xBlog: The visual thinking weblog
25th March 2003

T36: The everyday design of business

“T36 is essentially a resource for my work including resources as links, papers and a weblog of thoughts and interests. The topics covered are within the wide scope of the design profession, with a common thread on design in business. I work with companies to understand the value of design, business behaviour and the strategic work involved in improving their performance. Specifically in the way organizations behave and design their business, products or services.”

posted in Branding | Permalink | Comments Off

25th March 2003

HostProfessor

“This is [the] ultimate resource to find / compare / research … cheap web hosting and domain name registration. Try our search engine / directory / review to find a reliable with low cost / budget / affordable web hosting server.”

posted in Domain names | Permalink | Comments Off

25th March 2003

MY BAND IS HOT, SERIOUSLY

“Promo photos are super-important, ’cause they let people put a face to the music. Here are some tips on how not to look like a creep in yours.”

posted in Photography | Permalink | Comments Off

25th March 2003

A Better Google: 37BetterGoogle

“Google is the search expert. Yet as good as their search engine is, the results are only as good as the search terms you enter. How can you know if “african coffee trade” is a better search than “africa’s coffee trading” when you’re doing research? You can’t possibly know, but Google can. To help you discern between different synonyms and related terms, Google could provide a way to search for slight variations of your initial query and flag the ones that differ. This mockup will help illustrate how 37signals envisions this functionality.”

posted in Searching | Permalink | Comments Off

25th March 2003

Mind Mapping Resource Center

“Mind mapping — the technique of arranging ideas and their interconnections visually — is a popular brainstorming technique. We have collected the best resources and tools on this subject into one convenient location. This Resource Center will help you to learn more about how to create mind maps, as well as how to use them in your business, for personal goal-setting and more.”

posted in Visual thinking | Permalink | Comments Off

20th March 2003

Brand Advocate

“Emisare, Inc., a relationship branding firm, designed Brand Advocate to help educate senior marketing executives by providing news, strategic analysis, case studies, white papers, tutorials, innovations, trends & statistics, reviews, peer-to-peer dialog, resources, and more. Brand Advocate provides fresh information every month from the people in the trenches of the online/offline marketing industry.”

posted in Branding | Permalink | Comments Off

20th March 2003

STACK Kite Figures

“The STACK figures are the basis of competition flying, but some of them are hard to make out from the static diagrams. In order to make them clearer, I have produced a set of animations of all of the figures. The animations now allow you turn both the grid and figure lines on and off. This can give flyers an idea of how the figures look when seen against a clear sky.”

posted in Et cetera | Permalink | Comments Off

20th March 2003

Kansei Engineering: Incorporating affection and emotion into the design process

“Kansei is a japanese term where the syllable kan means sensitivity and sei means sensibility. It is used to express the quality of an object for producing pleasure through its use. Therefore, there are objects with much kansei, and others with little or no kansei at all… Professor Mitsuo Nagamachi developed, back in the seventies, a technique to incorporate these issues in the industrial design methodology. This technique, named Kansei Engineering, has already been put into practice by several companies quite succesfully.”

posted in Industrial design | Permalink | Comments Off

20th March 2003

Design and Emotion

“One can feel happy about the car that functions properly, aesthetically pleased by the gentle curve of a mobile telephone, proud of possessing a particular necklace, feel indignant because the intelligent product used seems to have a (stupid) mind of its own, and angry because the drawer makes a grating sound. Research in this area investigates what critical factors of human-product interaction contribute to an emotional experience.”

posted in Industrial design | Permalink | Comments Off

20th March 2003

Design and Emotion

“One can feel happy about the car that functions properly, aesthetically pleased by the gentle curve of a mobile telephone, proud of possessing a particular necklace, feel indignant because the intelligent product used seems to have a (stupid) mind of its own, and angry because the drawer makes a grating sound. Research in this area investigates what critical factors of human-product interaction contribute to an emotional experience.”

posted in Interaction design | Permalink | Comments Off

7th March 2003

Controlled Vocabulary.com

“A controlled vocabulary is often used to make a database easier to search. Most often it is a listing of words or terms which can be used as subject headings or descriptors in a particular database. Since we tend to have many different ways of describing the same concept, it can be valuable to be able to draw together under a single word or phrase, all the material that is available on a particular topic.”

posted in Information architecture | Permalink | Comments Off

7th March 2003

World of Ends

“What the Internet is and how to stop mistaking it for something else… When it comes to the Net, a lot of us suffer from Repetitive Mistake Syndrome. This is especially true for magazine and newspaper publishing, broadcasting, cable television, the record industry, the movie industry, and the telephone industry, to name just six.”

posted in Internet | Permalink | Comments Off

7th March 2003

Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge

“The National Science Foundation and the journal Science, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), invite you to participate in the first Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. This new international contest is designed to recognize outstanding achievements by scientists and engineers in the use of visual media to promote understanding of research results. Visualization, especially in science and technology, has a special power to complement and enhance the written word in depicting phenomena, elucidating concepts, revealing new insights, provoking thought and appealing to the imagination — for both technical audiences and the general public.”

posted in Visual thinking | Permalink | Comments Off

7th March 2003

Omnigraffle GUI Design Toolset

“This OmniGraffle palette can be used for general GUI design. I’ve tried to make it vanilla enough for platform independance although you can see some Mac OS X and Swing peeking out.”

posted in Interface design | Permalink | Comments Off

5th March 2003

The History of Visualisation

“The history of visualisation is that of the search for new artefacts to amplify the ability to know; it’s the history of writing and of maps, the history of knowledge.”

posted in Visual thinking | Permalink | Comments Off