1. Photoshop toolbar evolution

    photoshoptools

    Via La evolucion de photoshop | MJG Adrian

    August 15, 2008
    Category: design, display, information design, quick inspiration
    Tags: , , ,
    Comments (0)

  2. OLPC 2.0: A Striking eBook and a Step In the Right Direction

    OLPC 2.0: A Striking eBook and a Step In the Right Direction

    Here is the the next-generation OLPC. It will consist of dual touchscreens on a single spine and include keyboard, face-to-face, and ebook functionality. The touchscreens will be built by a start-up by OLPC CTO Mary Lou Jepsen. These screens will be readable in direct sunlight, just like the OLPC.

    I’m glad that the second generation OLPC is more of an ebook than a laptop. While the “laptop,” as a designed object, is an excellent tool, books are what define our early education and creating an electronic book that works and is actively useful seems far more intelligent than the original OLPC, which is a stab at a “less is more” mentality that eventually hobbles the very people it is designed to help.

    I remember a very interesting statistic from Freakonomics: the single, traceable correlation between a child’s ability in school and his home life are the number of books a family has in their home. I’m paraphrasing, but I’ve taken it to heart and I believe it to be true. A laptop is an interactive tool. An ebook, even if it’s just a glorified, dual screen laptop, is a reading tool. That is why tablet PCs never took off in the mainstream: people don’t know what to do with a form factor that is clearly not a laptop yet is also clearly a powerful computer. There is no way to connect the act of “scratching out words on a tablet” to processing worksheets in a spreadsheet. Why doesn’t the iPhone have handwriting recognition? Because it’s a horrible way to talk to a computer, even now. But that’s a different rant entirely.

    That said, I worry about the project as a whole.

    Read more plus video…

    Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

    ”

    (via TechCrunch.)

    [tags][/tags]

    May 21, 2008
    Category: electronic culture, interaction design, nice products
    Tags: , , ,
    Comments Off

  3. reading magazines as Google maps

    reading magazines as Google maps

    zkimmer.jpg

    an online interface that allows the browsing & skimming of magazines by a Google maps like interface. pictures, articles & spreads are charted as maps, with the well-known navigation controls on the left top hand side.

    [link: zkimmer.com & ricricho.wordpress.com|thnkx tvsnob]

    (via Information Aesthetics)

    April 03, 2008
    Category: design, display, edition, electronic culture, graphic design, information design
    Tags: , , , ,
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  4. Blue in the Interface

    Blue in the Interface: ”

    This comes as a surprise to me, but a look at most all of the icons on my computer reveals that the vast majority of them are blue. There’s only a very small handful — Adium, Address Book, iCal, Transmit, some others — that aren’t. Blue, blue, blue — everywhere I look all over my hard drive, blue.

    Maybe this is old news to you — it’s hardly novel for any Westerner to realize that, if there’s a default color that signals acceptability and inoffensiveness, it᾿s blue. But if you don’t believe me, have a look at these thirty icons I collected from my hard drive (please, no potshots about how out of date some of them are. I’m too busy to upgrade) and how shockingly uniform they are in color.

    “

    (Via Subtraction.)

    March 16, 2008
    Category: information design
    Tags: , , ,
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  5. georectifying

    georectifying: ”

    I amused myself this weekend by pulling maps from the Online Archive Of California and grinding them up with Python and gdalwarp to make map tiles:

    Comments
    (4)

    “

    (Via tecznotes.)

    March 16, 2008
    Category: mapping
    Tags: , , , ,
    Comments (0)

  6. one company, ten brands: lessons from retail for tech companies

    one company, ten brands: lessons from retail for tech companies: ”

    Lots of folks are unaware that multiple brands are owned by the same company (e.g., the same company owns Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy). Consumer activists often complain that this practice is deceptive because it tricks consumers into believing that there are big distinctions between brands when, often, the differences are minimal. Personally, while I’d love to see more consumer brand awareness, but I think that brand distinctions play an important role. I just wish that the tech industry would figure this out.

    I’m a relatively educated consumer and I’m also one of the most brand-loyal customers out there. When it comes to food and personal care products, many of my brand decisions come down to smell and taste, even when these are completely manufactured in a lab in New Jersey to differentiate soaps, toothpastes, and other products that are chemically identical. I buy All laundry detergent and not other Unilever brands (Surf, Wisk) or P&G brands (Tide, Gain, Cheer) simply because it smells better. When it comes to clothes, fit trumps everything.

    In other words, my purchasing decisions are heavily affected by ‘interface.’ (Politics and convenience too…) When a company changes the interface, I get cranky. I’m still cranky with my favorite pretzel brand for eliminating the air bubbles in their pretzels that allowed for more salt to build up. The reason that I’m committed to most consumer brands is not because I love the company. For many products, I’m not even influenced by the lifestyle being sold. I simply love the interface. Luckily, most retail companies get that their interface matters and when they futz with it, they create a separate brand or segment the primary brand into ‘Original’ and ‘New with XYZ.’ In the world of retail, a brand represents its interface. There are interfaces I like, those that I don’t, and those that I’m completely ambivalent about. But the interface often matters a whole lot more than the ‘features.’

    Why do technology companies often fail to understand branding the way retail folks do? Many think that they can change the interface at whim to spice-up their product. They approach user retention as user lock-in, rather than user satisfaction and commitment. They try to shove everyone into the same interface in a one-size-fits-all paradigm that tends to fit few. Why??

    Unfortunately, I don’t think that many companies are aware of the limitations of their brands. When they’re flying high, their brands are invincible and extending it to a wide array of products seems natural. Yet, over time, tech companies’ brands get entrenched. Certain users identify with it; others don’t. New products using that brand enter into the market with both cachet and baggage. Yet, tech companies tend to hold onto their brands for dear life and assume users will forget. Foolish.

    We all know that youth talk about certain products as ’sooo last year.’ This tends to cover a genre rather than a brand. Yet, teens also have plenty to say about the brands themselves. Yahoo! and AOL, for example, are for old people. When I asked why they use Yahoo! Mail and AOL Instant Messaging if they’re for old people, they responded by telling me that their parents made those accounts for them. Furthermore, email is for communicating with old people and AIM is ’so middle school’ and both are losing ground to SNS and SMS. While Microsoft is viewed in equally lame light amongst youth I spoke with, it’s at least valued as a brand for doing work. Yet, even youth who use MSN messenger think that msn.com is for old people. Why shouldn’t they? When I logged in just now, the main visual was a woman with white hair sitting on a hospital bed with the caption ‘10 Vital Questions to Ask Your Doctor.’

    Take a look at all of the major portals attempting to reach universal audiences. Now imagine yourself as a teen. Why would you even visit them? Even if you were the rare teen who cared about Autos, Careers & Jobs, Dating & Personals, Finance & Money, Health & Fitness, or Real Estate, one click in and you know that this content is not targeted at you. Even the sites that allow you to ‘personalize’ your modules rarely let you get rid of these or make them relevant to you. To make matters worse, now that these companies are heading towards mobile, they are taking these one-size-fits-all interfaces and cluttering up the phones. Ugg! Why?

    I would like to offer two bits of advice to all of the major tech companies out there: 1) Start sub-branding; and 2) Start doing real personalization.

    If you’re creating a new product, launch it with a new brand. Put your flagship brand on the bottom of the page, letting people know that this is backed by you - this is not about deception. Advertise it alongside your flagship brand if you think that’ll gain you traction. But let the new product develop a life of its own and not get flattened by a universal brand. Some products should be niche, especially those targeted at youth; while youth are happy to use well-established tools, they also like to distinguish their practices from those of adults and mature into new brands. In other words, they aren’t going to fall to your lock-in for very long. If you’re buying a well-established brand, don’t flatten it, especially if it’s loved by youth. Kudos to Google wrt YouTube; boo to Yahoo! wrt Launch. Even at the coarse demographic level, people are different; don’t treat them as a universal bunch, even if your back-end serves up the same thing to different interfaces.

    Personalization is more than skinning and moving modules around. Give me a blank slate and let me add modules that might be relevant to me. Alternatively, make some good initial guesses based on what you know about me and let me modify them from the getgo. Help me find the modules that are most likely to appeal to me - you already have a lot of data on what it is that I do; use it for something that helps me. This is particularly important if there are going to be a bazillion Apps or Gadgets or Widgets out there because I don’t want to comb through the crud. A targeted interface is just as important as a targeted ad.

    Above all, understand that no brand is universally loved and one size does not fit all. Most of us look like idiots in XXL shirts and we don’t want our technology interfaces to be XXL. People like brands that fit them like a glove. The tech industry serves up ads this way; why doesn’t it get this when it comes to their own brand? Technology is well positioned to create sub-brands and personalize those brands from there. It’s high time for the tech industry to grow up and start doing so.

    brands
    “

    (Via apophenia.)

    March 12, 2008
    Category: coding, electronic culture, interaction design, language, technology
    Tags: , , , ,
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  7. Analog color selection, tangible interface and live performance

    Analog color selection, tangible interface and live performance: “stuff-rainbow_1.jpg
    Today Amandine took this picture - it helped me to assemble some thoughts I had, dispersed, lately.“

    (Via assembling.)

    February 18, 2008
    Category: electronic culture
    Tags: , ,
    Comments (0)

  8. Analog color selection, tangible interface and live performance

    Analog color selection, tangible interface and live performance: “stuff-rainbow_1.jpg
    Today Amandine took this picture - it helped me to assemble some thoughts I had, dispersed, lately.“

    (Via assembling.)

    February 10, 2008
    Category: electronic culture
    Tags: , , ,
    Comments (0)

  9. Exhibition wiki for Worlds Away

    Exhibition wiki for Worlds Away: “

    In the research process for Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes, Design Director and Curator Andrew Blauvelt uncovered many interesting words invented to describe suburbia. Andrew enlisted now-former Design Fellow Jayme Yen and Visual Arts Fellow Rachel Hooper to assist in the research for the exhibit, and to further research the lexicon of suburbia. To make the collecting of the terminology easier, we set up a private wiki for them to use.

    The wiki of terms has transformed into the lexicon found in the Worlds Away exhibition catalog (soon to be found in the Walker Shop). We thought the lexicon would make a great resource, so it was decided to build it into a larger exhibition website.

    Worlds Away Website

    Site URL: http://design.walkerart.org/worldsaway/

    The exhibition website is still a wiki, and you can help enhance and add to the terms in the lexicon. Each entry in the lexicon consists of a definition, a section for images, and a google map. You can modify or enhance the definitions, or add new terms we might not know about. Images can be added to better describe the term. And map locations can also be submitted to give a satellite overview for terms that may best be seen from above (cloverleaf, for instance). We also added bios for all the artists in the exhibition, as well as a few sample essays and excerpts from other essays found in the catalog. Additionally, the selected videos from our YouTube competition can be found on the video section of the site.

    The design of the site is drawn from the exhibition catalog design by Senior Designer Chad Kloepfer. The book uses different paper and ink colors in different sections to compartmentalize the types of content (essays, interviews, lexicon, and topics). The site also takes the book or paper metaphor and uses it as the navigation mechanism, allowing you to always see the index for the other sections of the site.

    I wanted to enforce a rigours structure on the wiki, not let it grow out of hand, and only allow public edits in the lexicon section. Like our other wiki sites, this one is based on pmwiki, which allows for a rigorous permissions system. We’re using a few extensions, extended markup (for footnotes), Google Map API, NewPageBoxPlus, and DictIndex (for the lexicon list). Pmwiki is quite hackable, and the skin we constructed makes good use of that hackability. For the animation and accordion, I’m using my favorite javascript library, MooTools.

    Please take some time to explore the site and enhance the lexicon of terms.

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    February 08, 2008
    Category: language
    Tags: , , , ,
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  10. Augmented Reality: A Practical Guide

    Augmented Reality: A Practical Guide: ”

    By Tim O’Reilly

    cover of Augmented Reality book
    I’m jealous. The Prags have just published a book I wish I’d thought of first: Augmented Reality: A Practical Guide.

    I’ve been talking quite a bit about augmented reality lately, especially when people ask me about what I think might represent a discontinuity significant enough to represent a paradigm shift of the scale of the PC revolution or Web 2.0. Sensors instrumenting the world and driving collective intelligence applications that provide new information layers in our everyday experience is one big element of this next revolution.

    The topic also comes up whenever people ask me about Second Life, because I’m much more fascinated by the possibility of SL to create additional information layers on top of this world than I am about the idea of it as a complete alternate reality. I usually point to an SAP project I learned of last year, in which SAP is working with a Swiss property management firm to build instrumented models of their buildings in Second Life. That is, you open a door in the building, a door opens in the SL model. The building catches fire, so does the SL model. And of course, that’s why I was so excited about Google’s acquisition of Sketchup. It seems to me to be a really important long-term play in the mapping space. After all, so much of the built world we interact with isn’t represented at all on the maps we use. An address on the 37th floor of a building looks just the same to our mapping system as one on the first floor. But does it need to be that way? Not in a future where we’ve populated our maps (at first perhaps Google Earth, but eventually web-based maps as well) with additional layers representing the human-built world.

    Augmented reality is also coming at us in the news, especially forward looking news outlets (hint: ‘News for nerds. Stuff that matters.’) Take a look at these recent Slashdot headlines and think about them as all part of an emerging augmented reality trend: Smart ‘Lego’ Set Conjures Up Virtual 3D Twin, Cellphone App Developed that Could Allow For ‘Pocket Supercomputers’, Stanford’s New Website Converts Your Photos to 3D, and The Coming Wave of Gadgets That Listen and Obey. Add in the recent Radar posts The Future of Cell Phone Headsets and More on the Virtual Reality Audio Headset. Season with a dash of Nintendo Wii and innovative cell phone games like Mobzombies (Radar post.)

    We’re clearly careening towards a world in which virtual worlds are overlaid on the real world, bits interpenetrated with atoms.

    I should be clear that this broad-strokes definition of augmented reality isn’t what’s covered in the Prags’ new book. They are focused on a more traditional definition: ‘to create the sensation that virtual objects are present in the real world.’ They provide some first tools for developers to explore interfaces and techniques for doing so, with an emphasis on overlaying rendered objects onto real time digital video. This is a subset of the big picture I’m drawing in this post, but an important one. And perhaps even more to the point, this book will help to socialize the idea and to get people started building the new skills that will be required as augmented reality interfaces go mainstream.”

    (Via O’Reilly Radar.)

    February 05, 2008
    Category: Offline Products, architecture, electronic culture
    Tags: , , , ,
    Comments (0)

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