Websites: no font, axisartsists, soyouwanna, moodstats

10 best sites this week

With visual experiments on the themes of fonts, typography and written communication in general, this entertaining and thought-provoking site combines arresting design with convincing investigation. Each "experiment" takes you step-by-step through an idea and comes up with innovative responses to questions of text, including a design to enable you to read a book while lying down without your arms getting tired. Which is nice.

www.nofont.com
With visual experiments on the themes of fonts, typography and written communication in general, this entertaining and thought-provoking site combines arresting design with convincing investigation. Each "experiment" takes you step-by-step through an idea and comes up with innovative responses to questions of text, including a design to enable you to read a book while lying down without your arms getting tired. Which is nice.

www.axisartists.org.uk
Despite the fertile breeding ground for cynicism that is the world of modern art, not all art is utterly bonkers or a pile of tat, balanced precariously against a wall, as the Axis Artists website confirms. If you are after some reasonably priced, but at the same time original works of art, ranging from £10 craft items to more expensive large-scale paintings, this site offers a wide-ranging database of contemporary artists from home and abroad.

www.soyouwanna.com
So You Wanna alerts surfers to a whole load of stuff that is certainly interesting enough to warrant your attention as you wander aimlessly through life, but which rarely gets taught in official institutions. From being a stand-up comedian to ferret-fancying, from cigar-smoking to cat-training, whatever it is you wanna do or be, this site can help you on your way. Follow their advice and you can find out how to make a low-budget movie ­ just make sure that you're not making yet another Blair Witch Project rip-off.

www.moodstats.com
Web design gurus Kaliber1000 have come up with just the sort of graph-heavy, information-presenting visual fest that will impress anybody who enjoyed toggling the buttons at the previous site. Using the answers you give to questions about your daily mood fluctuations, you can see, in colourful precision, just how happy, sad or indifferent you really are. Pointless quantification of qualia was never so brightly executed.

www.tate.org.uk/warhol/#
The current obsession with Pop artist and cultural entrepreneur Andy Warhol continues, after Channel 4's recent series and alongside the Tate Modern's ongoing exhibition, at the Tate's website. Here, visitors can send in likenesses of their good selves to be "Warholised" in the manner of the man's famous "Marilyn" series of prints. Nowhere but the net could the authorless reproducibility of Warhol's vision be put into practice so expertly, even when using his own work.

http://radioqualia.va.com.au/freeradiolinux/
Free Radio Linux is a net radio broadcast that is made up of a computerized voice reading out the code of the revolutionary open-source Linux operating system. With more than 4 million lines of code, the transmission, begun only a month ago, should be completed in just under a couple of years time. A fascinating insight into a cheap, universal way of making information available to all.

www.broadbandmap.co.uk
Forget job opportunities, low crime rates, and affordable housing ­ many netheads must surely now realise that the opportunity for broadband capability is the number one issue that sways the decision about where to live. This Broadband Map illustrates which exchanges are broadband-enabled, plus it gives a useful overview of which cable company controls which area, essential knowledge in a fractured market.

www.atomica.com
At the chocolate-bar counter of information, Atomica is a kind of fun-sized alternative to Google, and, though nothing can replace the infinite majesty of the mighty POG (all hail the Power of Google!), if it's a more manageable snack of knowledge you crave, Atomica, favoured by industry for its quick results, is the perfect place to peruse pithy pop-ups.

www.imdb.com
Well over 10 years old, the Internet Movie Database continues to be the perfect source for finding out the plotlines, casts, credits and other film trivia for any film you're interested in. If you're pondering whether to see the latest Hollywood blockbuster, or want to check out if it's worth taping that late-night Channel 4 offering, the impressively-enormous IMDB should deliver the info goods.

www.turbulence.org/Works/nums/index.html
Artist, Golan Levin, has created a program piece called "The Secret Lives of Numbers", in which he plots the relative frequency of every number between zero and one million, according to its appearance count in search engines and other information sources. Regardless of the significance of the supposedly oft-appearing 212, there are some great graphs to play with.