I thought I’d post about Ffffound!, a great site which I actually stumbled across a while ago but have really got into recently. It’s basically del.icio.us or Flickr but for graphics, and it’s super simple and easy to use.

The site allows users to grab any image on the web (you can’t get at Flash content or stuff hidden inside framesets mind you) and clip it to their Ffffound! profile to browse later. It’s genius the way it’s done, you simple add a bookmarklet to your browser bar and press it when you’re on the page you want to save an image from. Magically all the images get a thick border and you simply click the one you want.

That’s it, no tagging, no posting, no logging in, it’s that easy. And I think that’s the key, because clipping things like this only becomes second nature, useful and enjoyable if it’s easy to do, with as few extra steps as necessary. I wrote a while ago about Boxedup, which is great, but adding a product to that site does require a bit of tinkering which sometimes is enough to make me think twice abut bothering at all, especially if I don’t have much time.

Ffffound doesn’t use tags (which seems to be a deliberate choice rather than an omission) but it can still track trends and suggests images for you based on your own preference, it also shows you when other users like similar things. There’s even a screensaver which displays either the site’s, or your own picks while your machine is idle…

The only things I guess I would like to see developed would be some way to actually find something specific on the site, as once a favourite of yours is a little older, it simply drifts somewhere within a long list. There’s no way of finding that lovely piece of type you remember saving a couple of months ago. I’d also like to be able to recommend images to other people when I find something I know they’d like or find useful. Other than that, unusually I’m going to resist suggesting bells and whistles, I think that’s part of the site’s charm.

The site is still quite small and it’s a private beta at the moment, only members can invite new ones. This is the reason I had passed it by up to now, but after being reminded about it on Ben Terrett’s blog I emailed the guys who run it and blagged my way in. It looks like a Japanese site (some practise for my Japanese reading skills) and may have something to do with Yugo Nakamura of yugop fame…

Thanks to Keita for inviting me in!

Not much happens over at www.designologue.com these days. I used to quite like engaging in an idle game of Photoshop Tennis on the site. As part of the signup process, members were required to respond to some sample words in the form of a one-off image. I thought I’d post my old ones here…

Labor:

Condition:

Hubris:

Portrait:

Bypass:

Standard:

Check out the site, perhaps a few visits might wake it up…