16th
October
2000
“It is scary to be living at a time when a particular creative field grips the public imagination as powerfully as design has in recent years. I can’t recall anything like it since the late 60’s and early 70’s, when movies and pop music exercised a magnetic hold on the minds of baby boomers. Today, the vigor pulses through fashion, furniture, art direction, graphics and product and image design with a similarly captivating verve. Design has taken on its own life, and this raises a problem often encountered in consumer culture. The energy is pure delight. But can we turn it off?”
posted in Graphic design | Permalink |
16th
October
2000
The story behind Audion: “Our previous release had been an FTP client, which is mostly a thing for tech-heads. It just didn’t have that mass consumer appeal. We started tossing around an idea called the PanicPack which was to be a suite of small utilities, including a CD player called Audion. One day, Cabel says to me, ‘can we make it play mp3s too?’ and somehow I got that together. And then I thought, hmm, well since it plays MP3s, maybe I can make it play MP3 net streams as well, and soon that was working.”
posted in Software/Hardware | Permalink |
16th
October
2000
“When short pieces of text are called for, we try to devise sentences containing all the letters of the alphabet with as few duplications as possible. These are called pangrams. The classic pangram used by typographers is: The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog. Good score: all 24 letters of the alphabet in a 33-word sentence that make sense. Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs is better, with one letter less.”
posted in Typography | Permalink |
16th
October
2000
“Along with batteries, text input is one of the most difficult problems for Post-PC era electronic devices. First and fundamentally, the problem is one of physical size, followed by the opposing needs of speed and familiarity. As wireless data services explode onto the market, the need for efficient text entry in small devices is becoming ever more intense, yet fundamental tradeoffs limit the viable options.”
posted in Interface design | Permalink |
