Here’s a game you can play along with at home: cover design for free English language listing magazines in Shanghai.

Consider the following activities:

All the episodes of “Design for Life”, the BBC’s version of Britain’s Got Talent/Dragon’s Den for designers, are now on Vimeo. Handy for those of us whose eyeball geography does not meet with the beeb’s approval. Links below.

So I got an email from Microsoft about renewing as a registered developer. Copy the link over to a PC so I can do it on IE since I’m pretty sure there’s going to be a few bits which are PC/IE specific. The web page says log in with the LiveID used for the account. Mmmm. I never used a LiveID to register. Strange. Maybe they made one for me. So I enter my email address and what I think it my password. Nope. “Either the email address or password are wrong” How helpful. So I go through…

We’re not fans of producing work on spec or for free. We’re not the only ones, Spec Watch is a site exposing the dark side of crowdsourcing design. In general you get what you pay for. Follow Spec Watch on Twitter.

Atkins has won an international competition to design a five-star resort hotel set within a beautiful water filled quarry in Songjiang. Wow!

Baseline Mag has an overview of how MySpace coped with rapid growth. Basically a good lesson in how not to build a dynamic database backed website.