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Results from the Digital Information Design Camp run by MIT Media Lab and the AIGA. They should have worked on their interface/information design a little more…you wouldn’t know that there’s a ton of student work to view by looking at the front page.
Using information from the USPTO to track how logo design in the US has changed over time. “Using this database, innovations and trends in the design of trademarks can be tracked and dissected. For example, the rise of the swoosh element, concentrated among internet and telecommunications firms in particular, can be seen developing in the mid-1990s.”
Design critique of the alphabet. “Puhleez! The capital I without the crossbars top and bottom is either the laziest piece of design in history, or an elegant stroke of modernism. With the crossbars it’s just clunky, boring and awkward. The lowercase i is kind of cute with that little dot, I suppose, but I’m not really buying it. This one should have never made it out of the comp stage.”
Gallery of newspaper front pages from Lance Armstong’s 7th tour victory.
The evolution of book cover design. Using Robert W Chambers’ The King in Yellow as an example.
As a designer, who owns your portfolio?. I’ve never had any problems with this, but I’ve heard some pretty bad stories about other people’s troubles.
The Semi-Permanent design conference takes place in NYC 9/9-9/10.
Huge collection of logos of metros/subways from around the world.
Jeff Veen’s The Art and Science of Web Design is 5 years old. To celebrate, he’s made a proof of the entire book available for download.
“Does anyone devote as much energy to avoiding simple, sensible solutions as the modern graphic designer?”. Novelty is necessary to foster innovation, but is missing the mark so frequently worth the effort?
Zeldman’s observations about judging the May 1st Reboot. Most of the entries lacked originality, had little content, and even less focus on the user. Sounds like many of the winners of interactive design annuals as well.
My recent design refresh is already bearing fruit around these parts. Behold the new photo album template, which you can see in the Ireland photos, some recent Paris photos, photos from the High Line, etc. The album pages are the first non-white background pages to make it onto kottke.org in quite awhile, which was part of the reason for the design refresh. I tried the photos on white, but I felt they looked better on a darker background, so I went with that. The photos are also larger than they previously were, up from 600 pixels wide to 720 pixels. The file sizes are also quite large (sorry!)…BetterHTMLExport doesn’t do the best job in compressing jpgs while preserving image quality. Photoshop’s “Save for Web” does a much better job, but that would be a lot more time consuming for me. The search for the perfect solution goes on…
But my favorite part of the albums are the navigation. If you mouseover the right half of the photo, you get an arrow overlaid on the photo that suggests that you can click to move to the next photo (which, of course, you can). Then you can click on the left side of the photo to go back. If you’re using Safari or Firefox or anything but IE really, the arrow images are tranparent png files that blend in with the photo in the background. Fun!
Up next: the photo page needs some help.
The Morning News redesigns a bit. It looks a bit fresher, contemporary, and more like what it should look like (if that makes any sense at all).
Collection of Chip Kidd’s book cover design work due out in October.
An interview with Rob Walker, who writes about design and consumer behavior for the NY Times Magazine. “The consumer is making a decision as to whether the product succeeds or fails, and what I do is to come in afterwards and try to articulate what the consumer saw or didn’t see that makes something succeed or fail.”
Soviet-style “Watch, Ride, and Report” poster spied on DC-area commuter train. Report any unusual activities directly to the Ministry of Love.
Early aircraft designs from US Patent applications.
Long interview with Edward Tufte from Technical Communication Quarterly.
Design and the art of bullshitting. In my experience, a designer’s job entails coming up with a solution that works (which takes 20% of the time and energy) and then selling it to the client (which takes the remaining 80% of the time/energy, sometimes more).
“A campaign for the Portuguese political magazine Grande Reportagem … turns flags of various countries into infographics by adding a legend”. For the US flag: “Red: In favor of the war in Iraq, White: Against the war in Iraq, Blue: Don’t know where Iraq is.”
Processing, a programming environment for designers and artists, is in beta. It’s the first public release.
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