XPLANE founder and CEO Dave Gray will be giving a visual thinking workshop in Toronto on September 8: “The title of the workshop will be ‘The Power of Pictonics: Using Visualizations to Tell Your Technology Story.’ I am really looking forward to this. There will be plenty of hands-on exercises to help you hone your visual thinking and storytelling skills. You’ll also learn some of the ’secret sauce’ that goes into making visual explanations. This will be a pretty special event, to be held in the beautiful and hi-tech MaRS convergence and innovation center in the downtown Discovery District. It also happens to coincide with the Toronto film festival, one of the best film festivals in North America in my opinion. So if you’ve been meaning to visit Toronto you couldn’t pick a better time.”

“During the 18th century, British caricaturists changed the shape of speechballoons from gothic speech-bands or flags into fluffy balloons, our modern speechballoons. I’m using the word speechballoon as the general, inclusive term. (The gothic form of speechballoons are speechbands, flags, scrolls or sheets of paper, the modern form of speechballoons are balloons, but also little rectangles, often rounded at the edges, or simply little blocks of text above the heads of the speaker etc, etc).”

“A strange gulf exists today between the worlds of design and advertising. That makes it easy to forget that one of the greatest designers that ever lived was an advertising art director: Doyle Dane Bernbach’s Helmut Krone. Long before branding became a buzzword, Krone intuitively understood how graphic design could define an institution’s personality. ‘The page,’ he once said, ‘ought to be a package for the product. It should look like the product, smell like the product…Every company, every product, needs its own package.’ Without ever designing a logo — often without even using a logo — he created corporate images that endure to this day. How many companies can be said to ‘own’ a typeface the way that Volkswagen does Futura Bold? They have Helmut Krone to thank for that.”

“Modern Mechanix is collecting, among other things, examples of pre-computer ASCII art, found in old issues of popular science magazines. So far, he has found articles on the typewriter art of mill worker Rosaire Belanger in the June 1939 issue of Popular Science (featuring an awesome picture of George Washington)…”

“Everyone wants to sell more papers. Everyone is doing everything they can and virtually no one is succeeding. Why? Because almost every effort is too narrowly focused. What the industry needs is an enterprise-wide solution, beginning with a focus on the goal of selling more newspapers. Here are the steps…”

“When designers speak of ‘bad design’, they are generally referring to visual treatments which are displeasing, the haphazard output of a poorly trained designer, or at most, design solutions which simply do not work… If we accept that our general barometer for ‘bad’ is primarily superficial and personal in nature — as it is in the above examples — it leads us to consider that which truly is bad. I ask whether we should redefine bad design as: work that causes harm or helps support the efforts of clients who do damaging things.”

“Developing web-sites over the last few years, I’ve been stumbling over the same problem over and over again: how can I visualize my idea easily and quickly? Since human being is used to visualize things, trying to understand the idea behind them, recently I’ve spent hours googling for useful tools and tutorials which would help me to create images — mostly, diagrams, charts, chart-flows etc. to visualize my personal ideas to my potential clients.”

“For a 25-year dishwasher at Seattle’s Washington Athletic Club, Gregory Blackstock has an amazing skill set: he speaks 12 languages, has mastered the accordion (and can play just about every instrument he picks up), can do spot-on sound effects of dentist’s drills and airplanes, and chronicles the objects of everyday life with exacting detail using only a Sharpie and gray crayons… While he’s a classic autistic savant, Blackstock’s amazingly intricate drawings, because of their craft and obsessive vision, would surely be considered art by any measure.” (Thanks Design Observer!)

[10:36] styloid: BTW have you seen any excellent interface guideline documents on line?
[10:37] styloid: mostly for assisting a very green IA/UE team
[10:39] christina_wodtke: yahoo’s pattern language library rocks

“designerID is the first tool created specifically to help designers make meaningful connections worldwide. Build your career one connection at a time, easily networking with other designers in your market and around the world.”

“This is a list of HTML elements I’ve found to be very poorly represented in most markup on the web today. Many of these elements offer more semantic value than actual functionality, but with the rising popularity of CSS driven design where HTML elements are used for what they were actually intended for, I felt shining a little light on them was appropriate.”

“Like learnin’, but don’t like ponying up the leafy Sacagaweas to do it? Check out these useful little nuggets of knowledge…”

“Photographs taken with film fade with age, and even negatives yellow and become brittle. Digital photos, on the other hand, retain the same brilliant color and clarity every time you pull them up on the computer screen–until your hard disk crashes and you instantly lose every photo you’ve ever taken.”

“At the recent Media Lab faculty retreat led by our new director Frank Moss, we had an interesting time discussing our favorite topic here at the Lab — the future. It’s never easy to discuss the future when you’re living in the present of the course, but with the impressive array of colleagues I have here it’s not that difficult. Digital music impresario Tod Machover and the mind of Lego’s Mindstorm Mitch Resnick led a discussion about the future of creativity. It was here that the past collided with the future, or at least in my mind. The timeless question in art arose: What matters more: the process of creating an artwork, or just the artwork alone? There are only a few variants to this answer. My simple mind calculates four total…”

“Some links to celebrate Flash’s 10th anniversary.”