Jonathan Ive speaks on design
“Apple and Ive are known for their attention to detail. ‘Simplicity speaks of the care of how our products are developed’, he said, ‘it’s not obvious how hard it was’.” (Jonny Evans – MacWorld UK)
Mr. Vignelli’s Map
“This week marks the 100th anniversary of the New York subway system, and what better time to recognize the beautiful achievement represented by Massimo Vignelli’s subway map of 1972.” (Michael Bierut – Design Observer)
All watched over by machines of loving grace
“Ubiquitous computing is coming. It is coming because there are too many too powerful institutions vested in its coming; it is coming because it is a ‘technically sweet’ challenge; it is coming because it represents the eventual convergence of devices, tools and services that became inevitable the moment they each began to be expressed in ones and zeroes.” (Adam Greenfield – Boxes and Arrows)
Use of Narrative in Interactive Design
“By making a conscious effort to integrate narrative into our work, we are better able to support creative learning, problem solving, and task completion by the people who use the things we build.” (Nancy Broden, Marisa Gallagher, and Jonathan Woyte – Boxes and Arrows)
Wireframe Annotations in Visio : Special Deliverable #11
“This article introduces several techniques in the context of wireframe annotations. At the conclusion, you will have learned to create an annotation widget, and you will also have learned several facets of Visio you may not have been aware of.” (Dan Brown – Boxes and Arrows)
[BEEP]
“I am Peter Boersma, male, 34, living in an apartment from 1670 in the centre of Amsterdam. I studied computer science and ergonomics, and have been working in the field since 1995.” – Welcome to the blogosphere! (Peter Boersma)
Stick Figure Warning Signs
“For the longest time, whenever I saw one of those ‘don’t stick your head into the rotating blade’ warning signs with an illustration of a stick-figure person doing exactly that, I’ve wanted to make a web gallery of them. (…) they’re a visual form of anticryptography, the science of conveying information without assuming any prior knowledge.” – (Toren K. Smith) – courtesy of antenna
Why categorize?
“The human brain is a wonderful information processor. We take in innumerable details with every glance, sound or touch. Yet we are seldom overwhelmed with the magnitude of the information we are processing. One reason that we are able to cope with so much input is that we categorize it all. We look for what is new, what is different, what has changed. Then we try to match the new information to the categories that already exist in our minds.” – (Susan Feldman – KMWorld Magazine) – courtesy of elearningpost
A Comparison of Hyperstructures: Zzstructures, mSpaces, and Polyarchies
“Hypermedia applications tend to use simple representations for navigation: most commonly, nodes are organized within an unconstrained graph, and users are presented with embedded links or lists of links. Recently, new data structures have emerged which may serve as alternative models for both the organization, and presentation, of hypertextual nodes and links. In this paper, we consider zzstructures, mSpaces, and polyarchies from the perspective of graph theory, and compare these models formally.” – (Michael J. McGuffin and M.C. Schraefel) – courtesy of ui designer
Introducing the Customer-Centric Worldview
“(1) Business revolves around the customer. – (2) Companies that focus on creating a good customer experience will succeed far above those that do not. – (3) This is the primary determinant of business success over the next several decades.” – (Mark Hurst – Good Experience) – courtesy of asterisk
A quick and dirty introduction to accessibility
“Accessibility is about building web pages that can be navigated and read by everyone, regardless of disability, location, experience or technology.” – (Max Design)
User Education Is Not the Answer to Security Problems
“Internet scams cannot be thwarted by placing the burden on users to defend themselves at all times. Beleaguered users need protection, and the technology must change to provide this.” – (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)
Web content management depends on trust
“You must be able to stand over everything that is published on your website and say that it is all accurate and up-to-date. Trust is a fundamental building block of professional web content management.” – (Gerry McGovern)
Overview of the Open Source Development and Documentation Project: Overview
“The main purpose of OSDDP is to provide a place where everyone can learn project development from each other through open source development as well as develop skills for producing professional and technical documents.” – (OSDDP)
Eating Architecture
“The contributors to this highly original collection of essays explore the relationship between food and architecture, asking what can be learned by examining the (often metaphorical) intersection of the preparation of meals and the production of space.” – Table of Content & Sample chapters (MIT Press)
Microsoft Typography
From Lewis Blackwell’s 20th-Century Type: “Microsoft has arguably the largest, most expert typographic unit in the world. With repsonsibility for the functionality and output of the great majority of type-generating devices, it is no surprise that they should have that, but it is not a fact that is celebrated or much investigated. That the Apple Macintosh platform is more celebrated and widely supported by creative designers obscures the prevelance of Microsoft technology in generating the typography that the world sees — even if many of its smartest ideas came from elsewhere.” (…) “Microsoft’s Typography group researches and develops fonts and font technologies, and supports the development of TrueType and OpenType fonts by independent type vendors.” (Microsoft) – courtesy of jamie divine
Apple Fonts
“As a company that arguably did more to jump-start the desktop publishing industry than any other in the mid-1980s, Apple Computer has always paid great attention to the typefaces used in its marketing, operating systems and industrial design. It has also been a leading player in font technology development, and controls several patents important to the implementation of high-quality typeface rendering on computers.” – (Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
Patterns in Motion: Examining Design’s Reconstruction
“Harold G. Nelson and Garry K. VanPatter discuss ups and downs, ins and outs, challenges and opportunities, related to the reconstruction of design leadership. Not for the faint hearted.” – (About NextD Leadership Institute)
Using Personas to Create User Documentation
“Personas and other user-modeling techniques are often solely discussed as tools for product definition and design, but they are useful tools in other arenas, as well. Technical writers responsible for creating user documentation can benefit greatly from a well-defined persona set, too.” (Steve Calde – Cooper Newsletter)
Devising a new paradigm for usable, maintainable Web applications
“Why does usability tend to lag behind as Web applications become increasingly complex? Much of this lag can be attributed to the fact that the languages we use to create Web pages are not optimized for usability engineering.” – (Ka Wai Cheung – Digital Web Magazine)