Category: Design

I have been doing HTML pages since 1994 when xMosaic 1.0 hit the FTP servers worldwide. The only really radical changes to webdesign for a very very long time had been a) JavaScript, b) tables and c) frames. I hesitate to include CSS, because it was kind of buggy and browser specific for a long…

Jason Kottke is an invited weblog author at AIGA conference in San Francisco. He wrote some useful commentary and round-ups: Preparation, Lonely in a packed room, 20 courses not taken in design school, Friday round-up.

I am reading John Maeda’s Simplicity-Weblog from time to time – especially because I offered a seminar about this topic a while ago. Most of the posts of John are typical day-in-day out observations of a designer sensible for the details: sometimes I feel he can make an article out of anything (which tends to…

I am busy doing things that I can’t learn anything from right now (which is always kind of hard work!). But I am trying to catch up with what is going on at the NextD initiative (I wrote about that before). NextD is currently a spot where designers are thinking about »design thinking«. An example…

Colleen Taugher is speaking out what many (me too) are propagating for a long time now: It is clear that the most exciting design professionals work in complex, multi-disciplinary, dispersed teams in order to develop innovative solutions to some of modern life’s slipperiest problems. While design students will still need some old-school training in basic…

Technorati is running a new »Blog finder« feature: You can find weblogs that cover a certain topic. I looked for »Design« and I got the usual suspects but also some (to me) unknown gems – like Drawn, a blog about illustrators. This blog doesn’t even list (I guess there is an issue with the tagging…

Andrew Dillon in December 2004 joined the group of thinkers that question simplistic approaches to effiiciency of communication that ask for speed instead of pace: Is there a temporal aspect to interaction that we should acknowledge? Surely there is a pace that leads to the best fit for each of us between tool and task,…

The KDE project has issued a short list of things the’re aiming for in a future release of Linux desktop. Interestingly the first item on their list is »breathtaking beauty«: Breathtaking Beauty putting an emphasis on the form and style of software in addition to the function of it creating visually impactful interfaces that support…

I am glad to see music video creators running formal experiments and pushing styles forward. Here are some: The video of Agenda Suicide by The Faint the former reminds me a lot of the song Remind Me by Röyksopp also a must see is Let Forever Be by Chemical Brother (directed by Michael Gondry) Facing…

There have been three convents of the German Association of Design Theory and Research (DGTF). These are available online now. There are audio recordings of the latest convent available.

I just came across the NextD site – an organisation located in New York – with some interesting interviews – the latest with Richard Saul Wurman. NextDesign Leadership Institute was created as an experiment in innovation acceleration. We wondered if it might be possible for a small team of practicing designers to help speed the…

6th International Conference of the European Academy of Design.

Microsoft has create a special website for recruiting designers for their design department.

Dirk Kneymeyer published an article about the “fruits” of a usability discourse ending up in uninspired designs: The yang to our present yin is a dearth of mainstream creativity, visual differentiation, and sense of active design. For example, the financial services industry spends a tremendous amount of money on Web sites, having moved a large…

The International Institute for Information Design (IIID) has published a very valuable documentation about the expert meeting on knowledge presentation online.

Cinematography nowadays almost is unthinkable without computers. I like this story of Kerry Conran trying to render a complex video composition of the upcoming movie Sky Captain in 1994 on a Apple Mac IIsi. After four years (and some hardware upgrades later) he finished six minutes of his feature film. Today it has become not…

Rosan Chow reflects on work by Alain Findeli. She wants to help characterize design activity by projecting a fringe view on the relation between design activity and knowledge, scientific or non-scientific. To me, the essence of design activity lies in the ontological realm and how it affects the way we are that is different than…

Finally there is some movement on the weblog of the “simplicity” seminar. And some very good items popped up already. For instance some explanatory animations by Nigel Holmes which look pretty much like the things we did in the “density” seminar. And also I learned that John Maeda at MIT started an experimental research project…

Virginia Postrel is the author of The Substance of Style and The Future and Its Enemies. She also writes the “Economic Scene” column for the New York Times and maintains the Dynamist blog. In her presentation at SXSW Interactive, Postrel discussed the importance of aesthetics, how design comes into play, the role of expertise, and…