What's so bad about Mozilla's Toronto workspace? Besides the fluorescent lighting, the colorless white walls and the folding tables, the worst thing about Mozilla's Toronto workspace is how we're sure management would improve it. With corporate graffiti, company logos and too many colors. That was management's trick at Facebook and look where readers ranked it in our poll on tech's ten worst workspaces — as tech's second-worst workspace, just after Mozilla. Check out the full list, below.

After reviewing our post "The 10 worst workspaces in tech," commenter AdmNaismith described Facebook's office, pictured above, as "foggy, dank, dim, and utterly depressing." Commenter mothra1 hated Yahoo's New York offices more: "They suck! Lifeless and impersonal. Kinda like the douchebags who still actually work there." Meanwhile, Adobe apologist BlairHapjo told us we "clearly didn't get past Adobe's lobby," and the rest of the office features "Aeron chairs, real offices (with doors!), big picture windows." For us, the worst offices we found on Office Snapshots and elsewhere were the the ones that try too hard to seem Internet-hip, like Jajah and Google. Now it's time to settle the disputes. Below, vote for your least favorite and help us rank tech's 10 most dismal places to work:

We've toured the top 10 workspaces in tech. Click to viewNow, we've gone back to Office Snapshots to find the 10 worst. What makes them so bad? Some offend with exposed fluorescent lights, gray cubicles and a dystopian corporate sheen. But others, with their pseudo-hip graffiti, kindergarten toys and plastic decorations — all in a desperate attempt to seem "Internet-y" — come off even worse. We'll start with Yahoo's New York digs.

If buying Facebook doesn't work out, Microsoft plans to compete on the Web by growing "organically." Bill Gates said that means search advancements, more marketing and lots of meetings. Lots of meetings. But here's what those meetings ought to be about: unifying Microsoft's online branding. Check out the screenshots of Microsoft's Web designs below. Nabbed by LiveSide, ReadWriteWeb's Josh Catone points out they contain "four different search boxes, two different Live.com "orb" logos (in four different sizes), and six different header backgrounds."

Many years ago, the Bush reelection campaign site had a little gadget that allowed users to put their own slogans on Bush campaign signs. This gadget was abused, humorously. No one learns any lessons on the internet, thank god, and now a site created by a Barack Obama supporter allows you to upload any photo you want and stick it in the candidate's official logo. Animal has a bit of fun with this. Can any of you do better than this terrifying Julia Allison/MisShapes/Corey Kennedy triptych? [Animal]

Here's a list of 63 different whimsical faux-stencil fonts you can use to make fliers for your indie band that look grittier than just normal fliers which would not indicate your indie tendencies quite as well. [Outlaw Design Blog via Kottke]

Philippe Starck, the totally influential French designer of interiors, furniture, and consumer objects, seems to be having an existential crisis. "Everything I designed was unnecessary," he told a German publication, adding that he will retire in two years. "In future there will be no more designers. The designers of the future will be the personal coach, the gym trainer, the diet consultant." [Breitbart]

Yahoo has redesigned its homepage slightly, shifting its logo from the left of the search box to a spot directly above. That central location is more traditional for the company, and emphasizes the streamlined, Google-like search box. (The same search layout has been available at search.yahoo.com for a while.) The design does make it easier to search, but we don't think it'll make Steve Ballmer increase his bid. Click through to see a history of Yahoo homepages.

"Since 9/11, I've secretly measured the socioeconomic well-being of New York City by the advertising content and graphic design of the billboards on the Long Island Expressway between the Midtown Tunnel and the Greenpoint Avenue exit in Queens. I like seeing lots of billboards, and I want them to be filled with terrific ads." [Creativity Online]

A respectful, comprehensive, and interesting overview of the historical evolution of the design of farm magazines. A must-read for poultry portrait aficionados. [Design Observer]

Famed — and famously unproductive — interaction theorist Joy Mountford was not the only designer let go from Yahoo this week. Her entire "Design Innovation Team," known in Sunnyvale as yHaus, was let go. Which makes sense. While designers love innovation, consumers usually reject it.

It turns out, according to today's Times, that when you have children, you might have to slightly compromise your aesthetic design sense and maybe even tape the corners of your designer furniture. Or put it in storage! All because the little puke you finally conceived after putting it off for a decade or two spent finally snagging that prewar apartment and filling it with dead-tech post-modernistic bullshit might hurt himself on the sharp edges of your Barcelona chairs. Or smudge your glass-top Noguchi coffee table. The obvious answers to the problem—belt-delivered beatings should young Atticus get near the Ligne Roset brown microsuede one-arm sofa, locking young Libertad in your minimally appointed sleek modernist basement until he's 18, abortion—are not provided. [NYT] Photo: Evan Sung for The New York Times

On a day when Sunnyvale is bleeding the royal hue, it's good to know how Google avoided a purple logo. Designer Ruth Kedar went through numerous rainbow-hued iterations before ending up with today's simple logo. [Wired News]

Why are so many websites painful to look at and worse to use? Web designer Jeffrey Zeldman has found the culprit: the media. Reporters don't get the Web, he claims, or if they do, their bosses force them to run stories about business deals instead of design. An entertaining conspiracy theory, but entirely false. If anything, there's been very real pressure from newspaper and magazine publishers to churn out page after page of "special coverage" on design, packaged nicely with high-gloss advertisements. Online editors who closely watch website stats know better: Design stories, while occasionally worth doing, don't get the clicks. Good design is like pornography: People know it when they see it. They don't need to be lectured about it.

Before Jonathan Ive, there was Robert Brunner, the designer behind Apple's original, iconic PowerBook. Brunner, who left design firm Pentagram this summer and now has a new product-design studio, Ammunition, worked with Amazon.com's Lab126 unit, also staffed with Apple veterans, to design the Kindle e-book reader, a source tells us.

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Wired has a kind-hearted story about original Mac icon designer Susan Kare. Kare's the one behind those cloying Facebook "gifts" cluttering up your News Feed. So far, Facebook members have exchanged more than 20 million of Kare's tiny graphics. And the suckers are paying up to $1 for each. Kare's thrilled to be a con artist, of course. "I can do things in gifts that I never could in UI design," Kare told Wired. "Screen icons have a job to do — they're more like traffic signs than illustrations. But the gifts don't have to be anything other than what they are." Which is, she surely meant to go on, a way to tell your friends that you're thinking of them, but too cheap to get a real present. Also, don't miss the funny tidbit about Kare's attempt to sneak a pot brownie onto Facebook for the 4/20 holiday. That's when I really knew this was a puff piece.

Artist Scott King reimagines Vogue. "His 12 artworks featuring fictional proposals for Vogue covers ruthlessly lampoon the fatuous froth of the glossy. Take January, The Angry Issue: its main feature - 769 Things That Make Scarlett Johansson Angry At Injustice. Inside, we are promised advice on 'how to dress angry', a report on 'whatever happened to New Orleans' and 'how Bono saved Africa'." Highly recommended. [Creative Review]

Jakob Nielsen, perennial usability and interface design guru, made hay again yesterday with renewed criticism of Web 2.0 design. This is not the first nor will it be the last time Nielsen attacks Web 2.0 for a little press. Of course, there is wisdom and validity to his concerns. The Web 2.0 aesthetic and feature set are like obscenity: you know it when you see it. There is always good and bad design, and statements like "The idea of community, user generated content and more dynamic web pages are not inherently bad [...], they should be secondary to the primary things sites should get right" always ring true. However, as H.L. Menken said, "Criticism is prejudice made plausible." Let's consider the design and interface of some noteworthy Web 2.0 sites:

With newspaper redesigns happening every other week—and more and more of them being conducted by fun-loving text-haters like Mario Garcia—readers are getting more strident attempts at impact shoved in their faces. This guy's gone through the fairly new LA Times and counted 22 font uses (not, probably different fonts, as he says, but definitely different stylings) above the fold.