OpenID42 items tagged “design”
24 ways: Extreme Design. Hannah Donovan on the design process that has evolved from multiple /dev/fort expeditions. 
10th December 2010, 10:08 am
A More Royal Royal Opera House. Beautiful piece of work updating the branding for the Royal Opera House, including a strikingly modern take on the original crest. 
20th August 2010, 12:08 pm
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.” 
17th August 2010, 1:38 pm
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. 
9th June 2010, 11:21 pm
Popular Science+. Matt Webb’s write-up of the Mag+ project, the platform behind the highly praised Popular Science+ iPad application. 
12th April 2010, 1:06 pm
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. 20th March 2010, 2:32 pm
A new global visual language for the BBC’s digital services. Detailed explanation of the BBC’s new “visual language” for their digital properties. 17th February 2010, 12:34 pm
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. 25th January 2010, 1:11 pm
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. 19th January 2010, 2:44 pm
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. 
6th January 2010, 9:04 am
Newzald: From Moleskine to Market. A typeface designer describes the process involved in designing a new font and taking it to market. 31st December 2009, 9:24 am
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. 20th December 2009, 12:55 pm
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. 
8th December 2009, 10:59 pm
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. 
2nd December 2009, 9:34 am
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.” 3rd October 2009, 10:28 pm
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.
— Fake Steve Jobs 28th September 2009, 10:40 pm
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. 3rd September 2009, 6:28 pm
Collection: Search Patterns. Peter Morville’s enormous collection of screenshots of search engine interfaces. 30th July 2009, 12:35 pm
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. 9th July 2009, 4:38 pm
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. 21st February 2009, 11:09 am
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. 9th February 2009, 9:16 pm
24 ways: User Styling. The web geek advent calendar is up and running again this year, with a striking new design. 3rd December 2008, 9:08 am
The new Lawrence.com. The world’s best local entertainment website, relaunched on Django 1.0 with an accompanying substantial redesign. 18th November 2008, 2:25 pm
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.
— John Gruber 4th November 2008, 12:02 am
and now... Opera. Jon Hicks is joining Opera as Senior Designer. I absolutely cannot wait to see what he comes up with there. 9th October 2008, 6:39 pm
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.
— Andy Rutledge 25th June 2008, 7:17 pm
Minimal. James Bennett follows Ryan Tomayko’s example and experiments with the minimalist school of blog design. 15th June 2008, 11:40 am
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. 4th April 2008, 7:42 am
Administrative Debris. Ryan Tomayko explains his exceptionally clean redesign, inspired by Edward Tufte’s critique of the iPhone. 21st March 2008, 3:29 am
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. 8th February 2008, 11:17 am
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. 20th December 2007, 4:53 pm
The Rissington Podcast. Resize the browser window and marvel at the way the various background images seamlessly overlay each other—Nat and I cooed at it for about five minutes. 30th November 2007, 11:11 pm
Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.
— Jeffrey Zeldman 20th November 2007, 11:44 pm
Harry Potter and the Order of Typography. Jon Hicks highlights some of the beautiful typography displayed by the latest Harry Potter film. 18th November 2007, 11:18 am
In rainbows. Dopplr generates a unique colour for each city using an MD5 hash. The colours are then used in subtle but intelligent ways throughout the design—right down to the favicon. 23rd October 2007, 10:39 pm
If It Looks Like a Cow, Swims Like a Dolphin and Quacks Like a Duck, It Must Be Enterprise Software. Interesting discussion about why enterprise software tends to completely suck from an end-user point of view. 22nd October 2007, 1:51 pm
Primary & Secondary Actions in Web Forms. Fascinating results from an eye tracking study on the placement of “Submit” and “Cancel” buttons—one layout was a whole six seconds slower than the others. Luke Wroblewski’s “Web Form Design Best Practices” book looks like it will be excellent. 4th September 2007, 2:52 am
About Mezzoblue. Dave Shea’s blog archive is really classy, in particular the way bundles of posts around a single photo share a colour scheme derived from the image. 16th June 2007, 12:30 am
The logo is still evolving, say designers. The Olympics logo is designed to be “hackable”—which is actually a great idea, but lawyers advised against unveiling that concept at the same time as the abstract shapes. 11th June 2007, 10:22 am
Poll results: 50.4% of respondents maximise windows. Interesting graphs that break down browser window maximisation by operating system. 17th April 2007, 4:22 pm
Designing Google Reader’s trends. “But beyond the visualization, this serves as a good example of collecting and understanding the ambient information that flows through our digital lives.” 15th January 2007, 12:53 am
Apple’s Next-Generation Themes. Cabel’s spotted an Apple patent with screenshots of their in-house tool for creating resolution independent user interface themes. 8th January 2007, 11 pm
