This template is most useful if your logo or icon graphic consists of a single basic shape. The template includes a canvas in the correct icon size, a 96 x 96 pixel bounding box, focal zone guides, the Symbian Colour Spectrum and several precast background layers with the surround shapes of Symbian launcher icons. You can simply paste your graphic or glyph on top of the surround background shape of your choice, add the inner shadow, and save the icon as an SVG file. See the video.

The desktop remains central to our everyday work and play, despite all the excitement around tablets, TV’s and phones. So it’s exciting for us to innovate in the desktop too, especially when we find ways to enhance the experience of both heavy “power” users and casual users at the same time. The desktop will be with us for a long time, and for those of us who spend hours every day using a wide diversity of applications, here is some very good news: 12.04 LTS will include the first step in a major new approach to application interfaces.

Welcome to Android Design, your place for learning how to design exceptional Android apps.

The Nokia N9 UI represents the next generation of platforms and mobile interactions. This section introduces the concepts and principles that have shaped the Nokia N9 UI framework

Pinterest is an online pinboard.
Organize and share things you love.

Weihnachten, Jahreswechsel – zusammen der klassische Anlass, sich oder andere mit einem Kalender zu beschenken. Die perfekte Gelegenheit, einen Rückblick auf das eigene fotografische Schaffen des letzten Jahres zu werfen. Und einen Kalender mit den eigenen besten 12 Bildern zu fülle

Melville
A literary theme for WordPress

Collection of iOS UI patterns

Casey’s Contraptions came out for iPad only in May. Since then, you and your partner in crime have been working on making it run on the iPhone. That’s 3 months for those of you counting. So what has taken this long? Wasn’t it a straight port? Lots of shared code? Just shrink the images and go? Well…

CJ from ZOMGitsCJ found a video on vimeo about Nokia’s 8 perspective on design.

Watch to see the processes that goes into designing a Nokia phone.

The formula for the perfect game may be an area of hot discussion, but most would argue that games that are easy to get into and difficult to put down goes along the right lines. Players' early experience of a game is critical: this is the period in which they're making up their minds whether to devote more time, and often money, to the rest of it. 

So how do we make games with a polished early experience? Let's take some lessons from a game which I think does it incredibly well, PopCap's Plants Vs Zombies. 

All of the below use only a single HTML element. Any kind of CSS goes, as long as it's supported in at least one browser.

The Nokia N9 UI represents the next generation of platforms and mobile interactions. This section introduces the concepts and principles that have shaped the Nokia N9 UI framework.

The following is a more concise version of a three part series – Designing Enemies: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the MvC

Late last year, the Netflix Tech Blog wrote about five lessons they learned moving to Amazon Web Services. AWS is, of course, the preeminent provider of so-called "cloud computing", so this can essentially be read as key advice for any website considering a move to the cloud. And it's great advice, too. Here's the one bit that struck me as most essential

In this post, we’ll showcase 50 Free high-quality & New (X)HTML/CSS template (some of them include the PSD-source files). You will also find among these elegant templates a very well written step-by-step tutorials showing you how to create your own. Hopefully some of these will meet your expectations and come in handy in your projects.
You will have to check the license first for any restrictions or guidelines before using any template.

Photoblog, also with animated photographs

My son Eli has been using iPad apps since he was one and we have about 50 toddler apps. With the big caveat that this post is based off essentially a sample size of one, here are some toddler app user interface guidelines.

Angry Birds may seem a simple game that is substantially without a narrative structure. And why is it so addictive? The common explanation is that many of us are addicted by it because of the clever usage of “tap & drag” to sling birds, and the cute resulting effects. Its success is the result of luck, of getting the right effect at the right time – this is what I heard developers say, last time a few days ago at a lunch with a couple of iOS developers.

I think instead that the addictiveness of the game is rooted not just in the clever artillery physics, and is not a result of chance. I am unconvinced that it lacks a narrative logic, and here try to articulate myself.

Despite a huge backlog of games trying to get my attention, I found myself playing a lot of Team Fortress 2 (TF2) lately. This is in part because of the loot system, which drops random items –mainly hats or weapons– for you to use in customizing your avatar.1 This system has been in TF2 for a while, and it used to be that the only way of getting the gear you wanted was by getting it from a drop or by crafting it from raw materials (which also essentially came from drops). Many players rejoiced and were very proud of their silly hats and weapons.

Why is it that over 50 million individuals have downloaded this simple game? Many paid a few dollars or more for the advanced version. More compelling is the fact that not only do huge numbers download this game, they play it with such focus that the total number of hours consumed by Angry Birds players world-wide is roughly 200 million minutes a DAY, which translates into 1.2 billion hours a year. To compare, all person-hours spent creating and updating Wikipedia totals about 100 million hours over the entire life span of Wikipedia (Neiman Journalism Lab). I say these Angry Birds are clearly up to something worth looking into. Why is this seemly simple game so massively compelling? Creating truly engaging software experiences is far more complex than one might assume, even in the simplest of computer games. Here is some of the cognitive science behind why Angry Birds is a truly winning user experience.

You must be living under the rock to not to have noticed something called CES (Consumer Electronics Show) is happening in Las Vegas right now and something that has the bloggers sphere excited about is Android 3.0 aka “honeycomb” the tablet version of Android. It certainly is impressive from the videos we have seen. We instantly thought about the MeeGo tablet UI and started comparing. So what we where curious about was what you preferred and why. Of course the MeeGo UI is pre- alpha and the Android 3.0 is only a sneak peak. But we are still interested what your first impressions are when comparing the two.

If you check out this link you’ll see a flash presentation of a MeeGo tablet UI from Evolve III Maestro’s Slate, you” see something quite beautiful.

The MeeGo Maestro Slate from Evolve III has an interactive panoramic homescreens full of non-restricted widgets, Swipe up for apps, Swipe down for multitasking/notifications. There’s also album art cover flow style, and very neat photo viewing options with normal thumbnail, perspective and bottom bar thumbnails.

1999, San Francisco, Triton Hotel: we meet in person for the first time. We had found each other via our medium, the networked computer and had a brief but passionate virtual love affair. We got to know each other doing what we loved doing most, making websites and interactive artworks online. We begin living and working together soon after. 2003: Leaving behind careers of net.art and web design, the two of us radically redirect all our creative attention towards the medium of videogames. February 2005: After 2 years of designing and prototyping, our first project 8 is rejected by games publishers, then the only source of funding. We are devastated but determined to continue and to keep our independence. Reboot. September 2005: Launch of The Endless Forest. October 2006: presentation of the Realtime Art Manifesto at the Mediaterra festival in Athens. January 2007: Drama Princess engine complete. March 2008: Launch of The Graveyard. March 2009, San Francisco, Triton Hotel: launch of The Path.

Recognizing it needed to play serious catchup, Microsoft essentially hit CTRL+ALT+DEL on Windows Mobile, rebooting its mobile OS like a balky, old Windows PC and making a fresh start.

Ob Logo-Design, Visitenkarte, Flyer, Webseite, Werbebanner... Stellen Sie jetzt Ihr Projekt ein und bewerten Sie bereits nach wenigen Stunden die ersten Designvorschläge.

Joe Bork has written a great article explaining some of the decisions that go into whether a bug is fixed or not. This means that I can cross that one off my list of potential future entries. Thanks Joe!

But while I'm at it, I'd like to expand a little on what Joe said.His comments generalize to more than just bug fixes. A bug fix is one kind of change to the behaviour of the product, and all changes have similar costs and go through a similar process.

Tabs, tabs, tabs. The specialist subject of UI experts everywhere. Should tabs just rearrange horizontally or also detach? How much vertical scroll buffer should a tab have before it detaches? Under what circumstances should it detach? What about reattaching

The goal of a software product is to serve human beings. A good software product caters to the user’s whims, even if it means doing something hard and technically complicated just to save the user one click while he is watching pictures of lolcats. The way a good software product treats the user is kind of like the way a butler treats his master

As I work towards completing my own game, I’ve been thinking a lot about finishing projects in general. I’ve noticed that there are a lot of really talented developers out there that have trouble finishing games. Truthfully, I’ve left a long trail of unfinished games in my wake… I think everyone has. Not every project is going to pan out, for whatever reason. But if you find yourself consistently backing out of game projects that have a lot of potential, it could be worth taking a step back and examining why this happens.

By now, we're used to letting Facebook and Twitter capture our social lives on the web -- building a "social layer" on top of the real world. At TEDxBoston, Seth Priebatsch looks at the next layer in progress: the "game layer," a pervasive net of behavior-steering game dynamics that will reshape education and commerce.

Readymechs are free, flatpack toys for you to print and build. They are designed to fit on an 8.5"x11" page and printed with any printer. You’ll need double-sided tape, thick matte paper, and 10-15 minutes for build time.

The importance of colors can be described by only one sentence – “Color to life is like salt to food”. Colors can change your mood, determine your attitude, whenever you see color you can feel its pleasing effect within your soul. In other words, in life colors express a lot of meanings without saying anything.

Today we have collected some captivating examples of elegant colorful web designs for your inspiration. Have a look.

I created a web-based iPad app mainly for my own personal use. I got fed up with the App Store and all the paid apps that didn’t do the trick.

My particular project is a news aggregating app that makes it easy to take 5 minutes every couple hours and keep up-to-date on news stories from a variety of sources.

[In this much-referenced technical piece originally published in Game Developer magazine late last year, the team behind idiosyncratic MMO success EVE Online discusses precisely why sharing a single world between all of its players makes sense.]

Hans Rosling redux: Mixing analog with digital visualization

You have probably heard Hans Rosling's presentations on world population using the cool Gapminder software before. In his latest presentation — his sixth for TED — he mixes in some analog technique as well. This new analog teaching technique he picked up from Ikea, he says. This presentation below is excellent and is a good example of mixing analog and digital visualization techniques that result in a memorable short-form presentation. Watch the video below.

The Web Design Ledger is a publication written by web designers for web designers. The primary purpose of this site is to act as a platform for sharing web design related knowledge and resources. Topics range from design inspiration to tips and tutorials and everything in between.

If you travel back in time and show a student from the 1950s an iPad or Twitter they'd have a tough time making sense of it; show them a classroom desk, though, and they'd see it's changed little.

Steelcase's IDEO-designed Node chair aims to change that, with a modern re-fresh of the schoolroom desk-chair combo.

DotModeler est un logiciel de modeling / édition 3D à base de cube. L’idée viens d’une jeux chinois sur PS3 appelé 3D Dot Game Hero ou le style graphique fait un mélange de la 3D actuel et des graphismes 8Bit. J’ai trouvé l’idée tellement original que j’ai décidé de l’exploiter, n’étant moi même que très peu doué en graphisme, je peu maintenant créer toutes les ressources dont j’ai besoin pour mes programmes. Amateur des Pixels-Art, vous allez vous en donner à cœur joie.

First, the paper magazine was crammed into the little iPad frame. In form of a PNG slide show. To compensate for the lack of interactive logic, this pretty package was provided with a fruity navigation. In the end it was spiced with in-app links, plucked with a couple of movies and salted with audio files (”interactive”). Then it was off to marketing. And it sold 24,000 copies. Dammit. It’s the Nineties all over again.

Over the last two months we have been working on several iPad projects: Two news applications, a social network and a word processor. We worked on iPad projects without ever having touched an iPad. One client asked us to “start working on that tablet thing” even before we knew whether the iPad was real. The question Are we designing desktop programs, web sites or something entirely new? has been torturing us until that express package from New York finally crossed our door sill. A quick write up of design insights before and after the appearance of the iPad at our office.

The biggest hurdle for convincing someone that games can be meaningful is explaining interactivity. To someone looking over your shoulder while you play a game, gaming probably looks very mindless. If you stop playing and try to explain the design, you end up rattling off equations and rules, which just makes it sound dull. Since video games are a bit complicated, handing someone a controller and insisting that they just go at it doesn’t really work either. Interacting with the content and design simultaneously is what makes a game engaging. There is, however, something that everyone interacts with daily that communicates meaning like a video game: architecture.

Diese Website ergänzt das Buch »Generative Gestaltung« (erschienen im Verlag Hermann Schmidt Mainz, 2009) und bietet direkten Zugriff auf alle Processing-Quellcodes der im Buch beschriebenen Programme.

Im Buch »Generative Gestaltung« geht es darum, wie Bilder mittels Code erzeugt werden können. Ein Bild wird also nicht mehr »von Hand« geschaffen, sondern dadurch, dass eine visuelle Idee in ein Regelwerk übersetzt und dann in einer Programmiersprache in Form eines Quellcodes umgesetzt wird. Die Folge ist, dass ein solches Programm nicht nur ein einzelnes Bild erzeugen kann, sondern dass durch Veränderung von Parametern ganze Bilderwelten entstehen.

Schnelles Prototyping durch Drag&Drop, komplett klickbare Wireframes, Usability Testing und effiziente Kommunikation im Team - das sind die Möglichkeiten von pidoco°!

Search engine for icons and icon sets

3DRT.com is a world leading developer of real-time CG content. We specialize in high-quality 3D models for video games and the web

Tool to test designs & web pages on multiple browsers automatically

While searching on the web for some insparation for a new project i came a cross a couple of beautiful free WordPress themes and I thought why not compose a list of best free WordPress themes that i can find on the web and share them here on OpenSourceHunter.

This is not a list just for the numbers but what i think that are the 55 beautiful themes that i could find on the web. If you know more beautiful free themes just share them with us as a comment here.

Please leave a comment as a thank you for the people that taken the time to make these beautiful themes and share theme with us for free.

The following are axioms for software architects by software architects. These axioms have been contributed under the Creative Commons, Attribution 3 open source license.

97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know
These are the axioms accepted into the book which will be published by O'Reilly Media next year.

Other Things Software Architects Should Know
These are axioms that were contributed and are good in their own right, but were not accepted into the "97 Things" book.

With the help of Prezi you can create maps of texts, images, videos, PDFs, drawings and present in a nonlinear way. Move beyond the slide, it only takes 5 minutes to learn how to use Prezi.

Our Mission - To explore the rich cultural genre of games; to give scholars a peer-reviewed forum for their ideas and theories; to provide an academic channel for the ongoing discussions on games and gaming.

Game Studies is a crossdisciplinary journal dedicated to games research, web-published several times a year at www.gamestudies.org.

Our primary focus is aesthetic, cultural and communicative aspects of computer games, but any previously unpublished article focused on games and gaming is welcome. Proposed articles should be jargon-free, and should attempt to shed new light on games, rather than simply use games as metaphor or illustration of some other theory or phenomenon.

DIGITAL ARTS AND CULTURE BETWEEN POP AND SUB, HIGH AND LOW, ON AND OFF

Below we present over 50 excellent navigation menus — we feature CSS-based design solutions, CSS+JavaScript-based menus and Flash-designs. However, they all have something in common: they are user-friendly yet creative and perfectly fit to the style of their respective websites.

My name is Tina Roth Eisenberg. I am a 'swiss designer gone NYC'. swissmiss is my visual archive of things that 'make me look'. I am a graphic designer and run my own studio in Brooklyn. Contact me if you would like to team up, have a link suggestion or just want to say hello: submissions {at} swiss-miss.com.

Amy Jo Kim is a game/social/web designer known for bridging the divide between game and web design. She has designed software UIs, games, online communities, and wrote the seminal book Community Building for the Web way back in 2000. I have long admired her work, and I am grateful that she recently sat down for an interview on the basics of game mechanics and how they can be used in interaction design.

Here you find links and information about nearly 175 free
PDF mags from all over the world with main focus on art, design, illustration and culture...

I recently finished Outliers: The Story of Success, the latest book by Malcolm Gladwell. More than any other writer, Gladwell can take any topic, even the most dry and boring, and turn it into compelling reading.
The entire Outliers book is good, but Chapter 7: The Ethnic History of Plane Crashes, is amazing. It’s worth the price of the book just to see how Gladwell stitches this chapter together. In it Gladwell tells the story of several plane crashes and uses the last radio conversations between the pilots and the control tower to paint an incredible picture of how they happen.

C/O Berlin ist ein Labor, in dem Grenzen über einzelne gestalterische Disziplinen hinaus experimentell ausgelotet werden. Das kreative,
künstlerische Leben wird besonders anhand der renommierten Fotografieausstellungen sichtbar, die C/O Berlin konzipiert und koordiniert – international, vielseitig, aktuell.

Getragen wird C/O Berlin von Neugier, Leidenschaft und Professionalität.
Der Name C/O Berlin steht für Initiative und Flexibilität. Das „Care of“ als postalische Abkürzung für Umtriebige und örtlich ungebundene, international Agierende wird ergänzt durch das „Taking care of“ des privaten Engagements.

C/O Berlin handelt dort, wo andere Einrichtungen noch diskutieren, und setzt Zeichen für neue Wege im Kulturbereich.

This is a re-version of a talk I gave at the Let’s Change the Game conference held on Friday 5 December 2008. It was a very casual, irreverent talk, but one that I hoped would bring some light relief to the day as well as (possibly in a rather confrontational manner) highlight some of the current problems - as I perceive them - with this whole “alternate reality game” business.

Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photography blog featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.

Nothing else, only testing!

This talk introduces a paradigm for utilizing human processing power to solve problems that computers cannot yet solve. Traditional approaches to solving such problems focus on improving software. I advocate a novel approach: constructively channel human brainpower using computer games.

"Staring at the Sun" ist das private Fotoblog von Dirk Jesse. Ich lebe seit 1995 in Dresden, bin von Beruf Bauingenieur und liebe die Fotografie.

Hi, I'm Jeff, Lead Architect and Co-Founder of Orbus Gameworks, a game middleware company located in Cambridge, MA focused on providing metrics gathering tools. Before that, I was an associate programmer at Bethesda Game Studios and before that I was a lead programmer at a small government contractor.

Jon Jones is an Art Production Manager at NCsoft Austin, one of the most respected and successful video game studios in the world. He runs an art team composed solely of remote contractors on Dungeon Runners, a recently released free-to-download, free-to-play casual hack and slash MMORPG. Check it out for FREE on www.dungeonrunners.com!

My name’s Scott Jennings. I work as a designer in the computer gaming industry, and comment a lot here on my blog-type thing on massively multiplayer games. Currently I’m at a small startup called John Galt Games, working on getting Webwars: Eve out the door.

Flash Online Magazin

soDA - magazin für visuelle kultur.

nice blogroll

Max Kiesler is an award-winning strategic designer and co-founder and principal of Ideacodes.com, a web consultancy in San Francisco focused on next generation websites