iPhone 4
As most of you have heard by now, Apple has released a sneak peak at their new iPhone 4 earlier this week. I have to admit the new slick design and features are worth drooling over.

Behance
The popular design community, Behance has recently upgraded their site. The new site is a huge improvement over the previous release and is much more easier to navigate.  The additional much improved load time isn’t too bad either. 

AIGA recently posted their annual Survey of Design Salaries. The report posts salaries for various design position in the U.S. This annual survey is a really useful tool for anyone in the design and advertising field. 

Creative Week NYC is here.  A ton of events scattered around the city, some free some not but all pretty interesting. 

Sounds of Hamburg is an addicting and interesting site that allows users to interact with the city of Hamburg. The site utilizes 5 live web-cams, motion tracking and the music from the Hanseatic City Orchestra to to help you compose your own sounds of Hamburg.
via FWA

Keyonary is a cool site developed by Aaron McGuire. This site allows you to search for shortcut keys and displays the results below. This is definitely a useful site that should be bookmarked.

Just saw this today and I know everyone is pretty skeptical but this could be the next version of Apples iphone.  Check out this link for more photos,videos and specs about this new iphone that was found at a bar in Redwood City. I’m interested to see what peoples thoughts are about this.
via Gizmodo

Update: Turns out this is actually a real leaked iphone.  Read the letter from Apple here.

I’m normally not one to upgrade my Adobe Suite each time a new version is released because for the most part I don’t think each upgrade has enough additions that make me say, Wow! I must get that feature now. With that being said, I think CS5 does have enough of the ‘wow’ factor to make me want to upgrade. Check out Computer Arts 40 new features in CS5 and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

Amazing video directed by Patrick Jean of One More Production in Paris. Video is basically a bunch of old game characters taking over NYC one pixel at time.

On April 9, PSFK is back in Manhattan with their 2010 Conference. The line up will include over 20 speakers who have worked on some influential projects that have been featured on PSFK. Some of the highlighted speakers include Nick Felton (Feltron Report), Tina Roth Eisenberg (Swiss-Miss) and Naveen Selvaduri (Four Square) to name a few. Ticket prices are a bit steep for this one day event $350, but if you have the cash to shell out I’m sure it will be well worth it. 

I’m not sure how authentic this video is but supposedly it was created by a product manager from the Photoshop division of Adobe. In this video the user walks us through a new feature called “Content Aware Fill”.  This new feature allows users to cut out parts of an image and before you know it that section is filled in seamlessly by either the sky or surrounding part of the image. Rumors are circulating that this may debut in April for the Photoshop CS5 release so I guess it’s only a matter of time before we find out…

A quick summary of this story is basically that a freelancer working out in LA agreed to do some work for a studio and after both sides agreed on a deal memo the agency decided not to honor the contract and to throw a wrench into the situation by trying to stiff the freelancer out of the total agreed upon amount.

I first came across this article on Motionographer and later decided to read further into it on the freelancers blog post here.  What makes this story interesting is not the fact that a freelancer gets jipped out of pay because I’m sure this happens alot, but because of the way the freelancer deals with the situation and how he stands up against the sometimes intimidating agency and fights the company in court. 

As a freelancer myself, luckily I have not had to deal with this situation to this severity but I can totally see how this can be a huge issue. 

Everyone’s favorite online award website, The FWA, has recently relaunched with a completely new look. The site reminds me a little bit of the new agency websites that every company has been hauling out in the past couple of months but none the less it’s a refreshing look.  A couple new features have been thrown into the mix as well including the Dock, which allows you to sign in and save some of your favorite sites.  Public Vote has also been added and as the name sounds it allows people to vote on recent submissions.  Of course, there is the social networking aspect as well that allows you to tweet and facebook the winning sites. 

Heinz has recently announced that they will be introducing a new packing for their “Ketchup” later on this fall. The new design is suppose to make it easier for people to use ketchup on the go. The package will allow consumers to have 2 options on using the condiment.  One way is tearing off the top cap and squeezing the ketchup and the other option is to peel the corner and dip your food inside the packet. I quite like the new ketchup bottle shape design and can’t wait to test it out.  For all the fans of the current ketchup packet don’t worry Heinz will still be producing those as well. 

As the Super Bowl quickly approaches one of the main things during this event that is much anticipated by tons of viewers is seeing what new commercials are debuting and by whom.  One of the usual and largest companies, Pepsi, has already decided to pull out of this years line up but many other companies have returned with newer, funnier, quirkier and sexier ads. I don’t really follow football but some of the commercials airing during the game can be quiet interesting.

Above are a couple of commercials that will be in rotation during this years Super Bowl (Doritos, Go Daddy, Tru Tv, Career Builder), click the images to view the videos. You can also watch more ads at Chiff.