YouTube video captureing the I&O Brush from the MIT Media Lab. The brush paints what it “sees”, the user touches it to something, an apple, a leopard print, a persons blinking eye, and as you paint on a surface, the brush leaves the image behind, down to texture and animation details.
It’s pretty sweet.
This is directly from TED Talks which is a way cool conference held once a year. I only found out about it this past year in one of my design courses at RIT. Basically a bunch of really diverse, really smart people come together and give short presentations on their ideas, or something they are working on at the time.
This one is about BumpTop, http://bumptop.com/#TEDVideo and I highly recommend you watch the video. Its a sweet concept about re-thinking the computer desktop and how we organize our files and folders (specifically on the desktop).
I think I will definitely sign up for the beta version of this. I think it can work on both mac and pc but I can foresee it being frustrating when I am frustrated, but that I suppose comes with anything new. If I could turn it on and turn it off, that would be ideal, at least in the beginning when I am getting used to it. None the less, a very neat idea. Something the creator mentions is that this concept relates really well to photos and I could definitely see a company like Flickr jumping on board to try it out real soon.
This is David Armano’s Slideshow and his actual blog is http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/. He has a lot of really interesting things to say about interaction design. Since starting my new job as an Interaction Designer, I have started to pay attention more to how design and human factors specialists come together and create some really unique experiences for the public.
I highly recommend this presentation David Armano put together. It goes over general principles and his thoughts about how to create really great products/experiences. The one to my left titled “Four Simple Steps to Becoming a Compassionate Designer” and it encourages us (the designers/creators) to step outside our cubicles for a day and interact with those people who we are designing for. This is important because I see so many people who think that google or their own thought processes are the ideal for figuring out what people really want…or even worse…they simply adopt the philosophies of other great designs. Don’t get me wrong, some people cough::cough::Apple::cough have created simply amazing products, but who wants to design something as cool as those products? The goal is to surpass not the company or the coolness of the product, but the experience. Talking to the target audience, and really listening to what they have to say, their needs, wants, how they interact with products they already own – might be critical in finding the next greatest experience or product for them.
The “Human Hierarchy + Creative Collaboration in the Workplace” slide is a thought process starting to commonly occur in modern day. The time of the rigid levels of the work place is starting to disintegrate. Not totally, everyone (I personally think) needs someone to ground them, but whether that is a boss, or a co-worker is debatable. And I can proudly say that the only reason I am intimidated by my bosses (that is, my boss and my boss’s boss) are because I totally respect them and feel totally comfortable asking their opinion on a design concept I might be working on, or a problem I have. But, I digress. I think the biggest thought to take away from this slide of Armano’s is knowledge share across the board, from the highest up to the farthest across from you in the work place.
Overall, this is a great presentation and though I am sure it helps to have the creator of it explain the presentation along the way, the slides themselves are quite thought provoking and well done. Hats off to David Armano.
The best products aren’t the ones with the most features. The best products are those whose features are tightly integrated with the solutions they provide, making them the most usable.
- From Apple’s Fundamentals Guide to User Experience (pg 31)
Sweet product designs based off icons!!! These designs are a lot of fun and if you go to designboom.com you can see a lot of different ones from various artists. The one below of the watch is from anddesign.jp and they have a lot of other fun designs at their site, too.
I was truly astonished to see someone read the time in a half a second while glancing at a watch like this. A friend of mine owns one and after coming across the site that sells them I am shocked to see how many different versions there are! The average price (in American money) would be about 60-200 depending on the watch. (I used yahoo’s currency converter to figure it out.)
The picture here shows just a few of their many designs. Check out the others here.
In the past couple of years, I’ve decided that I absolutely love listening to books on tape, or listening to other people read stories. It’s a great way to pass the time on long road trips and, more recently for me, a great way to pass time while waiting for public transportation – or while on it.
LibriVox.org is made up of a group of volunteers reading on their own time and for the listeners enjoyment. Most of the works they offer are oldies but goodies. Recently, I listened to Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin and then Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. As I write this post, I am downloading the full zip file that includes all chapters in mp3 format of Uncle Toms Cabin. That way, I don’t have to worry about downoading chapter by chapter and listening through a browser…I’ll just unzip the folder of mp3’s and dump it into ITunes. Good deal.
Just another quick note, since the readers are volunteer, you don’t always get one person reading the whole book (though with Pride and Prejudice you do – thank you Annie Coleman!). So it can be jarring to have someone with a great reading ability, doing voices for each character one chapter, and then a obviously young squeaky voiced boy the next. All in all, its never unbearable and the readers usually do a superb job throughout.
Originally, I was reading an interaction design blog when I came across a quote of a quote from the article, The Secret of Apple Design by Don Norman.
“The hardest part of design, especially consumer electronics,” says Norman, “is keeping features out.” Simplicity, he says, is in itself a product differentiator, and pursuing it can lead to innovation.
Every Industrial Designer, Interaction Designer, and Human Factors guru would agree (I hope). To me, that sums what product design should be quite nicely. But, I wonder if the innovation that Don Norman is talking about is for the designers own satisfaction, or for the consumers satisfaction. Consumers, though they might want feature upon feature in a new device, what they need in the end is to be able to use the device effectively – does that mean the device has to be innovative? No, might be as simple and conforming as the next product on the shelf. I think, for Apple, the innovation came when they decided to focus more on basic design (aesthetics) as well as the Interaction Design early on in their products development.
If you read the article that Don Norman is quoted from, then you will get an excellent idea of Apple’s design philosophy – not how they design, or their process, but their philosophy based on people who have crossed paths with them. Apple supposedly doesn’t like talking to the press, so the article uses people twice removed. Still, a good read.
Another memorable quote from the article:
“Jobs is a dictator, but with good taste,” says Norman. “He is good and driven to the perfect experience. He doesn’t want good design; he wants great design.” Brunner similarly lauds Jobs’s “driven, singular focus.” And Rolston says, in what is perhaps the best explanation of Apple’s design ascendancy, “It’s a happy coincidence at Apple that the designer in chief is the CEO. He has a fantastic sense of what people want. And after all, that is design.”
(Robert Brunner was Apple’s director of industrial design from 1989 to early 1996 and Mark Rolston is senior vice president of creative at Frog Design, a product-design and strategic-branding firm that worked closely with Apple from 1982 to 1988.)
This is something that puzzles me still to do this day. A lot of people use these two words, font and typface interchangeably, most likely to the point that Grammar Girl will have to comment on it soon. I was taught there is a difference and since have forgotten it, but perhaps if I write about it, the truth will stick eventually.
Typeface – A set of fonts in the same style. Or, in other words, a font family. Ex: Times New Roman, Helvetica, or Arial.
Font – A single kind of typeface. Ex: Times New Roman in 10 point size is a font, and Times New Roman in 14 point size is also a font. Times New Roman in Bold is also a font. (Basically designating a specific type inside of a typeface is a font.)
So that clears the air a bit. So, if you are looking at typography in a magazine, or during a presentation and happen to like it, you could ask “what font is that sentance set to?”, or if you think the whole page of differing point sizes is in the same family, “What typeface are you using for this presentation?”. It seems instead of using font and typeface interchangeably and being wrong, you might be able to use the phrase font-family and the word typeface interchangeably.
Clocky is an alarm clock designed to run away from you as soon as its alarm goes off. So, if your one of those people who tends to hit the snooze button 3 or 4 times in the morning, this might be a good option for you.
The creator of this wonderful product is a store called Nanda, owner Gauri Nanda, who not surprisingly was a graduate student of the MIT Media Lab. Now, I know I am not supposed to throw praises at MIT since I am an RIT native, but when one of its students creates a product like Clocky and gets tons of recognition (New York Times ‘Year In Ideas’ magazine, ID, inc, Lucky, Jay Leno, The Today Show) – she is quite worthy of an applause.
Nanda products are available in a quite a few locations, check it out.
(The picture is Clocky in action – compliments of Nanda).
I had recorded a new Action in the “Actions Palette” when I discovered something very frustrating. Even though my original files were BMP’s and the ending file was supposed to be a BMP, the BMP options dialogue box would open at the end of every action, prompting me to hit OK. This is not convenient because it made me babysit the batch processing…which means that it wasn’t really a batch process.
What I did not realize was, in the course of creating my new Action, I should have gone through the “Save As” as my last step. It took me quite some time to figure out what was wrong, and this helpful Adobe Forum thread pointed me in the right direction: http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.3bc401c5/21
“A ’save as’ command must be recorded at the end of the action. This results in the JPEG options box settings being written to the action. I could not get this to work with “save for web”, but it seems to me no flexibility is lost anyway. If I’m correct, you get all the same JPEG options.” – pdlr
I’ll break down the steps I used in totallity – from beginning to end, just so there is no confusion.
-Open Actions Palette
-Create New Action
(As soon as you name the new action, PS starts to record your steps, so make sure you have the file opened and ready that you want to record the actions on.)
-The last step in your new actions should be going through the File > Save As process to completion.
-Close file
-Stop the recording of actions in the Actions Palette
Then
- File > Automate > Batch
- Choose your source, and all the options you want. The most important part in this options dialogue box being the choice “Save and Close” and check marking the “Override Save As Options”
If you have a folder of hundreds of images, a good idea would be to try out the Action and Automate Batch on a folder containing 3 of the hundreds of images – just to make sure everything is turning out right. I made the mistake of not doing that once, and 3 hours later… well, it was not good.
Happy Batching!
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