From the category archives:

Design

Drop the Lorem Ipsum – Have fun with Placeholder Text

December 2, 2008

“Lorem ipsum dolor…”
If you’re a design, build wireframes or prototypes, odds are good that you are all too familiar with the de facto standard for placeholder text. It works, especially if you want to ensure that people don’t focus their attention on the text itself. But it quickly gets old.
Sometimes you just need to [...]

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This Ain’t Right: Fight the Orphan Works Act

July 23, 2008

Jeffrey Zeldman pointed out the dangerous Orphan Works Acts making their way through Congress. This act has far-reaching implications for everyone, but the impact is even larger for those who work or publish on the ‘Net. Ultimately Congress is attempting to reduce your rights as a creator (whether you write, draw, design Web sites or [...]

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Non-linear Scheduling

April 30, 2008

Photo from the Muji Web site
LifeHacker points to the yet-to-be-released Muji Chronotebook Non-linear Day Planner, which provides an interesting way to plan your day. Gone are the normal grids and standard sequence of hours and dates. They have been replaced by pages that display “time on an axis, like an analog clock.” One page is [...]

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Spec Work, Pixish, Design Contests and Unicorns

February 12, 2008

Adam Howell sums up my thoughts on Pixish quite succinctly. Sure, the concept sounds great at first, as noted on the Pixish site, the community is set up as “a way to engage creative people online to submit, judge, and source amazing images.” Nice until you dig into it, just a little bit, and realize [...]

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Slanty Design in the Real World and on the Web

January 30, 2008

Architectures of Control, which provides some very interesting analysis of products that are “designed with features that intentionally restrict the way the user can behave” in order to encourage the user to follow certain practices and behaviors, has posted Slanty design, which is a great introduction to the concept and bridges design in the physical [...]

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How it Works

November 29, 2007

People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
Steve Jobs in The Guts of a New Machine

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The Urban Cup Holder

September 7, 2007

The Urban Cup Holder by Up to You is an amazing idea that transforms your environment on the go. In a large metropolis, it could shift the usual travel patterns, hopefully slowing life down by encouraging people to use the space around them and communicate. Or, as one commenter noted, it could be a nice [...]

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Design

September 5, 2007

You tell him I said to take a long unstructured walk around his city. Talk to strangers. Take pictures. Visit at least one museum. Pretend like he’s from somewhere else for an hour. Stop in a park to read Raymond Carver’s “What we talk about when we talk about love.” outloud would be rad, but [...]

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John Wayne, Fish Scales and Type

August 30, 2007

I recently discovered a great link in my design feeds, pointing me to the site I Love Typography, which is well on its way to becoming a great resource for designers and all those with an interest in type The most recent post, Who Shot the Serif?, is a tremendous introduction to the terminology used [...]

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Kuler Dashboard Widget

April 4, 2007

Adobe has released a Dashboard widget for Kuler, it’s beautiful, and very useful Web-based color picking app. The widget consumes RSS feeds from the site to display the most downloaded, highest rated and newest color schemes. In addition to the abiliy to search the tags that are used to organize the color palettes, each scheme [...]

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