“Visually, we wanted to make something that didn’t ape current design tropes – the boring, over-used and essentially art-less ‘web 2.0 look’ of bright palletes, gradient fills and rounded corners – but had a more classical view, as befitting something a little more grown up. Richard Spencer Powell said the magazine design draws from modernism, of course (especially North and Mittel European heritage) but also looks further back into the early 20thC, and beyond the simple serifs and vogue for ornamentation, but look at the engravings, section headers, cartographic styles etc.”
GridFox – The Grid Layout Firefox Extension
“Grid-based layouts have become really popular among web designers over the last year… However, I ran into a problem when coding grid-based layouts. How can I be sure my grid is maintained from the original mockup to the final coded version? When I coded my first grid-based layout, I found myself regularly taking screenshots of the site and comparing them with my original grid in Photoshop. There had to be an easier way.
Enter GridFox. GridFox is a Firefox extension that overlays a grid on any website. If you can open it in Firefox, you can put a grid on top of it. It’s easy to customize, allowing you to create the exact grid you designed your layout around.”
VizThink Europe ’08: Oct 12-14
“We are so excited to be able to announce our next VizThink Conference! This time we’ll be in Berlin, Germany. Berlin is an exciting, vibrant town with an amazing, growing art community. We’ll have lots of opportunities for hands on experiences, learning from industry gurus, and networking with your visual thinking peers. We’ll be bringing a few of your favorite facilitators from San Francisco with all new content, plus a whole lot of new facilitators from Europe.”
No bullet points
“I’m in the middle of preparing my presentation for Highland Fling and I find myself wondering if there’s a logo somewhere I can use on my first slide to tell the world that my presentation does not contain any bullet points.
I Google it. I find nothing. So I make one.
So I present to you the super-duper official No Bullet Points campaign/logo/badge.”
The Superest: Die Chart
“Creating an action plan to champion the synergies of goal-oriented murdering tactics while front pocketing customer-centric policies to take you offline by EOD.”
Scandic: Better World
One company’s approach to doing business in a healthy and environmentally sound way.
This is How We Do: A documentation of illustrative process of Frank Chimero in 16 easy steps
Update 10 Apr 2008: He pulled it off his site. Sorry!
“I’ve had a lot of questions recently about my process, how I achieve certain “effects” in my illustrations, what my tools are, etc. I’ve made this page very quickly to answer a lot of the questions I’ve been getting repeatedly.
Firstly: my tools are nothing special. A pencil, a fine-tipped Sharpie, copier paper, and Illustrator. That’s it. It’s good to have nice tools, but that’s not to say you can’t be successful without a $40 paint brush.
Before I begin, I feel obliged to say the following:
- ideas are more important than style.
- all the technical tips in the world won’t make a good illustration
- be honest and be yourself. Your work shouldn’t look like mine. We’d all be missing out if it did.”
Stefanie Posavec “On the Map”
“However, the works that caught my eyes was that of Stefanie Posavec. Stefanie’s maps capture something above and beyond that of the others. Rather than mapping physical geography, her maps capture regularities and patterns within a literary space. The pieces featured in On the Map focused on Kerouac’s On the Road. The maps visually represent the rhythm and structure of Kerouac’s literary space, creating works that are not only gorgeous from the point of view of graphic design, but also exhibit scientific rigor and precision in their formulation: meticulous scouring the surface of the text, highlighting and noting sentence length, prosody and themes, Posavec’s approach to the text is not unlike that of a surveyor.” (Thanks kottke.org!)
Navigating Comics
“I’m very happy to announce that I have a new essay online: Navigating Comics: Reading Strategies of Page Layouts. This paper reports the findings of an experiment I conducted looking at how people navigate through comic pages. The big finding: people don’t just mimic text going left-to-right and down.”
Ryan Coleman: Some changes afoot…
“It’s been a bit of an open secret for the past few weeks but as of today the official announcement is out. I’m excited to announce that as of May 1st I’ll be joining VizThink as their Chief Community Evangelist.
As the title suggests my new role will have me focusing on growing and developing the community surrounding VizThink and the ideas of Visual Thinking. One could argue I’ve already been doing this job for almost a year now, back to when I started running the VizThink evenings here in Toronto – it some sense I have, but it’s always been something I’ve done when I could steal a few minutes to think about it/do something.”
