Aleks Krotoski gave a talk at d-Construct this year called 'Playing the Web: how gaming makes the internet (and the world) a better place'. This is my summary of what she said and the bits of her talk that I liked the best.

Aleks talked about the shared goals of the web and games industry, how we could learn from each other, but how we don't seem to talk much to each other. The games industry needs to learn to build better community and could learn a lot from what the web has accomplished. We need to learn to achieve the 'stickiness' that the games industry has acheived. I'm not completely sure what stickiness means, but I think it's about producing an engaging experience that brings people coming back for more.

One way to make the web more engaging would be to make it more playful. Games keep you playing by making you work towards a goal; dangling carrots and letting you acheive smaller goals along the way. They reward you with points and other incentives for doing well, and the good ones make you want to play longer and do better.

She also talked about how huge games had become and how some had been unsuccessful because people felt they were too big. People still want the freedom, so it's important to give the illusion of infitinte possibilites, but to funnel people towards a goal, while giving them the chance to explore around the edges.

I really like the idea of making websites more playful and fun. It's something that's too easy to forget. I'm also interested in how web sites use incentives to keep users coming back and encouraging them to use a site more.

Photo credit to: Cyberdees

When I first went freelance I created some origami business cards that included instructions on how to make the card into an origami crane. They were very well received, but people struggled to follow the instructions and very few were successfully turned into the form that had been intended.

So, to help people I've created some video instructions. This takes you step by step through the process and lets you return to any step that you might have missed the first time through.

You can find the video instructions here:

• Origami crane - video instructions

Steven Johnson gave a talk at d-Construct 2008 on the Urban Web. This is my summary of what was said, and the bits I found most interesting.

He told us a fascinating story of the Cholera Epidemic in London and how one outbreak, a map visualisation and combined local knowledge helped them figure out that contaminated water was the cause of the disease. It was a brief summary of his book 'The Ghost Map'. He then went on to talk about how the web, combined with geographical data could bring us all closer to our communities and local knowledge.

He mentioned Tufte, who I've heard people talk about before and meant to read up on. Edward Tufte wrote some books on data visualisation and was described by The New York Times as "the da Vinci of Data".

There's so much information on the web including a growing number of blogs, micro-blogs and photo sharing. It's produced by companies and individuals, but he suggests that the most relevant stuff, is the stuff that's close to us physically. He's created a site called Outside In, that brings you 'hyper-local' news; a fancy and probably made up term that means stuff really close to you (i.e. half a mile from your house). He showed a really nice example of how it alerted him to a van burning in a nearby street, almost as it happened and even sent him photos that people had uploaded. The site has also allowed him to find the 'blogiest neighbourhood' in America, although I can't remember which one it was.

He talked about thinking beyond restaurants when it comes to the geographical web. This really resonated with me and has given me a lot to think about.

Photo credit to: Natalie Downe.

When I do a piece of design that involves typography I spend ages choosing the right font. The font that will endow the work with the right feeling and the font that is most similar to the one I've got pictured in my head.

This normally takes ages, but I've written a Font Picker program in Flash to help me do it. It shows you a sample of your chosen text displayed using all the fonts on your computer. You can then whittle down this list by removing unsuitable fonts.

The best thing is that this works straight from your browser and still displays the fonts that are on your computer. I've also made a version you can download and install if you have a PC or a Mac.

Picking the right font still takes ages, but hopefully you'll find this tool helpful in visualizing the typefaces you're considering.

You can use this fantastic tool here

• Font Picker

But how does it work?

In Flash ActionScript 3.0 there is a very useful function called:

Font.enumerateFonts

This allowed me to get a list of all the fonts on the computer running the flash program and display any text I wanted using them.

I've also used Adobe AIR to make a desktop version of this program. I've got some planned extra features for that version, including tagging for fonts and possibly some export features. The great thing about Adobe AIR is that it really was very easy indeed to take my web based Flash App and make it an AIR application.