50 (UK-centric) celebs share their top food experiences. (via rw)
50 (UK-centric) celebs share their top food experiences. (via rw)
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kottke.org posts about lists
100 notable books of 2005 from the NY Times Book Review.
100 notable books of 2005 from the NY Times Book Review.
A list of the best and worst
A list of the best and worst cookbooks to give people for Xmas (or Kwanzaa or Hanukkah or Festivus).
Fun compilation of the 100 greatest internet moments. (
Fun compilation of the 100 greatest internet moments. (via waxy!, i think)
David Pogue on 10 ways that companies can
David Pogue on 10 ways that companies can stop being stupid and help their customers. “Thou shalt not hide from thy customers.” (via df)
This list of famous people who are
This list of famous people who are also secondarily well known says that allegedly (or should that be allegendly?) Charlemagne invented white wine.
The readers of DJ Magazine picks the
The readers of DJ Magazine picks the top 100 DJs for 2005. Top honors go to Paul van Dyk.
US News & World Report has a
US News & World Report has a list of 25 of America’s best leaders. Condoleezza Rice, Steve Jobs, Meg Whitman, Bill & Melinda Gates, etc.
Speak Up critiques the covers on the
Speak Up critiques the covers on the recently released list of the 40 best magazine covers of the last 40 years. Chock full of snarky designy goodness. (thx armin)
Select one-star reviews from Amazon of books
Select one-star reviews from Amazon of books on Time magazine’s list of the 100 best English language novels since 1923 (discussion).
Jakob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox is about weblog
Jakob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox is about weblog usability. I actually think most of these are pretty good, but as with all such guidelines, they are made to be broken.
Time magazine has a list of the “100
Time magazine has a list of the “100 best English language novels from 1923 to the present”. I’m not much for novels, but I’ve read 11 of the works on the list.
As I was poking around 0sil8 this
As I was poking around 0sil8 this morning, I ran across this list from 1998 of movies due to be released in 1999/2000. Some were released on time, some were never released, and others were released years later. My favorite is the Charlie’s Angels speculation…with Jenny McCarthy, Jada Pinkett & Michelle Yeoh as the Angels.
Best burgers in NYC
A list of excellent hamburgers to be found in NYC. For more on NYC burgers, check out A Hamburger Today. I still maintain that NYC isn’t a burger town, although with all the recent activity, it may be one soon.
Esquire jumps the gun on the whole
Esquire jumps the gun on the whole end of the year best-of lists thing and names their favorite new restaurants of 2005, with Danny Meyer’s The Modern taking the top spot. Worth reading if only for the sidebar item on “wired and tired” dining trends.
Forbes has a list of 10 chef “tastemakers”,
Forbes has a list of 10 chef “tastemakers”, including Thomas Keller, Alain Ducasse, and Grant Achatz.
7 Habits of Highly Successful People. I think
7 Habits of Highly Successful People. I think this may be one of my favorite McSweeney’s lists ever. (Crap, the McSweeney’s RSS feed doesn’t seem to be working properly…gotta check into that later.)
Epicurious lists ten hated restaurant trends. “To
Epicurious lists ten hated restaurant trends. “To enjoy the brioche bread pudding, it’s really not necessary to know the name of the farm that supplied the eggs.” (via tmn)
The list of the 100 greatest theorems in
The list of the 100 greatest theorems in mathematics is topped by The Irrationality of the Square Root of 2 from that nutball Pythagoras. Jesus, who does Godel have to sleep with to get higher on this list…I mean, all the man did was destroy math! (I know, I know, oversimplification, please don’t send me any email….) (via cyn-c)
Stefan Sagmeister
I quite enjoyed Sagmeister’s presentation on happiness…where else but a design conference would you find a talk on that topic?[1] Early in, he suggested that visualizing happiness with design is easy (photos of someone laughing or a smiley face will do it) but that creating design that provokes happiness in the viewer is something else entirely. He then shared three designs that have made him happy recently:
- Emma Gasson made a day-planner with room for 82 years, the current life expectancy of a British citizen. It looked to be about a foot thick.
- Omnivisu. Richard The and Willy Sengewald constructed a kiosk in Berlin with video cameras inside. When you look into the kiosk through the viewfinder (very much like peering into a pair of binoculars), the cameras record your eyes and beam the video to a nearby location where the images are projected onto a building which rather looks like it’s got a head. When you blink into the kiosk, the building’s head blinks also.
- Ji Lee pastes empty speech bubbles over advertisements on the streets of Manhattan, people often fill them in, and Lee returns to photograph the results.
Sagmeister wrapped up his talk with a list of things he has learned and how he’s used that list in a recent series of projects:
- “everything i do always comes back to me”
- “trying to look good limits my life”
- “everybody thinks they are right”
- “money does not make me happy”
- “thinking life will be better in the future is stupid. i have to live now”
- “complaining is silly. act or forget.”
- “having guts always works out for me”
“Complaining is silly…” is my favorite, both as advice and his implementation of the design. A few of these are in this video shot by Hillman Curtis.
[1] Ok, maybe at a clown conference, but still.
20 courses I didn’t take in design school
As part of the conference within a conference for students, Michael Bierut listed 20 courses he did not take in design school (I think I got all of them):
Semiotics
Contemporary Performance Art
Traffic Engineering
The Changing Global Financial Marketplace
Urban planning
Sex Education
Early Childhood Development
Economics of Commerical Aviation
Biography as History
Introduction to Horticulture
Sports Marketing in Modern Media
Modern Architecture
The 1960s: Culture and Conflict
20th Century American Theater
Philanthropy and Social Progress
Fashion Merchandising
Studies in Popular Culture
Building Systems Engineering
Geopolitics, Military Conflict, and the Cultural Divide
Political Science: Electoral Politics and the Crisis of Democracy
His point was that design is just one part of the job. In order to do great work, you need to know what your client does. How do you design for new moms if you don’t know anything about raising children? Not very well, that’s how. When I was a designer, my approach was to treat the client’s knowledge of their business as my biggest asset…the more I could get them to tell me about what their product or service did and the people it served (and then talk to those people, etc.), the better it was for the finished product. Clients who didn’t have time to talk, weren’t genuinely engaged in their company’s business, or who I couldn’t get to open up usually didn’t get my best work.
Bierut’s other main point is, wow, look at all this cool stuff you get to learn about as a designer. If you’re a curious person, you could do worse than to choose design as a profession.
A list of twenty-eight design aphorisms to
A list of twenty-eight design aphorisms to consider before attending the AIGA conference.
Five things I’d ask every Supreme Court
Five things I’d ask every Supreme Court nominee if I sat on the Senate Judiciary Committee: “If you knew to an absolute moral certainty that you could capture and consume a live infant without being caught, how many do you suppose you could eat in a weekend?”
You’ve got to love an article called
You’ve got to love an article called The Ten Stupidest Utopias. In regard to the Internet, he says “utopia is never more than what we are; the people in them will always be just like us”.
Top 10 cheap marketing ploys to increase sales
Top 10 cheap marketing ploys to increase sales of comic books, but as noted in the comments, a sufficiently generalized version of this list would work in many instances.
A list of cliches in advertising, including “
A list of cliches in advertising, including “tortilla chips are the most exciting experience any group of young people can experience”. The list is UK-centric, but still pretty good.
10 good reasons to eat local food. Having
10 good reasons to eat local food. Having eaten local food for the better part of the last week, I can personally attest to some of these benefits. (via afb)
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