XPLANE is happy to present Did You Know 4.0 — another official update to the original “Shift Happens” video. This completely new Fall 2009 version includes facts and stats focusing on the changing media landscape, including convergence and technology, and was developed in partnership with The Economist.
As Garr Reynolds mentions over at Presentation Zen this morning, yes, this project was created with “off-the-shelf slideware” (Keynote and GarageBand, actually, along with Photoshop and Illustrator). Content by XPLANE, The Economist, Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod and Laura Bestler. Design and development by XPLANE.
ou present the work with the too-small logo, and the client explains that its size must be increased. Don’t argue. Instead, listen very carefully, nodding, drawing out detail and nuance. Make it clear that this is a matter of importance and complexity, and the client is right to focus on it. Finally, announce, as if it’s just then occurring to you, that there is only one way to get this exactly right, to make sure that the client is absolutely pleased. You will prepare not one, but five options, changing the size of the logo on each one just ever so slightly….
Works of art in and of themselves, these ancient maps reveal a great deal more than the geographical knowledge of our ancestors. They tell stories of war and triumph, reveal myths and biases, and document modes of thought that have long been obsolete.
» Posted September 1, 2009 @ 8am PDT
» Archived in History, Mapping » Comments: (2)
“The significance of trade-marks in the textile industry is, perhaps, greater than in any other industry of equal magnitude,” wrote V. Alexander Scher (no relation to Paula or Jeff) of Richards & Geier, patent and trademark attorneys, New York City. He was writing in a now forgotten book titled Textile Brand Names Dictionary, which was published in 1947, designed “to be of daily service in identifying the names already in use, thereby facilitating the choice and registering of new names and marks,” asserted the editor at the Textile Book Publishers Inc. Included were more than 4,000 names of fibers, yarns, fabrics, and garments registered with the United States Patent Office between 1934 and 1947. 4,000!!! That’s a lot of 7th Avenue brainstorming to devise names like Devogue, Denicron, Glritone, Glossitwist, Ma-Tex, Perma-Fluff, Permacrisp, Perma glaze, Permaglo, Perma-Seal, Permaset, Perma-Shade and Permoflex, to name a few (today they could double as rock band or design firm names).
When I first started to design Baseline, I wanted to base the grid on the work of Josef Müller-Brockmann, unfortunately some missing CSS attribute — like type leading — kept me from implementing a true grid based approach. I then decided to look back at the basic grid that is used in print: the baseline grid.
» Posted August 20, 2009 @ 10am PDT
» Archived in CSS, Typography, Web design » Comments: Comments Off
Whether you are designing for print or for the web, making the leap from what you see on your computer screen to the outside world can be a tricky process, fraught with unpredictable changes and unexpected results. The web is full of information regarding color management and sifting through it can be very overwhelming. Contradictory opinions abound and it can be difficult to find reliable sources of information.
Over the last few months, Scott and I have been researching this topic extensively [and] we have implemented a color management system that works for us. Below we have tried to aggregate this knowledge into a simple and useful guide, designed to help you ensure your studio is set up correctly. It is not intended to be the end-all article on color management by any means — but it’s a good place to start if color management isn’t something you have previously implemented or considered.
Personas is pretty fun to watch. Wish you could do something with it, like click through to the sources.
Personas is an art installation by Aaron Zinman that is a component of Metropath(ologies), an interactive exhibit by the Sociable Media Group, MIT Media Lab… It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you. Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person — to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.
We always found that there’s info lurking behind everything in the world,” says Morgan Clendaniel, deputy editor at GOOD Magazine. “You’ll read an article, but you won’t see the data behind it — nor would you want to. Nobody wants to read an Excel file.”
Clendaniel and I are discussing GOOD’s Transparency section — a regular print and online feature of standalone infographics. The general interest magazine best known for its social consciousness has published infographics on a number of topics, some serious (fuel efficiency between modes of transportation, a map of international legislation on death penalty), others more playful (relative trophy sizes, museum ticket prices).
“The goal is to illustrate these issues in a way that is entertaining, accessible, but also informative,” Clendaniel says.
Discover when the Golden Hour is at your current location, explore visually how the golden hour changes with the seasons and where you are in the world…
The Golden Hour (sometimes referred to as the Magic Hour) is often defined as the first and last hour of sunlight in the day when the special quality of light yields particularly beautiful photographs.
For this Golden Hour calculator website, I have used a more precise definition of the Golden Hour. I have chosen to define the Golden Hour as that period when the sun lies between 6 degrees below the horizon and 6 degrees above. This definition of the Golden Hour more accurately accounts for the speed of the transition from day to night around the world at different times of year.
» Posted August 5, 2009 @ 9am PDT
» Archived in Photography, Travel » Comments: Comments Off
Interesting. For me, sometimes a familiar place is conducive to creativity (my office, library, favorite coffee shop or wine bar) — but I also like to go to unfamiliar, unrelated places to think on creative problems.
Creativity is commonly thought of as a personality trait that resides within the individual. We count on creative people to produce the songs, movies, and books we love; to invent the new gadgets that can change our lives; and to discover the new scientific theories and philosophies that can change the way we view the world. Over the past several years, however, social psychologists have discovered that creativity is not only a characteristic of the individual, but may also change depending on the situation and context. The question, of course, is what those situations are: what makes us more creative at times and less creative at others?
» Posted July 30, 2009 @ 9am PDT
» Archived in Creativity » Comments: Comments Off
The Designer’s Desk By Drew Crowley, XPLANE designer
This is the first in a series of tips, tricks and recipes for designers, artists and other visual thinkers working in meetings and other sessions where large amounts of complex information need to be collected and visualized. It’s a peek into how XPLANE approaches discovery and uses visual thinking to communicate key ideas.
Why we do it:
Live sketching gets people engaged in the discovery process and leads to ideas that may not have presented themselves via normal note-taking. The response to visuals being created before a clients’ or colleagues’ eyes is energetic, and that leads to a natural desire to fill in the picture, completely. The result: Understanding and alignment, quickly.
Materials you’ll need:
Whiteboard or giant stickies
Variety of small, colorful stickies
Markers
Digital camera
How to do it:
GET STARTED | Start drawing as soon as you can. The earlier you start drawing in a session the better. It will get the momentum going in the room, the energy level will jump and you’ll start getting real content.
VISUAL NOTES | The key to live sketching is understanding that it isn’t “drawing” in the traditional sense. It’s visual note-taking. Instead of writing “there was a room with a couch and a lamp,” you draw a couch and a lamp and label it with the word “room.” This simple distinction between drawing and note-taking helps alleviate the fear of drawing in front of people.
MESSY IS OK | Yes, sloppy is good. The sketches don’t have to be pristine. The sketchier they are the better. By keeping things fast and loose you’re subconsciously telling the audience that these are just notes and not final images. What’s drawn in session isn’t necessarily going to show up in a final XPLANATiON or another visual communication piece. Keeping things sketchy will help drive that point home, and allow everyone to feel like they can add to the pictures themselves.
ASK | Don’t be afraid to ask for clarification or detail. If things are moving too fast, and you aren’t catching everything, let your partner — or the group — know. If the description doesn’t make sense, ask more questions. If you’re not sure whether you’ve captured something correctly, ask your client or colleague. It’s better to ask and be sure, than to assume you’ve got it and have to fix things later.
LABEL | Remember that you’re the one that will have to make sense of these notes after the fact, so annotate/sketch/label in a way that makes sense to you. Label people, label scenes, label arrows, label labels! Live sketching can be fast and sloppy, as mentioned above, and the squiggle you draw in a session might make complete sense to you at the time — but two days later it will just be a squiggle. Labels make the difference between a “centralized supply chain database that everyone has access to” and a bunch of mysterious boxes, lines and stick figures.
When you’re done, document everything with a digital camera being careful to avoid window and flash glare on the whiteboards. It’s a good idea to organize and annotate all of the relevant captured info soon after the session.
Live sketching can be done remotely too, using software like Webex or Adobe Acrobat Connect — but that’s a whole other article.
PICOL stands for PIctorial COmmunication Language and is a project to find a standard and reduced sign system for electronic communication. PICOL is free to use and open to alter.
XPLANE, in collaboration with Nitin Nohria, Richard P. Chapman Professor of Business Administration, and Co-Chair of the Leadership Initiative at Harvard Business School, has created “Imagine Leadership,” an inspiring and thought-provoking video on the theme of global leadership. Nohria, working with Amanda Pepper, also a member of the Leadership Initiative, sought the support of XPLANE to create a visually appealing, provocative piece that would inspire viewers to take action, get involved and be motivated to lead.
» Posted June 30, 2009 @ 4pm PDT
» Archived in XPLANE » Comments: (1)
CMSs are beautiful things. Just as CSS allows us to abstract the design away from the markup, a CMS allows us to use a database to abstract the content away from the markup. There are a zillion of them, each with different backend UI’s and different ways to doing things.
But CMSs are for web people. Even my beloved WordPress can be challenging to train/explain to someone who has no experience working with websites. Perhaps this is the motivation toward a new trend in CMSs I’m calling “light” CMSs. Each of them attempt to make the task of updating content on a website easier and more intuitive. This is largely at the cost of features. These are for simple, otherwise static websites where updating content is the name of the game.
A love of baseball plus a love of infographics equals Flip Flop Fly Ball.
Essentially, this site is what I’d have been doing when I was 12 years old had the Internet and Photoshop been available to me in the eighties. As well as the infographics there are a few other bits and bobs; like small pixiliated portraits of some baseball players. They are filleted from a bigger collection of Minipops (that’s what I call them) which is one of the biggest parts of my main web site, Flip Flop Flyin’ (thus the name of this site). There’s also some photos from some of the stadiums I’ve visited, and a few drawings.
» Posted June 30, 2009 @ 9am PDT
» Archived in Information graphics » Comments: Comments Off
How to do it: