At every step through the questionnaire it gives you popular fonts that match the given characteristics. We’ve tried it with some popular fonts and it was right on. When you have less common fonts it seems that the tool gives you more accurate answers if you skip a question here and there. You can also search for fonts alphabetically, by similarity or picture, or by designer or publisher.

Why? This service is offered by Google in conjunction with several sponsors. Google is perpetually working on improving their search results and getting relevant local results is a big part of it. If they help small businesses get online, it will also help them provide better search results. The examples on the site include small businesses like someone offering a private music lessons, a second hand store, a bee keeper etc.

Good design, like good music, never loses its appeal. Use Google translate to read this interview with Rams. He talks about receiving a letter from Jonathan Ive (Apple designer) and a little bit about Apple’s and Braun’s design principles. Another Q&A with Rams on Designboom.com.

- FTC’s Q&A Guide

- Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising (PDF). These Guides offer more than 35 examples of how they apply in practical settings.

- FTC’s Guide about Online Advertising (PDF)

“The Guides address the application of Section 5 of the FTC Act (15 U.S.C. 45) to the use of endorsements and testimonials in advertising. The Guides provide the basis for voluntary compliance with the law by advertisers and endorsers. Practices inconsistent with these Guides may result in corrective action by the Commission under Section 5 if, after investigation, the Commission has reason to believe that the practices fall within the scope of conduct declared unlawful by the statute.”

What’s an endorsement?

“Endorsement means any advertising message (including verbal statements, demonstrations, or depictions of the name, signature, likeness or other identifying personal characteristics of an individual or the name or seal of an organization) that consumers are likely to believe reflects the opinions, beliefs, findings, or experiences of a party other than the sponsoring advertiser, even if the views expressed by that party are identical to those of the sponsoring advertiser. The party whose opinions, beliefs, findings, or experience the message appears to reflect will be called the endorser and may be an individual, group, or institution.”

What about testimonials?
“The Commission intends to treat endorsements and testimonials identically in the context of its enforcement of the Federal Trade Commission Act and for purposes of this part.”

Besides explanations about your messy code, HTML Tidy will clean up characters not allowed with your encoding, incomplete tags, redundant tags, unknown tags, invalid character codes and so on. The output is ready to be copied and pasted. One thing the tool is lacking is line numbering, which would make it easier to identify where your errors are.

If these examples won’t do it for you, maybe Cedric Laquieze’s floral skeleton sculptures will get you to stop for a second and behold:

The site has thousands of pictures of LA, many (maybe most?) without cars, all sorted by many different criteria which makes this a great resource for anyone interested in Los Angeles architecture or in need of inspiration for their project. Tourists will appreciate the fact that all images come with an address. The idea of taking all these images without cars is what makes this site special. How often have you seen an image of LA or any metropolis for that matter without any cars in it?

This geographical database is available for download free of charge under a creative commons attribution license. It contains over 10 million geographical names and consists of 7.5 million unique features, 2.8 million populated places and 5.5 million alternate names. It also offers some population and area statistics. According to the site Geonames users include Ubuntu, Apple’s SnowLeopard, Bing Maps, The New York Times and more.

This keyword editing tool lets you auto de-dupe and edit to broad match, “phrase match”, [exact match], -negative match. It also has sorting functions such as sort by match type, URLs and bids and features a very useful find and replace function. The Ad-Maker lets you create ads and preview them in different formats for your AdWords campaigns.

The site offers paid options to create the barcode in high resolution, batch processing, save your codes and more. Click here for more info on QR barcodes.

Here some sample searches:

- Views of Google+ article in July 2011
- Views of 405 freeway article in July 2011
- Views of Harry Potter article in July 2011

Spelling makes a difference: when you use harrypotter instead of Harry Potter, the statistics are different, even though the article is the same.

The site states that it “is very much a beta service and may disappear or change at any time.”