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

Inspired by a post on Hacker News.

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.

They recently released @Font-Face Kits, which is a tool that allows you to easily use any of the fonts on Font Squirrel in your web sites. It’s a great tool for using custom fonts but preserving search optimization.

A few of the things I liked:

• The way the video is at the top of the page, but mostly hidden until you click on it.
• The way the navigation bar is a pull down showing extra functionality — it’s not really a navigation bar in the traditional sense.

Hat tip: Josh Pigford.

Interesting way of showing which posts are the most popular.

When you click “Submit Tip” this panel pops up with the giant headline “Boss of the year entry form,” and right under that in small type it says “Now that we’ve thrown ‘em off the trail.” — cool idea!

I liked the search input field design for the way they graphically made it feel important.

Sections are separated with this fantastic divider which shows the number of comments, and lets the user share or get a link.

The calendar showing the number of posts by day, which I find is often useless, looks awesome on this page layout. When you hover over a specific day you get a pop out that shows the number of posts.

So that’s just a few of the things I liked about the current Engadget site design.

What is Ketchup Week? It’s one week where you can “catch up” on all of the projects you’ve been putting aside. It’s the one week when all of your customers are on vacation, and when the phone rarely rings. It is the one week when the office is quiet and distraction free.

So take the mantle, er, the ketchup and get to work on those personal dreams. Start a new business, or make a craft, or just spend time away from the mundane. Have a great Ketchup Week, everyone!

You can follow Ketchup Week on Twitter, or become a fan on Facebook.

We chose to go with a dark background so that the photos would really pop (we also took most of the photos). We then used some of the orange color tones in our design that the store is using in their other branding, and in the store design.

Press Coffee home page.

The food menu layout.

On their site, you can order live Maine lobsters and other shellfish. I’ve got to hand it to them for using real photos which absolutely make the web site.

I ran across the James Hardie web site today and instantly liked the design.

I really like the graphics on the Burton web site. Check it out.

It’s not the best way to show data, but it’s new and interesting.

Here’s how Brian describes it: “You put your grandfather IN the grandfather clock!”

Some amazing photos of a man who paints himself. Via Matt Linderman.

Some of my favorite statistics:

• How many minutes of video were viewed in a time period
• Attention span — time viewed on a video (fall off rate)
• Bandwidth
• Embeded views

The Punched Out Font (free on dafont.com) gives you a way to create cut-out letters which you can form into words. Perfect for your 15-minute break!

My startup is called Minuteglass and it is quite simply a tool for tracking time. I’ve used or tried dozens of time tracking applications over the years and Minuteglass is our response to the question of “what could be better in time tracking.”

I’m so excited by time tracking that I started a blog devoted to the topic.

Currently Minuteglass is in private beta. We’ve released to a few select friends and as soon as we have our bug list whittled down we will be releasing to our 500+ person beta invite list. Right now we have 49 bugs / improvements we’re working on.

Most startup founders are programmers or business guys. I’m different in that I’m a user interface designer. While I’d love to be a developer I wouldn’t trade what I do for the ability to code. I love approaching the world from a design perspective.

In the coming months, I hope to share more about Minuteglass and the process I’ve gone through to get to this point (along with my excellent team).

Typekit is a new startup designed to make it easy to embed fonts in your web sites. It’s a subscription service with annual price plans based on bandwidth. They have a free plan for testing it out, so it could be fun to experiment with some of the fonts on low-bandwidth sites.

The entire site is made with Flash and besides the great product photography, they have some great background textures. And most of the textures are fabrics like those from Converse shoes.

Many of the products have hand drawn illustrations for a backdrop. It works surprisingly well and fits the theme of the site.