80 posts tagged “design”
2010
Human pylons carry electricity across Iceland. An entry in the “Icelandic High-Voltage Electrical Pylon International Design Competition” proposes giant human-shaped electricity pylons. “The figures can be placed into different poses, with the suggestion that the landscapes could inform the position that the sculpture is placed into. For example, as a power line ascends a hill, the pylons could look as if they’re climbing. The figures could also stretch up to gain increased height over longer spans.”
Today’s Guardian, by Phil Gyford. An alternative interface for reading today’s Guardian, built using the new Open Platform Content API and with extensive design notes from creator Phil Gyford.
Popular Science+. Matt Webb’s write-up of the Mag+ project, the platform behind the highly praised Popular Science+ iPad application.
Placehold.it. Useful dynamic image generator for layout mockups—just drop an image in to a page pointing at http://placehold.it/300x200. Takes optional arguments for text, colour and format as well.
A new global visual language for the BBC’s digital services. Detailed explanation of the BBC’s new “visual language” for their digital properties.
The making of the NYT’s Netflix graphic. A database dump from Netflix, some clever hackery in ArcView GIS, hpricot to scrape Metacritic and a lot of careful thought about the UI for navigating the data.
Crayola Crayon Colors Multiply Like Rabits. “In 1903, Crayola had eight colors in its standard package. Today, there are 120”—and here’s a brilliantly designed infographic showing how it happened.
Vintage Ad Browser. Fantastic. 100,000+ vintage advertisements scanned and organised by date and topic, going all the way back to the 1840s and covering every decade in between. An absolute gold mine.
2009
Newzald: From Moleskine to Market. A typeface designer describes the process involved in designing a new font and taking it to market.
Notes on designing the Guardian iPhone app. By John-Henry Barac, the principal designer of he iPhone application who also previously worked on the Guardian’s print transition to the Berliner format.
Panic’s lost 1982 artwork. Found. Jaw-droppingly beautiful re-imagination of Panic’s software line-up as Atari console products, complete with box art and 80’s watercolour illustrated posters.
Mark Coleran’s screen design portfolio. Mark Coleran designs computer interfaces for films—Movie OS. His portfolio includes The Bourne Identity, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Mission Impossible 3 and many more.
Logos in Lego Town. “Unlike the railways, there have been a multitude of different airline logos in Lego land – indicating a de-regulated market and open competition.”
Look at Sony, or Microsoft, or Google, or anyone. They still don't get it. They're still out there talking about chips, or features, or whatever. Or now they're all hot for design. But they think design means making pretty objects. It doesn't. It means making a system of pieces that all work together seamlessly. It's not about calling attention to the technology. It's about making the technology invisible.
Chris Heathcote: loca london. Chris’s new guide to exhibitions in London is presented as an enormous (5100px wide) page with horizontal and vertical scrollbars—as Chris points out, this interface may be a bit clumsy with a mouse but it works wonderfully well on touchpads and touchscreens.
Collection: Search Patterns. Peter Morville’s enormous collection of screenshots of search engine interfaces.
Social Media Icons. Paul Robert Lloyd: “ In the past I’ve used site favicons, but these can often be visually inconsistent”—so he’s put together a tasty set of icons for different social websites with a consistent visual feel, available in four different sizes.
Mapping with Isotype (via) I hadn’t heard of Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education), a beautiful pictographic language created in the 1930s. This Isotype-inspired atlas is pretty spectacular.
Facing up to Fonts. Slides and notes from Richard Rutter’s excellent typography presentation at a recent SkillSwap Brighton. Includes some new thinking about the font stack (comma separated list of fonts provided to the font-family property) you should use to get the best possible implementation of a given font on various different platforms.
2008
24 ways: User Styling. The web geek advent calendar is up and running again this year, with a striking new design.
The new Lawrence.com. The world’s best local entertainment website, relaunched on Django 1.0 with an accompanying substantial redesign.
I'll put forth one central, overriding guideline for iPhone UI design: Figure out the absolute least you need to do to implement the idea, do just that, and then polish the hell out of the experience.
and now... Opera. Jon Hicks is joining Opera as Senior Designer. I absolutely cannot wait to see what he comes up with there.
You may find that there are plenty of job listings where the job requirements are described as, “must be expert with Photoshop and Illustrator…” or something long those lines. Ignore those job listings; they’re placed by inept and sick companies looking for decorators, not designers.
Minimal. James Bennett follows Ryan Tomayko’s example and experiments with the minimalist school of blog design.
The Royal Mint: The New Designs Revealed. Matthew Dent’s design for the new UK coinage is inspired—absolutely beautiful. Can’t wait to get my hands on some of these.
Administrative Debris. Ryan Tomayko explains his exceptionally clean redesign, inspired by Edward Tufte’s critique of the iPhone.
LJWorld.com: Kansas Democratic Presidential Caucuses (via) The most beautiful election results page I’ve ever seen. Love the typography and the Google Charts integration.
8 More Design Mistakes with Account Sign-in (via) Second of a two part series by Jared Spool. I agree with all of them with the possible exception of #15 which advocates providing a non-email password recovery solution. Security “questions” are usually dreadfully insecure, and introduce the need to lock users out of their accounts after just a few tries.
2007
Design. A very fancy suite of design tools wrapped up in a bookmarklet (that loads an external script). Includes grids, rulers, measurements and a crosshair.