BrainFuel

The web team for Southwest.com deserves praise. Look how beautiful and usable their web site is! It’s amazing. Especially when you begin to compare it to the American Airlines web site (or most of the other airlines, for that matter).

“We have a ‘strategic’ plan. It’s called doing things.” — Herb Kelleher, founder Southwest Airlines

Maybe that’s their secret. They do things.

But in all honesty, their web site keeps getting better. Three years ago they started down this path towards having a nice site, and they’ve been refining ever since.

I don’t ever eat McDonalds, but tonight I ran across their web site and have to say it’s really nice. I love the navigation bar, and the intuitive roll out menus. That, and the amazing photography almost make it look healthy. Hah, not even close.

The Hawaii Convention & Visitors Bureau has produced an amazing travel guide for Hawaii called GoHawaii.com. I’m considering a trip there this fall, and this site has been very helpful for learning about the state. Where to go, and what to see. Kudos to them for the nice site.

Wolfram Alpha is unlike any other search engine. Because of this, searches you would normally do on another standard search engine don’t always work. They’ve got a really nice example that suggests how to search, and gives you a way to see how it works. Nice job!

Comedian and actor Jim Carrey has a pretty bizarre web site. It’s filled with crazy animations, strange sound and music, and some surprises.

Actor Jeff Bridges fills his site with interesting illustrations and writing.

Inspired by a post on Hacker News.

Check out this sweet feature on the NBC Miami web site.

Whenever visitors are viewing an article they can rate it based on a number of factors — like “Laughing” or “Furious.” It’s a great way to gauge reader opinion without requiring that they leave a comment.

And — after you’ve shared your opinion, you can easily share it on Twitter or Facebook.

These designs are just flat out amazing to me. Love the vibrant color, detail, typography, effects. Designed by Moxie Sozo for Leap Organics and scheduled to launch spring 2010. Can’t wait to see them in the wild.

the Ugmonk Shop is bucking the trend and showing their t-shirts with wrinkles. They also have some really cool shirt designs.