Web design: Here’s an interesting article on using colors, shapes, and typography in web design: Visual Designer | Satisfying Customers With Color, Shape, and Type (Web Techniques, Nov 1999). Have you ever noticed the arrow in the FedEx logo? Look between the E and the x…

Interested in the history of social dance? The Library of Congress has put together a site detailing its collection of social dance manuals: An American Ballroom Companion. There are also a number of on linevideo clips of the various dances.

More on record databases:

Greg Malinowski writes that he also has an online listing of square dance records (Caller’s Page, use the left-hand framed menu) that has over 4000 entries. No ratings or cue sheets, but he does have a “theme” field, where he categorizes his records by things like “trains”, “military”, “sixties”, etc. Greg’s looks like it was generated from his database in 1997. It’s not a “real” online database, in that I can’t, for example, search for and get a list of all the records with a “train” theme. But you can do text searches once the listing is showing in your browser.

Greg has a lot of interesting things on his website. I have an unfortunate tendency to not pay a lot of attention to sites that aren’t kept up to date (and Greg’s front page hasn’t been modified since sometime in 1998). However, that doesn’t mean that the information isn’t still useful. One section that I think is very useful is the Teaching Think Tank, a collection of 1998 postings to the sd-callers mailing list about teaching the Mainstream calls. Lots of teaching hints and routines using the calls…if you’re looking for teaching ideas, you should check this out.

If you’re tired of starting out your sequences with H/S Square Thru 4, take a look at Greg’s Square Thru 4 Subsitutes, a list of 146 Mainstram and Plus equivalents for Square Thru.