(flash video content) The trailer for Gary Hustwit s next film Objectified hit the interwebs today. I really enjoyed Helvetica (twice at screenings and on DVD several times) and am looking forward to enjoying this one as well.
I just read a couple of great posts for designers during these hard economic times. Both offer great advice: Michael Beirut s Designing Through the Recession and Greg Storey s Goldfish . One of my favorites (from Beirut): And don t forget that recessions are a great time for the kind of research and development that manifests itself in self-initiated projects
This is a good reminder when designing interfaces, no? Cartoon from the New Yorker . Via Chris Willis, who hasn t updated his site in ages.
Here s a fun little information graphic outlining our current economic situation from Mint.com.
"A person who works six hours a day but with total focus has an enormous advantage over a 12-hour-per-day workaholic who s multi-tasking all day, answering every phone call, constantly checking Facebook and Twitter, and indulging every interruption. It s time we upgraded our work ethic for the age we re living in, not our grandparents age. Hard work is still a virtue, but now takes a distant…
(flash video content) The Making of LittleBigPlanet , the uncontrollably cute game for Playstation 3.
House Industries redesigned .
Here s a great recap of the accessibility advancements made in 2008 written by a high-level IBM engineer.
Here in Northtemple Land, as in many parts of the United States, we ve received slightly more than our fair share of precipitation in the last week. I have a long driveway to deal with and no snow blower (something I may need to remedy this year with Grandma s Christmas check). The combination of heavy snow and a long driveway has resulted in an inordinate amount of time spent outside, with…
"Make sure that the essential needs are met, but do not go overboard in creating so many good things to do that the essential ones are not accomplished. . . . Remember, don t magnify the work to be done—simplify it." ~ Elder Dallin H. Oaks, Good, Better, Best , October, 2007
Dr. Josh Silver, professor of physics at Oxford University designed a pair of spectacles where the optical power can be tuned individually by the wearer, eliminating the need for the optician and the whole process of lens grinding. He hopes to bring 20/20 vision to 1 million people in India next year, and has a bigger goal to offer perfect vision to 1 billion of the worlds poorest by the year…
Where We Do What We Do is a collection of agency and personal workspaces to inspire and perhaps motivate you to do a makeover of your own space during the holiday break.
LDS Maps is now live in 16 languages! The site should detect the browser language automatically, or if you want to poke around, there is a language selector at the bottom of the screen. Most of the work for this minor release was on the dev and translation teams, but props are due to Aaron Barker for helping define a new standard for language selection and Rob Foster for the soon-to-be-universal…
"If anyone is interested, I m thinking of doing a type poster representing the Church Office Building, set in Hobo and Impact. $200? Let me know if ur interested." ~ Jason, commenting on the fact that Cameron s magnificent letterpress poster of the Salt Lake Temple has sold out after only a couple of days.
We are looking to hire two front end developer types RIGHT NOW . As in, interview on Thursday with a potential hire on Friday. We are looking for two Senior level front end gurus who seriously know their HTML /CSS/JS stuff. One of those could be a more Junior level person with lots of potential and a sparkle in their eye. If you or someone you know fits the bill and want to come work at the church…
Interesting read: the Uncanny Valley of user interface design
Uncle Mark s Gift Guide and Almanac . A yearly publication with great gift ideas and other cool information.
Pitchfork s posted 51-100 of their 100 Best Tracks of 2008 . This isn t only a great list, they ve finally added handy little MP3 players to hear or download tracks on the list. I guarantee you haven t heard of over half of these artists. Go explore and find some new faves. My tops: The Veronicas (87), Justice (76), Sigur Rós (71), The Whitest Boy Alive (64), Q-Tip (61), and some freakin Vampire…
Nielsen/Norman Group is offering a free report on Rich Internet Applications . It s from 2002 and most of the apps reviewed are Flash-based—but hey, it s free :-) And most of the findings focus on the interaction itself, not the technology. Quick skim looks promising
"Oh yeah, that s the stuff." ~ Eric Meyer, after explaining the greatly sought after power of advanced selectors in CSS3 . ( six revisions )
As the second member of the NorthTemple Alumni organization ( Brian Sweeting being the founder, I believe), I m going to set a precedent here that I hope will take, Alumni posting. Yes, that s Alumni with a capital A. If you don t like it, get someone to kill my login. It s not a new idea, but Clay Shirky reminds us today of the value of simple user testing. I always get big value when I do this.…
"The art of architecture is really the art of constraint. It s the art of compromise in many ways. It s not about a brilliant man or woman working in his or her studio and producing a design and then getting it built. It s about negotiating a whole series of constraints or challenges, whether those have to do with budget or site or the community." ~ Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic,…
Netvibes just released several upgrades to their personal dashboard product. Several of the features I ve enjoyed have been the customizable layout into various grid-based designs. They ve also improved their thickbox modal experience by allowing the modal box to be draggable, and making the 70% opaque background become lighter if I need to view changes made in real time to the screen behind the…
iPhone loverz, here s a nice set of non-obvious tips tricks .
It looks like you can use XHTML and CSS to wrap and flow text just like you would do in InDesign. I don t know how useful something like this would be, and I haven t looked at the cleanliness of the code, but it s nice to know this is programmatically possible (and in IE6 , no less). Check it out .
Another great use of the video player designed by Chris and company: the annual First Presidency Christmas Devotional . Designerly things to note: loved the opening shots of the lights on Temple Square; not in love with the title text, but oh well; and loved the family room set behind the podium, though the flickering fireplace got a little distracting at times. Finally, note that the broadcast…
"You have to tell [them] your job role twice, your job title once, and the language you prefer to speak 3 times—all in English." ~ Jared Spool, dazed by the number of hoops needed to pass through just to get to see (not buy) a product catalog of branded merchandise for a major technology company. (From a re-print of a year-old post on sign-in mistakes to avoid .)
Funeral services for Elder Joseph B. Wirthlin, of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, available in the new media player designed by Gilbert and company, which seems particularly well–suited to the dignity and solemnity of the occassion
Emtype , a small foundry in Barcelona hosuing the solo designer Eduardo Manso, has released a new font family entitle Geogrotesque and it is gorgeous. I try to reserve that word for only the truly beautiful but believe that this example deserves such praise. From the press release: Although the type family has a geometric or technological construction, the rounded finish provides it a warm…
A prototype iPhone case for blind users . The silicon[e] case has debossed, tactile logos, icons and characters, yet is still thin enough for the screen to register touches. Used in conjunction with text-to-speech features, it opens up a world of possibilities for those without sight.
"Designers need to stop thinking that they re creating experiences. They re allowing them to unfold with sound design decisions." ~ Bryan Zmijewski on why user experience design does not exist . I think he is spot on. We do not create experience, we design applications that allow experiences to happen. We are interaction designers. Just semantics? I don t think so. It s important to remember that…
What happens when a dragon and a demon go head-to-head in a guitar duel
In the month of November, Firefox 3 finally became the #2 browser on lds.org passing Internet Explorer 6. hallelujah It s interesting to see how the audience at lds.org appears to skew towards the techie when compared with the Internet Average (guessing that is all Omniture clients combined). More Firefox, Safari and Chrome users then the average. Less IE6 users. Then a weird anomaly of WAY more…
"20. Client wants the best. Once you tell him what the best costs, he asks if you can scale back. You craft a scaled-back proposal, but, without disclosing a budget or even hinting at what might be viable for him, the client asks if you can scale it down further. After you’ve put 40 hours into back-and-forth negotiation, client asks if you can’t design just the home page in Photoshop." ~ Jeffrey…
This is quite possibly the coolest search box I have ever seen. Way to go, Design Disease . So often search boxes are the last thing on a designer s mind, yet it s so easy to remove all the default styles and plop a wild background image behind the search input. I dig this kind of detail. Update: Smashing Magazine put up a massive search article that talks about customization and design…
In attempting to delete a Twitter account this morning I got the following message. Not my desired outcome, but somehow I think I m ok with it. I don t want to be adding to anyone s stress.
"If you want a successful product, test and revise. If you want a great product, one that can change the world, let it be driven by someone with a clear vision. The latter presents more financial risk, but it is the only path to greatness." ~ Donald A. Norman Don t freak out agile fans, He states in context that you still need to iterate it s just a difference in what is driving the project.
The Font Feed comments on recent research by scientists at New York University who are proving that good typography matters. Neuro-scientists Denis G. Pelli Katharine A. Tillman recently published a thesis in the Journal Nature Neuroscience advancing the theory that proper spacing is the defining factor in legibility. I also dug up an example of previous research on the topic by these scientists.…
Dropcaps are a staple of magazine and newspaper design, but aren t always the easiest to implement on the web. Using this little jQuery and CSS tutorial, you can easily add hot little dropcaps to your web articles without bothering your developers. This method will also let you sleep at night knowing your caps will degrade gracefully, displaying just fine in browsers without CSS or JavaScript…
"It takes a strong UX practitioner to stand up to an ill-informed team who think that Agile is about speed rather than about better project control, and who subsequently think that user experience work is a waste of time." ~ Looking forward to reading the rest of Nielsen/Norman s Best Practices for User Experience on Agile Development Projects
Many of the newer cool phones are moving to a touch screen only interface (iPhone, G1 [when closed], Storm, etc). They are also supporting the ability to view the same websites that we design for the desktop. This is naturally pretty cool in that they get all those bells and whistles we designed and we don t have to create a second version of our site specifically for them. The other day I was on…
"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." ~ Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle . There s something about this that resonates even though I d like to think that not all good ideas start as mistakes
"Perfect is the enemy of good enough. When your product or service is good enough, get it out, because cash flows when you start shipping. Besides, unwanted features, not perfection, come with more time. By shipping, youll also learn what your customers truly want you to fix. It’s definitely a trade-off your reputation versus cash flow so you can’t ship pure crap. But you can’t wait for perfection…
This beautiful combination of musical notation and typography comes from a poster advertising an art expo opening today in Stockholm, titled The Art of Music. From the curator: The Art of Music reflects upon the profound influence that music has on art and simultaneously art has on music and recognises their common creative approach. The leading idea of the show emphasises the fact that artists…
I m one of the least typographical guys in our group. But even I can appreciate a good cross between typography and 80 s cartoons with the Optima T-Shirt :)