The online calendar space just got a lot more interesting. Create, search, find, discuss, and invite anyone to all kinds of events. Keep your own schedule privately organized and accessible from anywhere. Or share single events or whole calendars with friends and family, or publish to the world. All with the shiny new beta of Google Calendar. continued

Stopdesign proudly announces the new design for Capgemini, a global leader in consulting and technology with headquarters in Paris, and regional operations throughout Europe, North America, and Asia Pacific. Stopdesign worked with Happy Cog Studios and Capgemini’s corporate web team to redesign the site of this worldwide consultancy, showcasing how Capgemini collaborates with each of their clients as partners, working with them to meet unique requirements. continued

Check out the latest Stopdesign mini-project: Mighty Goods, a new shopping blog by Margaret Mason, known for her long-running Mighty Girl weblog. Margaret came to me wanting a simple, clean design with integrated images for most of the items she posted. This is the end result of holing ourselves up in Canvas for a Saturday a little over a month ago. continued

While stationed in Washington, D.C., enjoying Adaptive Path’s User Experience Week, I’ll point out another project in which Stopdesign played a small role. Google recently launched another new feature for hosted-blogs that further improves the design and experience for Blogger’s users and all of their readers. In a bold move that meets a long-standing request by many of its users, Google recently removed the awkward ads on Blogspot-hosted blogs. In the ad’s place, a new, much slimmer navigation bar gets tucked into the top of the browser window, adding functionality to each blog continued

For those of us involved in the project, we’ve been waiting months for this day to come. At long last, I’m proud to announce the launch of a project representing the latest collaboration between Stopdesign and Adaptive Path: the redesign of Blogger.com. Congratulations to the entire Blogger team on completing hundreds of hours, and expending tremendous effort to fit so much into this launch. This is Blogger’s first major overhaul since getting acquired by Google in February 2003, and it’s a biggie. continued

No, I’m not moving to New York. Not anytime soon. Though I have considered such a move, and may likely end up there at some point in the future. However…

Jeffrey Zeldman and I quietly start a small rumor that Happy Cog Studios and Stopdesign may begin collaborating immediately on a new project. We hear talks have been going on between involved parties for months. Additional details of the rumor will remain under lock and key for now. But you’re smart. Put the two of us together. You can probably imagine what the project might involve.

Update: To clear up some confusion and speculation, this does not imply a visual redesign is in the works.

It seems I’ve not had many chances to toot my own horn lately with announcements of new designs or projects with which Stopdesign has been involved. When a print design is complete, the wait for a finished product merely depends on the printer’s schedule or a publisher’s distribution cycle. Some design projects for the web are application-based, and get tucked behind a login screen preventing access to the majority of the new design. Other projects get held up in lengthy development cycles and iterative improvements which delay public release. But once a new site design has been thoroughly produced, staged, analyzed, tested, and deemed ready for the world, making it available is almost as simple and instant as flipping a switch. continued

Ah, I can finally talk about it. It’s so far off everyone’s radar that hardly anyone has noticed yet. Let’s change that.

Another project I had a hand in design directing and pushing to XHTML/CSS (smack in the middle of the Wired News redesign) finally surfaces. Following Wired’s lead, HotBot redesigns and in the process, completely morphs as a new product. [Mostly] table-less CSS-based design that was cranked out in a one-week visit to Boston back in June. The backend took significantly longer, thus the delay. The CSS changed slightly from what I originally authored, creating a few rendering and alignment bugs in various browsers. But you get the basic idea. Aside from very minor visual changes, the design we came up with is still in tact, and represents the harnessed power and attitude HotBot has been known for. continued

At long last, the Wired News redesign is visible to the world. We launched the site around 10pm PDT time last night. And what a relief it is. Despite numerous setbacks, delays, bugs, and technical difficulties, we pushed through to the other side and found success. Are all of the bugs and errors fixed? No. But the major problems which were keeping us from launching last night have been solved. And now it’s live for all to see. continued

Since our failed attempt at pushing the Wired redesign live last night, our engineers and developers have been working like crazy to figure out what went wrong. The errors never showed up in our development environment, but only manifested themselves once we started pushing the site to the live front end servers. The press release already went out this morning, and seems to have created more chaos inside the company than any attention or curiosity outside our walls. I can’t express how frustrating this additional delay is, especially when we were orignally supposed to launch 2 weeks ago. But life goes on, and we’ll get the site out eventually. Rumor has it that we may still try to get the new site up sometime today. Fingers crossed