“I finally got around to typing up my notes from the Edward Tufte seminar on information design. Damn, that show was thrilling. This was actually the first time I’ve enjoyed typing up notes on anything… Notes are broken down into three areas: 1. Grand Principles of Information Design; 2. General Tips in Creating and Analyzing Visual Data; and 3. Tips for Speaking to an Audience.”

“Semiotics is not widely institutionalized as an academic discipline. It is a field of study involving many different theoretical stances and methodological tools. One of the broadest definitions is that of Umberto Eco, who states that ’semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign.’ Semiotics involves the study not only of what we refer to as ’signs’ in everyday speech, but of anything which ’stands for’ something else. In a semiotic sense, signs take the form of words, images, sounds, gestures and objects.”

“Semiotics is not widely institutionalized as an academic discipline. It is a field of study involving many different theoretical stances and methodological tools. One of the broadest definitions is that of Umberto Eco, who states that ’semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign.’ Semiotics involves the study not only of what we refer to as ’signs’ in everyday speech, but of anything which ’stands for’ something else. In a semiotic sense, signs take the form of words, images, sounds, gestures and objects.”

“For Jane Mackay, sneezes are turquoise and Friday is chequered. She has synaesthesia, a neurological condition which mixes up her senses. Here, the former GP-turned-artist, of south London, explains her colourful world.”

“For Jane Mackay, sneezes are turquoise and Friday is chequered. She has synaesthesia, a neurological condition which mixes up her senses. Here, the former GP-turned-artist, of south London, explains her colourful world.”

Ug. “The Challenge: Replicate WebRef’s front page using CSS. The Solution: CSS and lots of iterations. Rogelio Lizaolo improves on Kwon Ekstrom’s CSS version of WebRef’s tabled home page. Months in the making, the final design successfully duplicates WebRef’s layout without the use of tables. Numerous bugs were discovered in Netscape and Explorer in how they handle CSS, and we found some elegant workarounds to these and other problems. What follows is a step by step CSS layout tutorial that shows how we got to the final design.”

“If everyone would subscribe to such a system and create good metadata for the purposes of describing their goods, services and information, it would be a trivial matter to search the Internet for highly qualified, context-sensitive results: a fan could find all the downloadable music in a given genre, a manufacturer could efficiently discover suppliers, travelers could easily choose a hotel room for an upcoming trip. A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It’s also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities.”

Attention St. Louisans! The Shins bring their extremely lovable brand of misfit pop to the Rocket Bar tonight. Recommended.

“Objects, people, attributes and just about every aspect of human activity have often been grouped together to aid us in our understanding. From the earliest times numbers, seemingly only used for counting, have been used for the foundation of elaborate symbolisation. They can not only express quantity but ideas, notions and power. Each number possesses its own individuality and has its own particular properties. Within all of the themes that infiltrate our lives number is a central force.” Neat!

“We invite you to enter a visual landscape that reveals much of the rich achievement of five centuries of scientific and artistic pursuit. Travel through time; it is a voyage of eye and mind, a potent mixture of art, imagination, mythology and real science… This is the place where designers, artists, publishers and communications professionals can easily access many of the choicest visual communications from history to convey a message today. From the first printed atlas of the world, to pioneering studies of human anatomy, lavishly illustrated constellation charts, to early botanical classics, Visual Language offers the finest selection of royalty-free historical illustration on CD-ROM.”

“The fact that graphic designers and other people who do expert problem solving in visual domains have difficulty verbally articulating the basis of their expertise leaves us with a paradox: How do designers communicate expertise to each other? How then, is it possible for anyone to learn to become a designer?”

“We invite you to enter a visual landscape that reveals much of the rich achievement of five centuries of scientific and artistic pursuit. Travel through time; it is a voyage of eye and mind, a potent mixture of art, imagination, mythology and real science… This is the place where designers, artists, publishers and communications professionals can easily access many of the choicest visual communications from history to convey a message today. From the first printed atlas of the world, to pioneering studies of human anatomy, lavishly illustrated constellation charts, to early botanical classics, Visual Language offers the finest selection of royalty-free historical illustration on CD-ROM.”

“Because interaction design has strong roots in the social sciences with their positivist approaches to studying and analyzing behavior, little has been written about non-formal methods, approaches which might serve as an analog to the architect’s playful, exploratory sketching described above. In this article, I want to discuss one of the non-formal methods I use: storytelling. Storytelling is an integral part of my approach to design, both at the earliest stages, as well as later on in the process.”

“A WikiWikiWeb is a web site where anyone can edit the pages through an HTML form. Linking is done automatically on the server side; all pages are stored in a database. This may sound rather simplistic, but a Wiki is a very unique way to collaborate on the Web… The addictive quality of a Wiki is that making pages is as simple as making a link to them. If they don’t yet exist, the page link will be followed by a hyperlinked question mark; follow that link and you can define the new page. With this setup, you can update and create pages from anywhere there is a web browser handy.”

“Magazine typography is all about communicating, but magazines communicate in many different ways. One of those ways is through the text, the traditional meat of any publication. Other ways include photography, artwork, suggestive and allusive headlines, cartoons, and even the advertising. All of these require integrating words and images in imaginative ways.”