August 2011
22 posts
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Bookbinding
I had some extra time on my hands yesterday afternoon, thanks to Hurricane Irene. A co-worker and I kicked around Colonial Williamsburg, which, while without power, was able to function much the same. We were given a lengthy demonstration in the book bindery. It took me back a few years.
During my senior year in the Graphic Design program at WVU, I took a one-semester course on letterpress and...
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Interaction 11 Photos
It took me long enough to get around to it, but I’ve finally finished going through all of my photos from Interaction 11. I’ve done my post processing and published them to a MobileMe gallery. Enjoy some memories from seven months ago.
I’m taking a business trip this week, so posts may be spotty.
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Amuseing
There was a time that I believed WYSIWYG HTML editors were the future. While in grad school, I created my first website using Adobe Pagemill. Soon, I was using GoLive Cyberstudio, which was then acquired by Adobe and renamed Adobe GoLive. I continued using the product, and I did some decent work with it. Eventually, after Macromedia merged with Adobe, GoLive was discontinued in favor of...
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iResign
In honor of the tremendous impact Steve Jobs has had on the computer, music, movie, animation, television, mobile phone, consumer electronics, and design industries, I devote today’s post to my favorite quotes from one of the most passionate, design-oriented CEOs ever. You may notice some common themes.
“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied...
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Scroll Barred
When Apple designed iOS for the iPhone, they designed it for direct manipulation. They intended for the user to interact with the UI as they would with something tangible. To that end, they did not include scroll bars; at least, not in the traditional sense. Scroll bars don’t make sense when you can push the content itself. But scroll bars have evolved on the desktop to be both an interface for...
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Caffeine for the Soul
Like a can of caffeine and sugar, kicking off a new semester with a fresh group of students has me pumped. I’m once again teaching my Design Issues course, a seminar with a few integrated projects. The semester will be broken into seven two-week units:
Defining Design & Design Leadership
The Design Landscape
Design Methods
Design & Business
Social & Organizational Change
Design...
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Designer’s Toolbelt: Espresso 2
I’ve been using MacRabbit’s Espresso as my primary HTML editor since it’s release, but it’s gotten a bit long in the tooth. It’s lacking support for CSS 3 and HTML 5, and it has never received a lot of the great features they already had implemented in CSSEdit. I was excited to discover recently that they have released their Kaboom version of Espresso 2. In other words, it’s a beta release. I...
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Bass Ackwords
I was taking a lengthy survey this evening, and this was the basic layout of every page:
How many times do you think I pressed the Previous button attempting to go to the next page? Someone needs to read Luke Wroblewski’s article.
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Of Mice and Men
Depending on who you ask, Apple’s reversal of scrolling direction in Lion was either the dumbest decision ever or no big deal. Natural scrolling, as Apple refers to it, works the way it does on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. Move your finger in the direction you want the content to go, as opposed to traditional scrolling, in which the content moves in the opposite direction.
While it is easy...
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Sifteo Cubes
I’ve been interested in the work of the faculty and students of MIT’s Media Lab ever since I started grad school. However, I was often critical of projects, considering them to be technological solutions looking for problems. Not so with David Merrill’s Siftables, debuted during a TED talk in February of 2009. I have to believe they were originally inspired by a project called Triangles that was...
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Core77 Design Awards
Given my vacation at the end of July and other interesting happenings, like the release of Lion, I almost missed the Core77 Design Awards, the winners of which were announced in a series of broadcasts from July 12th through the 22nd. There were fifteen categories, many of which were typical, but there were a few unique ones as well. DIY/Hack/Mod had some intriguing entries, and I love the idea of...
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In the Details: Resize
I forget where I heard someone make the comment that, with Lion, Apple is attempting to remove abstractions from the user interface. I’m not sure that is universally true. Take window resizing, for instance. In the past, Apple always provided a visible handle in the bottom-right corner of a window that was used to resize it. Windows, on the other hand, relied on a cursor change at any edge of the...
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In the Details: Icon Morph
One of the little changes in Lion that I noticed right away is the morphing of a dragged icon between views. Let’s say you have a document sitting on your desktop, and you are moving it into a folder within a column-view window. On the desktop, the document is represented by a large icon with the white label centered below it, wrapping to multiple lines. When it is displayed in column view, the...
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Desktop Underpinnings
Last week, I posted my thoughts on Apple’s new Mission Control feature within Mac OS X Lion. Chris Parker pointed out an inaccuracy, so I’d like to address it. I had complained that Apple removed the ability to pin an application to a particular space (or to all spaces). This is not the case, and I should have realized it, because my applications were actually following my prior settings; I just...
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Mission Control
Spaces was the multi-desktop feature in Mac OS X Leopard that has now been rolled into Lion’s Mission Control, which also incorporates Dashboard and Expose. I have heard that Spaces wasn’t used by a lot of people. I used it extensively and loved the flexibility of it. I had Spaces set up as a grid of six: three on top and three on bottom. I had certain applications pinned to specific spaces. For...
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Designer’s Toolbelt: CardRaider
I took over 200 photos during my vacation last week, and last night, when I imported them into iPhoto, I discovered that the card was corrupt and that about half of them couldn’t be read. That scared me. But then I figured that surely someone is making money off of this problem, so I did some Googling. I found a few photo recovery tools and decided to give CardRaider a go, because it’s available...
