Period Three Blog

Jul242008

Obama is design savvy

Posted by Gene in Uncategorized, Design

I can’t say enough about the design efforts that go behind Obama’s campaign materials. Here is just the latest design nerdery that i’ve come to expect and love form his design staff.

The poster on the right is an example of famous German Bauhaus poster. Given that Obama is on a trip to Germany this week, his design staff decided to show a subtle tip of the hat to those historic German designers. Not to mention one of my favorite design periods/schools of all time.

Link: Meaningful Distractions Blog

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Apr032008

Findability

Posted by Gene in Design, Usability

A List Apart has a great article/story on Findability. I’ve been a student of this for a while now ever since attending one of Jared Spool’s talks a few years ago, where he discusses designing for the “scent” of findability.

The fundamental goal of findability is to persistently connect your audience with the stuff you write, design, and build. When you create relevant and valuable content, present it in a machine readable format, and provide tools that facilitate content exchange and portability, you’ll help ensure that the folks you’re trying to reach get your message.

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Mar032008

Noted: Cars do not have dashboards, they have interfaces.

Posted by Jay in Business, Design, Branding, Usability

The new for 2009 Dodge Ram Truck, is by all respects, a handsome truck, if you like things like that. The interior, especially, especially looks like something out of a Mercedes or Lincoln or something. I can’t imagine getting my greasy paws all over that nice thing after working all day, but lets face it, most of these things are daily drivers, not all around utility vehicles.

Anyway, the main point of this post is that one of the features of the 2009 Dodge Ram is the “Driver Interface“, previously known to me as the “Dashboard”.

It seems we have come full circle. Cars once had dashboards, and web designers took the dashboard metaphor into the realm of interface design, and now cars have taken interface design into the realm of the actual, physical dashboard.

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Feb292008

Logos of the Techies

Posted by Gene in Design, Branding

The Neatorama blog has a really interesting article discussing the history of tech companies logos. It’s pretty neat to look back over the past as these companies logos/brands developed. My favorite is the Apple logo (of course).

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Feb122008

Edward Tufte Loves the iPhone

Posted by Gene in Design, Usability

You can head on over to Edward Tufte’s website and watch his screencast of why he loves the iPhone.

The iPhone platform elegantly solves the design problem of small screens by greatly
intensifying the information resolution of each displayed page. Small screens, as on
traditional cell phones, show very little information per screen, which in turn leads
to deep hierarchies of stacked-up thin information–too often leaving users with
“Where am I?” puzzles. Better to have users looking over material adjacent in space
rather than stacked in time.

In case you’ve never heard of him: Edward Tufte has written seven books, including Visual Explanations, Envisioning Information, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and Data Analysis for Politics and Policy. He writes, designs, and self-publishes his books on analytical design, which have received more than 40 awards for content and design. He is Professor Emeritus at Yale University, where he taught courses in statistical evidence, information design, and interface design. His current work includes landscape sculpture, printmaking, video and a new book.

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Feb072008

UI-Patterns.com

Posted by Gene in Design, Usability

This is a great site (ui-patterns.com) for people in the business of designing websites and web applications, It’s not the first library of User Interface Design Patterns I have seen but this one sure looks good. I hope they really push this site and fill it to the rim with patterns and reviews of interaction design in the wild.

Collections of software design patterns are standard reference points for the experienced programmer. But why not for the experienced User Interface (UI) designer? This website seeks to better the situation for the UI designer, who struggles with the same problems as many other UI designers have struggled with before him.

are not the first to create a UI design library. While other pattern collections are useful, they are far from coherent and complete. The purpose of this site is over time to fill some of the gaps - especially by providing code examples as to how how the different patterns can be implemented: to join theory with practice.

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Sep072007

NFL logo reboot

Posted by Gene in Design

The NFL is rebooting it’s logo, not very much though. I have to wonder why they would feel the need to tinker with this age-old design… Isn’t it working just fine, and the changes are fairly subtle for the amount of money that will have to go into launching the new logo.

Tinkering with one of the country’s most powerful and ubiquitous sports brands will be a risky and expensive business. NFL sponsors such as Reebok, Riddell, Wilson and EA Sports will have to switch shields on everything from uniforms (players wear three logos at the neck and waistlines and on the helmet) and licensed merchandise to the official “Duke” game ball and Madden video game. Even groundskeepers will have to adopt the new shield at NFL stadiums.

But Baird believes the cleaner, more modern symbol will “pop” better during TV telecasts. The less-busy logo will also show up better on “third screens” increasingly used by sports fans: cellphones, laptops, iPods and PDAs.

It’s interesting to me because it seems the biggest reason for the re-design is so that the logo will show up better in new media, like online and handheld devices. This should show us that everyone is gambling on new technology and the media that will eventually be flowing there. If these guys are going to make the move, even given the enormous costs involved in doing something as simple as changing some simple things on your logo, then we should all become more knowledgeable about what’s in store for us as designers as more and more devices and media are created…

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Aug172007

No staple stapler

Posted by Gene in Design

Okay, so it won’t replace your old-fashioned stapler, but if you have to bind 2-5 pages it would do the trick, and aside from the paper use, it could help the environment by not using the metal staple… The no staple stapler cuts and folds in on itself a tiny tab of pager, for up to 5 pages. It’s also safe for children.

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Aug142007

Huck Hack

Posted by Jay in Random Stuff, Design

So these guys came up a hack of sorts to allow you to do 2 way video-conferencing. They won the “Iron Coder” contest at this year’s C-4 conference. That is a very cool achievement, don’t get me wrong, but an ingenious part is that is uses a mirror contraption to reflect the camera to the front of the iphone, since, like every other cell or smartphone, the camera and screen are on opposite sides. It’s a gloriously low-tech solution and it turns out they have a product that does the same thing for macbooks and macbook pros. It’s called the Huckleberry mirror.

via Daring Fireball

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Aug132007

Graphic design of pirates

Posted by Gene in Random Stuff, Design

If you’ve never really studied the flags of the worlds famous pirates, you’ve definately missed something pretty neat. Not the old standard thought of skull and crossbones to say the least. Pirates of the world had a fairly intricate signage system and in many cases the history behind the pirate’s lives take form in the different versions of their flags/signage. it’s astounding to think that they actually cared about their brands at the same time killing and pillaging their way through life…

Take Blackbeard’s signage; he fancies himself the king of pirates while holding an hourglass. Which can only signify that his time is limited as king, seeing as how he’s a pirate and all… While my main point was to present the pirate flag as a design work, I am still a bit of a history buff and pirates are definately one of my favorite subjects, so I’ll just share a few interesting links:

Brief History of Blackbeard
Wikipedia on Blackbeard
National Geographic Kids on Blackbeard
Blackbeard was from North Carolina
Queen Anne’s Revenge (Blackbeard’s ship)
Blackbeard’s real name was Edward Teach
They even made a movie
Party with a pirate
Playmobile loves pirates

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