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!

D&AD Lecture by Vince Frost. Nice guy and some great work. It was interesting to hear about the challenges of setting up again on the other side of the world and all the trials and tribulations along the way. I guess the only thing that made me raise an eyebrow was his almost militant insistence that there’s no such thing as a bad project only bad designers, while we all know not every job is a D&AD pencil winner. I guess it’s just an easy point of view to have if you happen to be Vince Frost, I’m trying to believe it even though I’m not…

A nice mix of work and the odd random fragment from his recent life, even if there was maybe one too many pictures of his kids! Amazingly he had taken a picture of the exact same thing as I had that very lunchtime. Great minds… Apologies for the poor pictures, I didn’t really want to attract any attention to myself with the flash. Click for a better view…