Best Buy has just launched Twelpforce. The service allows for Twitter users to converse with Best Buy specialists on anything from selecting the best video game console to instructions on charging their new camera.

It’s refreshing to see a brand like Best Buy allow such an open dialogue with their customers and at the same time embrace a technology like Twitter in such a broad way. The new broadcast spots perfectly sum up the concept, conceived by our friends over at Crispin Porter + Bogusky.

Woohoo! Our friends over at CampaignMonitor have featured the latest Bkwld Newsletter in their gallery of well designed email campaigns. Take a look at some of the other inspiring designs or better yet, signup for our newsletter.

I love Photoshop. Okay, now that’s out of the way I can tell you about why I think every other web designer should consider checking out Adobe Fireworks for their next project. I realize this may be a touchy subject and that everyone is quite comfortable at the point using Photoshop and sometimes even Illustrator for web layouts. However, Fireworks is truly made for just this.

The first thing you’ll notice about Fireworks vs Photoshop is it’s ability to work with vector objects much better than Photoshop. I find this to be one of the biggest and best differences for me. This is extremely helpful when rapid prototyping projects and putting together wireframes.

I also love how Fireworks handles gradients over Photoshop. Giving you a simple handle to modify the direction and length of your gradients over the Photoshop guess and check method.

Another big deal for me is the Pages and States panels. When working on a large site it’s easy to get lost in Layers and constantly turning things on and off. With Pages you can easily setup a global layer that handles consistent elements like a primary nav, and then have a clean set of layers for each section of the site. I also find this functionality extremely helpful when brainstorming concepts and saving constant iterations through out the design process.

Another one of Fireworks big strengths is that it works very seamless into the Flash production workflow. You can copy a vector object from Fireworks and paste into Flash while retaining the vector object without having to create a bitmap, one of the first thing to wow our developers when introducing them to Fireworks for the first time.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting some of the features in Fireworks that I use on a regular basis that improve my workflow and hopefully inspire some people to at least open it up and check it out. I think once you get used to it you’ll find it’s an amazing tool and hopefully integrate it as part of your web production process.

Over the years, I’ve tried cataloging some of the inspirational things I find on the web. It’s been a bit of a labor of love since it’s not the most seamless process and takes forever. However, now that’s all changed. I installed Realmac Software’s web page capture software Little Snapper, and with a few key commands I can quickly save entire web pages or just a selection. Once inside the app I have the ability to quickly tag and categorize each snap.  Not only is the process of cataloging inspiration easier, Little Snapper looks amazing and is polished beyond belief. They just released an iPhone version of Little Snapper I have yet to check out but it looks very interesting and has the ability to post your snaps to Twitter.

While working on website concepts for our good friends at Sacramento ad agency MeringCarson. We started playing with concepts based on a line from their mission statement; “Think ‘Till It Hurts”. One of the ideas that kept sticking with us was to actually take the statement quite literally and show the staff of MeringCarson beat up and injured. After doing some rough comps I remembered a great set of images from photographer Nicolai Howalt titled Kid Boxers. The series of images documents children in their early teens before and after a boxing match. The images are extremely compelling and served as a huge inspiration for beating up our agency friends.

While working on all of the post production on the images it turns out it’s much harder to beat someone up in Photoshop than with your fists. There is an extremely fine line between making someone look beat up versus someone ready to go Trick or Treating on Halloween.

Visual effects studio OOOii was given the opportunity to create the visual interfaces for JJ Abrams new Star Trek movie. Typically, this is all done in post production and the actors have to pretend they are interacting with a super computer from the future. However, with the power of Flash and AIR, OOOii created numerous interfaces allowing the actors to interact in real time with actual working applications during many of the films scenes. Read more about it on Lee Brimelow’s Flash Blog.