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Jill Fehrenbacher, founder of leading green design blog Inhabitat, announced this morning that her nearly seven-year-old site has been acquired by media network Internet Brands.

Fehrenbacher says she started the site when a student, as a way to engage in public conversation about specific topics of interest to her. That sounds like the kind of founding story that many of the first wave of commercially viable blogs of the era can tell. The site speaks to a lucrative young readership with disposable income and now gets 15 million unique visitors each month, up from 11 million at the beginning of this year. Fehrenbacher told the story of Inhabitat's birth in depth in a long post this Spring. No acquisition price was named but given the site's growth, audience and angel fundraising, it was presumably a life-changing event for Fehrenbacher. She'll stay on as the site's manager and Editor in Chief.

You probably have never heard of Dieter Rams (pictured at left) but certainly know of his work. For many years he was a product designer for Braun and other German companies. Back before Frog and Apple put the "i" in many of its products Braun was selling very elegant items that were well designed, such as calculators, shavers and household appliances. Many of these items can be found in museum collections all over the world today. Rams has had several design shows over the years and is known for his ten principles of "good design," and I thought if we substitute the word "code" for "design" that there is a lot software developers could learn from his principles too. Here they are, with some of my comments.

In May, we analyzed usability guru Jakob Nielsen's report on iPad design and concluded that it was a welcome return to form for the web veteran. Nielsen and his company have followed up with another excellent usability report, this time about "transmedia" design. It covers mobile, tablets, TVs and even dips a toe into "extreme screen sizes" (very small or very large screens).

The latest report convincingly argues that although use of mobile devices will dramatically increase, there will still be "much high-value use" on desktop PCs. "One size UI does not fit all screen sizes," the report somewhat obviously points out. The details though are worth looking at, as it shows how user experiences across devices and screen sizes will increasingly differ.

Verify, a concept testing application from interaction design firm ZURB, just added language support for German, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Dutch. The Verify team found that the app has large user bases in Europe, Central & South America, so the new languages will help them better serve those customers.

Verify helps Web designers create evaluative tests for their design elements and receive audience feedback. Users can upload an image of a design, create a test for it, and then offer it to users to evaluate its effectiveness. Several kinds of tests are available, such as memory tests and A/B preference tests. Here's a working demo of a Verify test.

Silicon Valley design agency ZURB is holding their fourth annual ZURBwired event on August 18, in which the firm donates 24 hours of their time to accomplish one mission for a nonprofit partner, whether it's designing a website, creating a fundraising campaign, or solving any other problem they can think of. The deadline for nonprofits to apply is Friday, August 5 (tomorrow). The proposal submission can be found here.

Last year when Nicholas Carr's book The Shallows hit the streets suggesting that the Internet was frying our brains (see our coverage) I asked what we could do to build a less brain damaging Internet. Since then I've been too, well, distracted to pursue that line of thinking.

Fortunately Alex Pang, a visiting fellow at Microsoft Research Cambridge, actively researches this area. Pang proposes a new paradigm called contemplative computing. Today he gave a talk on the idea at the Lift France 2011 conference and has published a PDF of it. You can also find a rough draft of his paper on contemplative computing.

So can computers actually help improve our concentration and contemplation, instead of leading us into distraction?

FlickrBomb is a new jQuery/jQuery Mobile plugin that lets designers quickly add relevant content to their prototypes. It greatly speeds up the traditional process of doing this, which has been to search for an image, download it, crop it to the right size and then add it. Instead, with just one line of code referencing your flickr.com search term, you can pull in photos automatically. And, if you don't like the first one flickrBomb returns, just click the little "wrench" icon that appears when you hover over the image to change the photo to a new one.

Creation of an attractive and compelling web app prototype is no small task, but a new startup called InVision offers a framework to do so that looks easy, fast and like a real pleasure to use.

The service lets designers drop image files into its web interface, then create clickable hot-spots on each page. The next page each spot links-to is chosen from a drop down menu of images uploaded and the end result is a stitched-together series of pages that can be shared publicly with a single URL and commented on. It looks really nice and is priced from free for a single small project through $75 per month for up to 25 simultaneous projects with unlimited collaborators. I saw one error in the account creation flow (which the company has now fixed), but otherwise the service appears to work well as promised.

Most design - be it architecture, interior design, industrial design or some other field - is inherently visual. It stands to reason that being able to provide stakeholders with visual references will give designers a competitive edge.

A recent survey on CGarchitect.com found that almost 90% of respondents were more likely to win a competitive bid using visualizations. More than 90% said community support was easier to win with visualizations. And 50% said they saved nearly $25,000 a year by creating visualizations in-house.

Fortunately, strides in 3D technology is making in-house visualization more accessible to companies both large and small. Some firms are taking advantage of tools used for 3D animation or video games to win clients or create better work. Others are taking advantage of new 3D modeling technologies available in traditional design tools.

Not too long ago, we highlighted a new website for mobile design inspiration called Mobile-Patterns.com. The site, created by Foursquare's lead designer Mari Sheibley, is meant to serve as a home to mobile screenshots showcasing various UI elements, including sign-up flows, splash screens, comment boxes and more.

However, Mobile-Patterns isn't the only site of its kind. Thanks to ReadWriteMobile commenters and others for listing more resources deserving a mention. We've rounded these up below.