21st
July
2007
“Even if you never read a single thing Dave Winer wrote in his 439 years of blogging, it’s worth taking time to study his ideas about comments on blogs (he doesn’t allow them).”
…to the extent that comments interfere with the natural expression of the unedited voice of an individual, comments may act to make something not a blog…. The cool thing about blogs is that while they may be quiet, and it may be hard to find what you’re looking for, at least you can say what you think without being shouted down. This makes it possible for unpopular ideas to be expressed. And if you know history, the most important ideas often are the unpopular ones…. That’s what’s important about blogs, not that people can comment on your ideas. As long as they can start their own blog, there will be no shortage of places to comment.
posted in Weblogs | Permalink |
21st
July
2007
“I spent the weekend building a new style for Shaun Inman’s Mint 2 called Tufte Mint. The inspiration and namesake of the style was Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information—a fantastic book that chronicles the history and theory of data graphics.
Tufte Mint’s design is focused on maximizing data-ink and minimizing chartjunk and decoration. The graphs in particular have been designed in a style Tufte presents in his book. Keep reading for more info on the design and to grab the free download.”
posted in Information design, Information graphics | Permalink |
21st
July
2007
“At a conference recently, I heard Dan Cederholm from SimpleBits talk about inspiration. He showed a bunch of different techniques he uses, including how he uses Photoshop’s mosaic filter on an image to blow up giant pixels representing the basic colors in the picture. He uses those as pallets for the design work he does. Very cool.
Inspiration can come from process, but it can also come from the most unexpected places. For example, when we were designing the data-over-time visualizations for Google Analytics, we were totally stuck with bar graphs. We’d iterated dozens of times, scoured the web for examples to steal, and had tried just about everything. The result felt muddy and chartjunked…”
posted in Creativity, Information design, Information graphics, Movies/TV | Permalink |
