i only subscribed to my first podcast around 6 months ago, but i very quickly found the variety and quality of audio content out there rather appealing. so i thought i would share a list of my favourites with you, starting with film podcasts.

the film program is bbc four’s half hour show presented by francine stock, it features interviews with cast and directors from british classics, forgotten oldies and recent cinema releases. so if you like finding out about films you may of missed first time around – then this is definitely recommended. they also feature a recommended dvd release and a film from the week’s schedule to watch (uk focused). subscribe

mark kermode’s film review’s is one of my favourites, produced by bbc five live and featuring simon mayo and mark kermode. ‘dr kermode’ is usually spot on with his commentary and reviews – it’s hard for me to disagree, even when he’s in full rant mode about a film i should (and sometime do) really like. the show features reviews from each of the week’s cinema releases, as well as having a run down of the box office top 10. subscribe

movies you should see features a bunch of northerners discuss at length one film, usually taking around an hour to dissect all the parts of a film, from the actors, director, script, music, location, cinematography and special effects. it can occasionally fall into a laughing fest and there’s quite a bit of swearing, but their enthusiasm for film shines through. subscribe

that little 16 x 16 pixel square that sits in the url bar to the left of the website address isn’t very important to some people, to others – it’s something to sweat over, discuss and argue over. google changed their favicon a couple of months ago, i noticed to be honest wondered why they changed it, i wasn’t impressed with the new design and thought the old design was better – but that’s where it stopped. a few other people went a bit further, quite a few actually – i did a google search for ‘google changes favicon‘ and got back over 810,000 results.

the reason i started this post was that earlier this evening i was updating my site and adding some links from a couple of design networking websites that i have been signing myself up to recently, namely behance network, linked in and coroflot. so far coroflot is my favourite for functionality and design – but that’s another post, the one thing that coroflot does let itself down on is their favicon. it seems like it has no relevance to the website, it’s a pair or cherries that is not featured anywhere else on the website – it’s not part of their logo, the colour of the cherries isn’t even a part of the site’s colour scheme. i use the favicon’s on my site as bullet points, but decided against using the cherries from the coroflot site and used an upside-down heart that they use on their banners and badges (see above).

you can check out what’s hot and what’s not in the world of favicon design here [http://thefavicongallery.com] and if you want to have a go at creating one, i use and recommend this website; http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon.

wordle takes the idea of a tag cloud – a selection of words or tags – and sets about organising them in an eye-catching design. the example on the right is this blog and the previous five posts – notice how much i use the word ‘css’ more than all the other words on the cloud.

once you get to grips with the app you can tweak the colour scheme, direction of the text and the font.

the results are fantastic, it would be tricky to use it online for anything more than a image – because you can’t edit or select the text in the end result – but on t-shirts, posters and other printed media there is a lot of scope for the results that wordle spits out.

have a go for yourself; http://www.wordle.net.