Sweet Tweets is a weekend feature to The Design Cubicle highlighting some of my favorite, and other Twitterer’s design-related links discovered via Twitter throughout the work week – because having resources and staying up-to-date is important in growth and development.

Week of 12-21-09:

Make out like a bandit
“It’s important to feel accomplished and a general happiness in our work. To make out like a bandit (or have an incredible amount of success), you can either get lucky or work hard for it.”

The best and worst identities of 2009
“2009 has been a great year for Brand New, with a bottomless source of new and redesigned identities from around the world, and we’ve all had good fun critiquing them in sickness and in health. But it all comes down to this: The Best and Worst.”

Interview with interface designer Sam Brown
“Sam Brown is a freelance Interface Designer from Scotland, who under the business name of Massive Blue creates a range of high quality websites, combining detailed design and top class code. Sam is also the guy behind such sites as Posh CSS, and the upcoming Remindness.”

Genius ways to use Photoshop Smart Objects
“Smart Objects are magical containers. They can hold an image, a vector graphic, or a complex set of layers. You can duplicate a Smart Object many times within your file and update the Object once to change all instances.”

How custom type is made
“In his lecture Schwartz shows how he and Paul Barnes settled on the basic design of the face, Giorgio, discusses how typography influences the personality of a magazine, and explains why not all typefaces have to last forever.”

Real fonts and rendering
“There are ways around this ugly type ugliness, but they involve complicated scripting and sniffing—the very nightmares from which web standards and the simplicity of @font-face were supposed to save us.”

Website designs of the year: 2009 (with explanations)
“I can only hope that after going through these designs you to have a better appreciation of what it takes to bring together a cohesive design.”

An unedited passion for creativity
“When reflecting on my creative intake and output over the past year, they simply stand out: the three guys that cursed a lot but admittedly got me fired up creatively.”

A decade in design
” Being a designer means being able to not only predict the future, but to have a hand in shaping it as well. In the last 10 years, however, designers also had to dramatically change the way they worked: What other industry got to weather the dot-com crash, a real estate bubble, and the death of print?”