Category: Design
September 21, 2006
House Thought
A few weeks ago I picked up House Thinking: A Room-by-Room Look at How We Live, knowing that with the move to Iowa we were planning to buy our first house. In it Winifred Gallagher pulls together thought and writings from a variety of disciplines (including several authors familiar to readers of this blog, such as Jane Jacobs, Don Norman,… 
June 9, 2006
Load up yer iPods, it’ a Conference Conference
I’ve gathered links to podcasts of a bunch of the stuff I’ve attended, or been listening to over the past few months. Beyond Search: Social and Personal Ways of Finding Information [mp3] from BayCHI. Neil Hunt, Netflix; David Porter, Live365; Tom Conrad, Pandora; Kevin Rose, Digg; Joshua Schachter, del.icio.us; Rashmi Sinha, Moderator Radio Times’ Marty Moss-Coane talks with the venerable…
March 2, 2006
Camouflage: Art, Science, and Popular Culture
I’ve been meaning to share a link to what looks to be an interesting conference on camouflage. The conference organizer, Roy Behrens, was one of my professors at the University of Northern Iowa. He lectured for several class sessions during a History of Design course on his research into the history of camouflage. To me, the most interesting part concerned…
February 14, 2006
Yahoo! Makes User Interface Pattern Libraries Public
Yahoo! is making portions of their Design Pattern Library and user interface code available to the public under an open-source license (via O’Reilly Radar). They’ve also launched a User Interface Blog related to this project. This is an excellent resource not only for useful patterns and code, but also as insight into the reasoning behind user interface choices and a…
January 18, 2006
Thin Slicing Meets Web Design: Judging the Visual Appeal of Sites
Nature has a summary of a paper asserting that “visual appeal can be assessed within 50 ms, suggesting that web designers have about 50 ms to make a good first impression.” “In the crowded and competitive world of the web, companies hoping to make millions from e-commerce should take notice, the researchers say. ‘Unless the first impression is favourable, visitors…
September 30, 2005
Edward Tufte in Philly
Edward Tufte gave a short presentation last week, which was sponsored by the Philadelphia AIGA and University of the Arts. I just wanted to give a quick rundown of my notes: Six principles of analytical design: Compared to what? Point of reference Show causality Show multi-variate information Integrate word, number, and image Document (cite) everything and tell people about it…
April 20, 2005
Prescription Bottle Redesign
(No clever titles here folks.) New York Magazine has a story on Deborah Adler a School of Visual Arts MFA student whose thesis project is a brilliant and much-needed redesigned prescription bottle and label. Its one of those things like the Twist & Pour paint bucket from a couple of years ago that make you wonder why we had to…
March 17, 2005
Folksonomy Visualization
MIT Media Lab’s John Maeda calls Flickr’s visualization of popular tags “the greatest diagram of 2004.” There are many things to admire about this format. Since it is about words, it uses some dimensions implicitly. For instance, it is alphabetized. The order makes complete sense. It is size-based and thus the dominant tags stand out clearly. It is read like…
February 11, 2005
On PowerPoint
Okay, I’ll sneeze — I’ve been reading a bunch at Beyond Bullets, Clif Atkinson’s blog/site for his upcoming book Beyond Bullet Points. There’s a comprehensive list of his articles on his consulting website. What’s interesting is the contrast between his philosophy and Edward Tufte’s essay The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (ironically summarized here in PowerPoint-style by Aaron Swartz). There seems…
August 13, 2004
2004 Olympics TV Schedule
After struggling with NBC’s official Olympic site (NBCOlympics.com where displaying a “complete listing” gives you a table with the next three hours of programming) I finally found a half-way useful 2004 Olympic television broadcast schedule on MSNBC.com (even more useful if you click through to the printer-friendly version to get rid of all the extraneous junk. It still leaves a…