In September of this year the fourth Victor Hugo International Music festival will take place in Guernsey. This years lineup of musicians includes classical acts such as the Southbank Sinfonia and Psophos Quartet, as well as traditional folk music and dancing from Portugal and Latvia.

You can get full details on all the acts performing as well as how book tickets on their website which we’ve recently updated.

Two literally faceless figures have been appearing in the crowds of some of the most high profile events of the summer, perplexing the public and creating a furore of theories ranging from publicity stunt to performance art to Scientology amongst the internet’s blogging community.

The pair, a man and a woman, have been sitting almost motionless amongst the crowds at a variety of A-list events, including Wimbledon, Henley Regatta and Elton John’s White Tie and Diamonds Ball, with their facial features almost completely obscured by a thin, flesh-coloured membrane.  The masks apparantly have tiny perforations around the nose and mouth area, so that the wearers are able to breathe.

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The new Guernsey Gas website design and developed by Betley Whitehorne has gone live. The site is packed with useful information and services for all gas uses whether residential or commercial, as well as those thinking about getting attached to the network. You can find the latest special offers and price tariffs or submit your metre reading via the site. The site also lets you help the environment with green tips on saving energy and information on the latest super efficient gas boilers and appliances. If you’re looking at updating your existing gas or electric appliances then browse through the The Energy Centre section and see Guernsey Gas’s wide selection on cookers, microwaves, televisions and lots more.

Later today Firefox 3 is being released and you can help set a world record by downloading it free. Mozilla, the creators of Firefox hope to set the world record for the most software downloaded in one day.

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Online news portal MSNBC recently launched Spectra Visual News Reader; an interesting and fun way to explore the latest news headlines. The simple interface lets you choose the news categories you’re interested in and then displays them in three dimensions.

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Everyone loves labeling things. As a designer I like things in the right place and I like to be able to get to those things quickly. To achieve this order a label seems to work, especially when I’m organising my video collection, Jam Jars, Facebook galleries and desktop folders.

Other label systems are not so efficient. If I was just searching the Internet to find a photograph of a elephant with some peanuts it will come up with a lot of unrelated images. When using image libraries such as Getty, iStockPhoto and Veer the such results are often very good. Internet search engines on the other hand aren’t organised by a photographer/company, they are searching under the users image file names.

This is all hopefully changing, I am talking about the Google Image Labeler. The perfect mix of competition and labeling. If you own a Dymo Label machine, a Badge-It or a collection of pens and over sized black markers then this is for you. Read more

An interesting, if slightly bizarre concept, the Literary Doener Kebab lets you explore German book publisher Reclam’s catalogue in an easily digestible manner.

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Isn’t it about time that something was done about the Google logo? My apologies to Ruth Kedar, but I think it’s a shocking piece of design. Ruth may have won several design awards and worked as a consultant art professor but that doesn’t mean that everything she produces is a work of art.

Google is one of the largest and most powerful companies in the world and yet the logo looks like it was created by a 10 year old. It’s not just the primary colour palette which offends me, however it is slightly improved when reversed out, such as in iGoogle. But for me it will take more than well designed backgrounds (or poorly as the case may be) to make the Google logo worthy of any awards.

Of course it’s recognisable around the world but I doubt very much that Google’s success has anything to do with the design of it’s logo. I know many of us are subjected to looking at this logo everyday, so please Google, consider a re-design, rather than erasing us from your search engine for writing this article!

It’s that time of year again - today is May 1^st Reboot when a host of websites around the world are relaunched (rebooted). The 2008 Reboot site comes in a rather scary shade of pink that I’m not too sure about. However you can be sure there’ll be a whole host of exciting and innovative websites on display. The winners are announced on June 1^st so be sure to check back then. Once again I’ve managed to totally miss rebooting my site, maybe next year…

Visit the May 1^st Reboot.

Here’s a little game for all your budding typographers out; can you identify the font from the list - that’s without using any books or websites to help you! And for web designers it’s also a good example of how to effectively use AJAX to create a seamless experience.

Play the game