64 items tagged “design”
2010
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.
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.
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.
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.
Harry Potter and the Order of Typography. Jon Hicks highlights some of the beautiful typography displayed by the latest Harry Potter film.
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.
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.
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.
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.