares are pretty large in relation to the photograph.

And that’s basically it. Once you have the pixellated photo, just pick and choose a set of 5-6 colours from it and lo, you have a palette. The following three palettes are all obtained from this experiment: the first is a set of unaltered colours from the photo, the second has had its value and saturation adjusted slightly, and the third is a result of playing with the “Hue” slider in the “Hue/Saturation” adjustments dialog.

Here are a few more quick examples I just cooked up, unadjusted from the original:

So, I clicked on a link in my RSS feedreader and the following page came up. It took me a noticeably long amount of time to find the actual content. Image here is colour coded for your edification: Orange = Advertising. Red = Script Error. Blue = Navigation. Yellow = Actual Content. Grr.