November 26 08
“Although there are several good design websites that occasionally have book reviews, there didn’t seem to be a single place online where you could get constant updates and reviews of new (and sometimes old) design books.
Design books are often expensive and contrary – sometimes the book is worth having for the physical production values alone, sometimes for the images, sometimes for the words and, occasionally, for all three. We wanted to cover those elements in our reviews so that you know whether it’s worth owning.”
November 26 08
“The recently released book ‘Data Flow: Visualising Information in Graphic Design’ available at Amazon.com and Gestalten.de seems to be an ideal Christmas gift. The book introduces an expansive scope of innovatively designed diagrams, and presents an abundant range of possibilities in visualizing data and information. These range from chart-like diagrams such as bar, plot, line diagrams and spider charts, graph-based diagrams including line, matrix, process flow, and molecular diagrams to extremely complex three-dimensional diagrams.”
November 24 08
“There is a commonly held belief that Helvetica is the signage typeface of the New York City subway system, a belief reinforced by Helvetica, Gary Hustwit’s popular 2007 documentary about the typeface. But it is not true—or rather, it is only somewhat true. Helvetica is the official typeface of the MTA today, but it was not the typeface specified by Unimark International when it created a new signage system at the end of the 1960s.”
November 24 08
Uses Mechanical Turk: “Simple, cheap usability testing for your website. Start a usability test for your web project in two minutes. Submit questions about your site and receive up to ten responses from our reviewers. The cost is $7.” (Thanks Waxy!)
November 12 08
“Toshiba’s new ‘timesculpture’ advert takes The Matrix’s Bullet Time film technique one bizarrely cool step forward by animating within the freeze-frame. It was filmed with 200 Gigashot camcorders arranged on a special rig, recording a mahoosive 20 terabytes of data from which the ad was composed. Check it out—it’s like a weird moving Bullet-Time ballet, and then check out the making of clip to learn how it was made.”
November 12 08
“Design State is a weblog about government web design and its attendant subtopics: accessibility, usability, and web standards. In addition to these nuts and bolts, Design State will also focus on higher level issues and project challenges that affect government and public-sector web design.”
November 10 08
“These are early storyboards from Star Wars, from before the Falcon was changed to its current design. I took them from Hyperspace’s Insider supplement, which means there’s more to be had in Insider. I’ll try and pick them up and see what this is about… To my knowledge, the majority of these storyboards were done by Joe Johnston.”
November 10 08
“Paul Boag’s presentation on how to Educate Clients to say Yes was fantastic and my personal highlight of today’s conference. Paul had a superbe stage presence, engaging slides, and most of all, his message was clear and valuable.
So, how do we get clients to say yes? It’s all in our way how we connect and interact. Paul kept stressing that the designer’s relationship with clients is fundamentally flawed. We have to face it that a big part of our job is to work,”
November 10 08
“The International System Of TYpographic Picture Education was developed by the Viennese social scientist and philosopher Otto Neurath (1882-1945) as a method for visual statistics. Gerd Arntz was the designer tasked with making Isotype’s pictograms and visual signs. Eventually, Arntz designed around 4000 such signs, which symbolized keydata from industry, demographics, politics and economy.”
November 10 08
“It’s been a good while since I announced we’re working on the redesign of Drupal.org. Two months, a couple of presentations, and seven iterations of the prototype later, a glimmer is at the end of the tunnel.
On thing is for sure, in this instance, Design by Community works.
I said, when we embarked on the process of designing this site, that Design by Community is the only way we could approach it. Since those initial thoughts, Leisa and I have continued to push a process that many thought would fall flat on its face. I’m not sure if this would be specific to the Drupal community, but they couldn’t have been more wrong. This process is working, and really well.”