infovore + design   584

greg.org: the making of: Jasper Johns Making Silkscreens, By Katy Martin
"The problem with ideas ís, the idea is often simply a way to focus your interest in making a work. The work isn't necessarily, I think-a function of the work is not to express the idea.... The idea focuses your attention in a certain way that helps you to do the work."
ideas  work  making  design  jasperjohns  via:moleitau 
5 days ago by infovore
Avengers - jayse
"This is just an image dump of marvel approved stills and screenshots of my work on the film. I'll do a proper post soon - this is a fraction of the work - But I had the distinct pleasure of working with Cantina Creative, leading the design of the glass screens for the Helicarier in the Avengers. I also led the design and animation of the all new and upgraded Mark VII Hud...

Included are some partial explanations of how the HUD diagnostic functions
Variations of it in 'all clear' mode, and a 'battle mode', after the suit has suffered damage and new windows have popped up to show depleted weapon stores and hazardous environmentals and general.

The flight menu was designed with input from an A-10 Fighter Pilot. I like to keep my stuff accurate.

I start all designs on paper so I included some ideas for the dock icons. In the final icons, the more detailed versions show system status based on the way they animate."

Lots of lovely detail in the work on all the fictional UI in the Avengers - looking forward to it being unpacked.
design  film  movies  ui  designfiction  avengers  hud 
5 days ago by infovore
BERG x Ericsson: ‘Joyful net work’ and Murmurations – Blog – BERG
"Here there are feedback mechanisms that produce more affect and pleasure – for instance the feedback involved in tuning a musical instrument, sound system or a radio. Gardening also seems to be a rich area for examination – where there is frequent work, but the sensual and systemic rewards are tangible." Beautiful work, as ever: I really liked the rewards-for-effort they point out.
berg  design  networks  interaction  work  pleasure  gardening 
10 days ago by infovore
Prototyping without physics - Edge Magazine
"It should be pointed out, however, that physics is not the only systemic toy upon which fun games can be built. Probability fields, such as those forged by the colours, numbers and suits in a deck of cards, and the stochastic patterns that emerge from mixing those cards up, are another well-known toy upon which many great games are built. In fact, there is a literal infinity of foundational systemic toys upon which meaningful games can be built, yet for the most part, the game industry focuses on building baseline game engines that simulate one single toy that is proven to only be marginally fun: physical reality."
design  games  simulation  physics  toys  systems  clinthocking 
15 days ago by infovore
It’s Not Working For Me: #crit | Mark Boulton
"Design critique is not a place to be mean, but it’s also not the place to be kind. You’re not critiquing to make friends. Kind designers don’t say what they mean. ‘Kind’ is not about the work, and design critique exists to make us better, but mostly, it’s to make the work better." Mark Boulton talks about the value of crits. I was introduced to the vocabulary and tone of the design/art-school crit at Berg, and find it useful, though I daren't think what 18-year-old me would have made of it. Stressing that it's not personal, it's about the work, and that that is contained within a magic circle, is really difficult, and it's really important.
art  design  process  crit  criticism  education 
19 days ago by infovore
Hard Copy, pt. 1 – Quinns
"The point is that this is lossless game design. There is no shark pit. When you buy a board game, what you take home and play is the original concept precisely as it was in the designer’s head. That’s the mecca for video games. For board games, it’s the norm."
boardgames  design  quintinsmith  writing 
29 days ago by infovore
Descriptive Camera
"Modern digital cameras capture gobs of parsable metadata about photos such as the camera's settings, the location of the photo, the date, and time, but they don't output any information about the content of the photo. The Descriptive Camera only outputs the metadata about the content." Lovely: a camera powered by Mechanical Turk.
camera  design  information  hardware  naturallanguage  mechanicalturk 
4 weeks ago by infovore
Eye blog » Playing with the logo. How Ken Garland + Associates had graphic fun with the Galt Toys identity
Gorgeous work from Ken Garland, and an exhibition of the Galt Toys work in Shoreditch. And, best of all, the exhibition lets you play with the toys. Will be going to this.
kengarland  galttoys  toys  play  design  graphicdesign 
6 weeks ago by infovore
In Response To Bruce Sterling's "Essay On The New Aesthetic" | The Creators Project
"In making this list, Sterling privileges the visible objects of New Aesthetics over the invisible and algorithmic ones. New Aesthetics is not simply an aesthetic fetish of the texture of these images, but an inquiry into the objects that make them. It’s an attempt to imagine the inner lives of the native objects of the 21st century and to visualize how they imagine us." I'm never quite convinced by the Creators Project, and their introduction to this feels a bit woolly, but the interviews are all very good. This quotation, from Greg Borenstein, is excellent.
newaesthetic  computervision  machines  design 
7 weeks ago by infovore
stamen design | Watercolor Textures
"The process of going back and forth from painting to the computer became a continuous cycle. Midway through as I became more and more familiar with the outcome of how the actual texture would appear on the screen when tiled, my painting process became more specific to achieve the desired texture, color, darkness, stroke, range of value that I wanted for each feature on the map." Lovely stuff from Geraldine on painting, textures, and process.
painting  texture  design  maps  process  stamen  watercolour 
8 weeks ago by infovore
Rob Ricketts — Graphic Design & Typography
"A series of informative posters detailing how some of the most notable drum sequences were programmed using the Roland TR-808 Drum Machine. Each sequence has been analyzed and represented as to allow users to re-programme each sequence, key for key." Gorgeous. (If I had to pick, I'd take Voodoo Ray - which is a lovely piece of drum programming amongst many other things).
art  design  music  drummachine  808  techno  posters 
9 weeks ago by infovore
Aiming (much) higher than Hackspaces and FabLabs… « Funding Startups (& other impossibilities)
"Where you see gadget, I see process. Moreover, where you see prose, I see poetry: for the UK will continue to have no manufacturing all the while it has lost its collective sense of the poetry of production. The ignominious application of production line metaphors to (the actually very creative) industrial life has helped alienate people from the process of making: whereas Lean Manufacturing instead helps to reconnect workers with the project as a whole, by seeing waste as a thing that erodes value, and that corrodes the relationship between customer and producer by making it unnecessarily fragile and contingent." There's lots to recommend in this piece. I'm not sure I agree about software, even ignoring my vested interested and perspective, but there's so much else of value in here. I think this paragraph spoke most to me, though.
manufacturing  design  engineering  uk  poetry 
11 weeks ago by infovore
stamen design | Esquire: where the maps come from
"I've often felt a sense of sadness that it's only the final piece that sees the light of day; there's a lightness to the experimentation that goes into the early parts of projects, when you're not worried so much about final implementation and instead can just play. We're going to start exposing some of this process, and this post is about the thinking that went into http://migration.stamen.com/, a recent project for Esquire Magazine." Lovely post from Stamen about the early stages of invention for this project.
showeverything  stamen  design  maps  invention 
february 2012 by infovore
Adventures (in code) - Alastair Coote • I had no idea how to make custom maps, so I learnt by doing. You should too.
Nice post about building your own maptiles in Tilemill. Something to return to when I have a location-specific maps problem to solve, perhaps.
maps  design  programming 
february 2012 by infovore
Adactio: Journal—Image-y nation
"I remember when Ajax was getting popular, all the problems associated with frames rose from the grave: bookmarking, breaking the back button, etc. Now that we’re in a time of small-screen devices on low-bandwidth networks, we’re rediscovering a lot of the same issues we had when we were developing for 640 pixel wide screens with 28K or 56K modems." This is the thing.
web  design  doingitright  performance  jeremykeith 
february 2012 by infovore
Chris Heathcote: anti-mega: sand in the vaseline
"Experience designers love a bit of Saarinen: “Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.” That’s what’s wrong here, an RFID card is not considered within the context of a wallet, containing multiple competing RF field creating information and ID objects, and this new, electric wallet isn’t considered within the larger system of shops and the invisible RF world." Companies don't design for seams - and, as Chris points out, when they do, it's for seams between all their own products.
saarinen  rfid  experience  chrisheathcote  seams  design 
january 2012 by infovore
Fingle for iPad
Two-player game designed to encourage awkward/fun bodily contact. Well, finger-contact. Really lovely idea: the sort of thing shared screens are designed for.
design  games  interaction  ios  sharedscreens  intimacy 
january 2012 by infovore
Favorite Typefaces from 2011 « Opinionated Type
Interesting list; worth spending some time staring at, for sure.
design  typefaces  type 
january 2012 by infovore
Pig Chase, a game for pigs and humans – Hubbub
"The choice for light as a medium is the result of a systematic exploration of what kinds of stimuli pigs respond to. We were aware of some evidence indicating pigs enjoy light. But when we saw how they reacted to a laser pointer, we knew we were on to something." Kars' frankly crazy game for pigs and people is in video form now, but he's deadly serious about it existing. I'm quite excited for him.
karsalfrink  hubbub  pigs  buta  play  games  interaction  design 
december 2011 by infovore
Styleguide — Paul Robert Lloyd
Attractive styleguide for a personal site. Might resort to these one day soon.
design  css  styles  typography 
december 2011 by infovore
Customer Service Romance - See Jayne
"I built a working prototype of a Customer Service phone bot that has personal issues she'd like to talk about and over time falls in love with the caller. She uses the tools at her disposal (discounts, upgrades, hold music, confirmation numbers) to communicate her feelings towards you as best she can." Hah!
robots  bots  phones  support  fiction  design 
november 2011 by infovore
“Sometimes the stories are the science…” – Blog – BERG
"We are making a model of how a product is, to the degree that we can in video. We subject it to as much rigour as we can in terms of the material and technological capabilities we think can be built.

It must not be magic, or else it won’t feel real.

I guess I’m saying sufficiently-advanced technology should be distinguishable from magic." This is a lovely pulling-together of things from Matt J, and really manages to express the notions of "physics" and "rulesets" that I always enjoyed so much.
berg  design  film  rules  physics 
november 2011 by infovore
New tables – Hubbub
I really like the Hubbub tables.
tables  design  offices  hubbub 
november 2011 by infovore
A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design
"Are we really going to accept an Interface Of The Future that is less expressive than a sandwich?" Yes, good.
design  interaction  hands  glowingrectangles 
november 2011 by infovore
Paper Bits
"“coding” is not the only concrete skill required “to work at the crossover of creative and technology”. Especially if you want to make an actual thing that lives outside of a screen." I'll gladly concede Josh's point. This is very much worth reading; if anything, the only reason I focused on code was the original W+K focus on that, likely because that's the technology they're interested in. Good points all, though.
making  hardware  product  design  creativetechnology  joshdimauro 
october 2011 by infovore
The Guardian iPad edition design evolution | Media | guardian.co.uk
Lovely behind-the-scenes on how the Guardian iPod app slowly evolved.
design  ipad  guardian  newspaper  layout 
october 2011 by infovore
[this is aaronland] the unbearable finality of pixel space
"I've long held that all media transit from being "functional" to "art" when they are no longer economically viable. It is that transition which dampers the cost and the consequence of failure and makes the space necessary for people to experiment and play. Think of lithography which was born of purely utilitarian needs and sherparded the arrival of the mass-produced image only to become capital-O objects as soon as the offset press was invented." I love Aaron.
art  design  maps  aaronstraupcope  culture 
october 2011 by infovore
Mark Porter » Blog Archive » New work: The Guardian iPad app
"Unlike the iPhone and Android apps, which are built on feeds from the website, this one actually recycles the already-formatted newspaper pages. A script analyses the InDesign files from the printed paper and uses various parameters (page number, physical area and position that a story occupies, headline size, image size etc) to assign a value to the story. The content is then automatically rebuilt according to those values in a new InDesign template for the app.

It’s not quite the “Robot Mark Porter” that Schulze and Jones imagined in the workshops, but it’s as close as we’re likely to see in my lifetime. Of course robots do not make good subs or designers, so at this stage some humans intervene to refine, improve and add character, particularly to the article pages. Then the InDesign data goes into a digital sausage machine to emerge at the other end as HTML." Niiiiice.
berg  design  layout  guardian  markporter  ipad  print 
october 2011 by infovore
The Transformers at dConstruct 2011 – Hubbub
Kars' "hypertext remix" of his marvellous dConstruct talk. It was sensitive and well thought-through, and appealed to me as both a designer and game maker. Very much worth your time.
baarle  karsalfrink  dconstruct2011  cities  games  design  talks 
september 2011 by infovore
Science fiction, fantasy, design and cultural invention | Design Culture Lab
"A lot of design is very good at stories; far less design is good at plot–and I’m convinced that we need the latter if we want design to serve, as Jack Schulze puts it, as a form of  “cultural invention” instead of problem-solver." Strong stuff on design fiction, the value of urban fantasy, and considering possible realities.
annegalloway  design  designfiction  stories  plot  fantasy 
august 2011 by infovore
Own Brand - FUEL Design & Publishing
"In 1962, when Peter Dixon joined the Sainsbury’s Design Studio, a remarkable revolution in packaging design began. The supermarket was developing its distinctive range of Own Label products, and Dixon’s designs for the line were revolutionary: simple, stripped down, creative, and completely different from what had gone before. Their striking modernity pushed the boundaries, reflecting a period full of optimism. They also helped build Sainsbury’s into a brand giant, the first real ‘super’ market of the time. This book examines and celebrates this paradigm shift that redefined packaging design, and led to the creation of some of the most original packaging ever seen." Classic, gorgeous.
packaging  british  design  food  sainsburys 
august 2011 by infovore
Tabletop: Analog Game Design | ETC-Press
"In this volume, people of diverse backgrounds -- tabletop game designers, digital game designers, and game studies academics -- talk about tabletop games, game culture, and the intersection of games with learning, theater, and other forms. Some have chosen to write about their design process, others about games they admire, others about the culture of tabletop games and their fans. The results are various and individual, but all cast some light on what is a multivarious and fascinating set of game styles."
books  games  design  boardgames 
august 2011 by infovore
ZURB iPhone Omnigraffle Stencils & Sketchsheets - ZURB Playground - ZURB.com
"To keep up with trends, we've developed some iPhone stencils and sketchsheets that'll make the lo-fi stage of development a lot quicker." Passable iOS wireframe templates - but at least they're wireframey, rather than irritating pixel-perfect stencils that are all-too-easy to come by.
design  ios  omnigraffle  stencil 
august 2011 by infovore
Creating new worlds « Bloom Blog
"I needed to get up to speed with doing recursive node structures so I coded up a project that would put a dot on the screen. When you tapped this dot, it would create a bunch of orbiting child-dots. These children could also be tapped, creating even more child nodes. This prototype took less than a day to create and I naively thought we would be done with the whole thing in a week, max. Silly me."

Marvellous, dense post from Robert on designing Planetary: lots of show-everything, material exploration, and plussing. What detail looks like.
design  software  bloom  planetary  detail  plussing 
july 2011 by infovore
[map=yes]
"Designers get handed a tool kit that has as many tools as a good swiss army knife, and the maps reflect these tools. Millions of people use them to make appointments across town, find restaurants, and drive home for the holidays.

But what if, instead of a swiss army knife, we used a box of crayons? Or charcoal and newsprint? Or play-doh? What would those maps look like? What could they tell us about the world?"
data  design  maps  mapping  stamen  whynotmakeitpretty 
july 2011 by infovore
Post by Andy Hertzfeld
"One thing that I learned during the launch of the original Macintosh in 1984 was that the press usually oversimplifies everything, and it can't deal with the reality that there are many people playing critical roles on significant projects. A few people always get too much credit, while most people get too little, that's just the way it has always worked. But luckily, it's 2011 and I can use the service that I helped to create to clarify things." This is Good And Proper. (Also it's good management).
management  design  credit  google  googleplus 
july 2011 by infovore
Prototypes — Bring your mockups to life
"Prototypes for Mac turns your flat mockup images into tappable and sharable prototypes that run on iPhone or iPod touch." Nice.
design  ios  prototype  mockup  interaction 
may 2011 by infovore
Portfolios are silver, LIVE design is gold. | disambiguity
"Let’s own the work that goes live, understand and explain why it is as it is, and work on the skills we need to make sure more good design actually makes it over the line. Otherwise, what’s the point?" Yes.
design  shipping  leisareichelt  delivery 
may 2011 by infovore
DESIGNER NOTES » Blog Archive » Dragon Age Legends: Guilds Explained
"...a genuinely meaningful social mechanic can create its own share of problems. Facebook friends are not necessarily one’s actual friends. Players often announce their names and character details in various forums, hoping to find “fake friends” to fill out their list. Doing so creates three advantages. First, the more friends the player has, the more opportunities for his character to be borrowed and thus earn friend gold for the player. Second, high-level friends make combat far easier because of their high stats and upgraded skills. Finally, a surplus of friends allows the player to bypass the rest time restriction." How do you get around all this? Johnson explains all. It's a really lovely piece of genuinely social game design.
sorenjohnson  games  design  social  meaningful 
april 2011 by infovore
Week 13: Too much is never enough | Urbanscale
"[Mayo is] making a dummy RFID-reader surface for us to mount on a subway turnstile, as well as a companion piece for the MetroCard vending machine. The challenge here is to avoid imposing our own designerly tastes on these artifacts; if we want them to be convincing at that all-important subliminal level, we have to try and imagine them as an extension of the MTA’s existing graphic vocabulary.

And that, in turn, means capturing a certain kind of municipal badness in the design of type and signage: inapposite font selection, clumsy kerning and so on. It’s an odd and demanding kind of discipline — especially for us, with our marked preference for the Vignelliesque."

Realism channeled through suitably ropey implementation.
design  simulation  badness  quality  culture 
april 2011 by infovore
GIRP
This is beyond brilliant. Not because it's More Hard Fun From The Maker Of QWOP, but because it's actually easier than QWOP, and it tickles exactly the same part of my brain that bouldering itself tickled, and it makes brilliant use of finger-gymnastics and the keyboard, and it's marvellous, really. I just want to go home and play it all night.
climbing  controls  game  design  bouldering  GIRP 
march 2011 by infovore
#wikileakspaper | booktwo.org
"Jennifer Brook, who makes artists’ books and iPad apps, speaking earlier this year: “Craftspeople are technologists, and technologists are craftspeople; the only difference is the velocity of the material they choose to work.” Humbly, I would add a further qualification, a further dimension. Celerity, or “proper velocity”, is velocity which takes the effects of relativity into account: the observer is travelling too; we are all travelling in time. The material has its own celerity." Oh, gosh, that's marvellous. Both parts.
stml  jamesbridle  celerity  velocity  materials  design 
march 2011 by infovore
In Bloom « Bloom Blog
"The ways in which people interact with computation are changing swiftly as we move into more casual relationships with our digital services on tablets, big screens, and across social networks. We believe we have some compelling answers about how digital experiences will evolve into these new contexts. Please, follow along with us and explore these playful, dynamic instruments of discovery together." These guys are going to be worth keeping a very beady eye on; what a team.
bloom  visualisation  information  data  design  friends 
february 2011 by infovore
Ben Bashford - Notebook of Things - Emoticomp
"Unless the behaviours and personalities of these things that compute are designed well enough the things that are not so good about them or unavoidable have the potential to come across as flaws in the object’s character, break the suspension of disbelief and do more harm than good. Running out of batteries, needing a part to be replaced or the system crashing could be seen as getting sick, dying - or worse - the whole thing could be so ridiculous and annoying that it gets thrown out on its ear before long." Lots of cracking stuff in this: designing personas, making personalities that aren't annoying, persona-design as role-playing or improv.
ubicomp  personas  acting  improv  design  benbashford 
january 2011 by infovore
URL Design — Warpspire
This is a really good checklist for what modern URL design looks like.
web  design  navigation  url  uri  usability  addressing 
december 2010 by infovore
Slides and notes for ‘Limits of the Imaginable’ – a lecture on the future of applied game design
Kars on games, cities, and biology. Lovely. And: he's exploring game-design for *pigs*, which makes me impossibly excited.
games  design  cities  biology  karsalfrink 
november 2010 by infovore
Game Prototypes
Jonathan Blow's game prototypes; some interesting stuff here, especially in the READMEs.
game  design  experimental  prototypes  jonathanblow 
october 2010 by infovore
The Most Popular Phone in the World
"This is what the next generation of the mega-selling phone will look like. They'll be rough facsimiles of the high-end smartphones forged for well-heeled buyers, stripped of fat and excess—an embodiment of compromise. They'll be 90% of the phone for 20% of the price, with FM radios instead of digital music stores, and flashlights instead of LED flashes. This is how the other half will smartphone, if you want to be so generous as to call the developing world's users a half. We're not even close." Yes.
technology  mobile  design  phones  hardware 
october 2010 by infovore
The Future Is A Blank Canvas Pinned To A Brick Wall « Matthew Sheret.com
"We access that history with tools that were, almost entirely, the props of science fiction my parents might have encountered – if they read it. My phone is my sonic screwdriver, the internet my TARDIS; these are the tools with which I unlock and manipulate time."
future  sf  design  writing  mattsheret  history 
october 2010 by infovore
Gravitation: a video game by Jason Rohrer
"Know that there are no "accidents" in this game design. Everything you notice about the game, and every subtle interaction that you experience, is intentionally packed with meaning." (Gravitation, still, being my favourite of Rohrer's games, I think).
games  gravitation  jasonrohrer  metaphor  design  deliberance 
october 2010 by infovore
Tuning Canabalt - Semi Secret
"...in honor of Canabalt's first birthday (back on September 1st), why not write a guided tour of how everything works instead?" Lots of good tidbits on here; the stuff on hitboxes is particularly well observed and explained.
design  games  canabalt  tuning  hitboxes 
september 2010 by infovore
Designer Diary: Thunderstone - Boardgame News
Nice, detailed writeup of the process of designing Thunderstone (a dungeon-crawling, deck-building game a bit like Dominion).
games  cardgames  deckbuilding  design  diary 
august 2010 by infovore
Wallpaper’s Limited Edition Laser Sailboat - PSFK
"Designer Marian Bantjes has created a stunning graphic design for Wallpaper magazine’s Laser sailboat. For the boat, Bantjes played with the Dazzle camouflage patterns that were prominently used by naval ships in the two World Wars." Brilliant. Bit pricey for a Laser... but still brilliant.
sailing  dinghy  dazzleships  design  gorgeous 
august 2010 by infovore
Gamasutra - News - GDC Europe: Limbo's Carlsen On Making Players Your Worst Enemy And Your Best Friend
"First, he says, think of the player as your worst enemy, and then create the most devious puzzle possible. But then from there, try to work with the player as your friend, so that you can give them the right clues. Start with tough stuff, then scale back." I am not really convinced by this - I find Limbo erring on the side of the cruel and unfair, and think that "thinking of the player as your worst enemy" is a pretty bad rule of thumb, no matter how you later ease off the pressure.
limbo  games  design  difficulty 
august 2010 by infovore
Lee Maguire – Guided by the Whispers of Angels
Nice post on future interfaces, but primarily bookmarked because I can *never* find that GITS:SAC still when I need it, and it's *brilliant*.
newspapers  future  interface  scifi  design  technology  gits 
august 2010 by infovore
GDC Vault - Train (or How I Dumped Electricity and Learned to Love Design)
Brenda Brathwaite is awesome. This is brilliant. You should watch it. (This is also in tune with so many things I'm banging on about at the moment).
games  design  video  brendabrathwaite  gdc10 
july 2010 by infovore
Lookspring » Too much of a good thing
"WonderLab was three days of performers and playmakers coming together to do what you do in a lab – tinker, theorise, experiment and make. A fantastic group of musicians, writers, composers, actors, directors, producers, commissioners, game designers, coders, artists and philosophers and spent three days sharing their brains. I’ve rarely had a greater treat than getting to lead their explorations." Margaret on lots of things, including the marvellous Wonderlab (which is where I've been for the past three days).
wonderlab2010  margaretrobertson  games  design 
july 2010 by infovore
Sixty years of the Fender Telecaster | Music | The Guardian
"In other words, it beggars belief how an object designed six decades ago doesn't look – or, more importantly, sound – kitsch or outdated. The Telecaster's younger and less elegant sibling, the Stratocaster, tends to go wildly in and out of style, but this guitar remains as unimpeachably cool as ever."
guitars  music  fender  telecaster  design 
july 2010 by infovore
Holga D - Holga Digtal Camera - Saikat Biswas
"Holga D is a digital camera inspired from the extremely popular cult of Holga and other toy cameras of its kind. Even though it's a digital camera, it retains the qualities and simplicity of the original Holga camera and brings back the joy and delayed gratification associated with good old analog photography." I like this not because it's a digital version of a Holga, but what a digital camera might be like if it took the same approach as a Holga. I also really like the reversible top panel.
design  camera  holga  digital  previousgeneration  simple  thoughtful 
july 2010 by infovore
Build Blog » Couch Cushion Architecture; A Critical Analysis
"More primal and immediate than any of the previously mentioned examples, it was couch cushion architecture that established the basic building blocks of our design logic. Unrepresented and ignored for too long in the architectural industry, today’s post pays respect to the wonders of couch cushion architecture. We’ve rounded up a (mostly) admirable collection of projects, taken from a randomly conducted search on the internet. Join us as we take a critical analysis of the architecture, methods and design philosophies of living room furniture re-appropriation." Charming, and generous, too.
architcture  criticism  design  children  play 
june 2010 by infovore
Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games
Went in sceptical, but this is a very good/solid presentation: the emphasis on going beyond chucking around the adjective "playful" and actually considering what makes (different kinds of) games work, and what they may/may not be applicable to, is spot-on. And a reminder that I'm behind on my reading, as usual.
games  interaction  design  fun  play 
june 2010 by infovore
Getting Juggly With It (Part One) « Denki
"For the past 20 years I’ve had this urge to make a series of games that never were – mainly to suggest lost archives now discovered; to create an emotional resonance akin to that experienced by, say, new-found Beatles demo tapes – but also the idea of recreating contemporary games and themes in an old style to suggest an alternative past and present." Lovely writing, smart ideas, nice little game, but the clarity of thought is the real stand-out here. Another example of why I love Denki so much.
denki  games  design  nostalgia  juggle 
june 2010 by infovore
Today's Guardian (Phil Gyford’s website)
"Although the finished site looks nothing like a newspaper I think it has more in common with newspapers’ best features than most news websites do. The sense of browsing quickly through stories and reading the ones that catch your eye, feels similar." Phil is smart. This is good.
guardian  reading  newspapers  design  publishing  philgyford 
june 2010 by infovore
Embracing the digital book — Craig Mod
"I'm excited about digital books for a number of reasons. Their proclivity towards multimedia is not one of them. I’m excited about digital books for their meta potential. The illumination of, in the words of Richard Nash, that commonality between two people who have read the same book." Craig Mod, excellent as ever, on e-books. Whilst he mainly talks about type, his point runs far deeper.
books  reading  ebooks  design  typography  digital  multimedia 
april 2010 by infovore
Philip K. Dick - Book Cover Art Gallery
"Philip K. Dick fans from around the world have contributed to this scanned collection of over 650 PKD book covers." Some of these are awesome, from the crazy french covers for VALIS to the German editions of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch - retitled as "LSD-Astronauten".
illustration  pkd  scifi  covers  books  philipkdick  design 
april 2010 by infovore
Mobile Gothic: a flight of fancy « matt.me63.com – Matt Edgar
"The craftsman as hero is a consistent motif in Ruskin’s artistic and social theories. To him, mechanisation and division of labour dehumanise workers, enslaving them to execute exactly the specifications of others. The only way to recapture the humanity in labour is to put the designer back in touch with the tools of the craft and to unleash the creativity of the maker." A lovely metaphorical piece from Matt Edgar, reminding me of how much I need to brush up on my knowledge of the Arts and Crafts movement, if only because of how much I appreciate their sentiments.
johnruskin  engineering  design  mobile  mattedgar  artsandcrafts  gothic 
april 2010 by infovore
Less Talk More Rock- Boing Boing
"A videogame is a staggeringly beautiful canvas. It's a window into another world. A world that lives only as long as the machine is on. A living breathing world with depth and soul that actually exists, right there onscreen, limited only by the vision and imagination of its creators. Seize that thought, and don't let it go." Less talk, more rock. (And: I am enjoying the BB one-off feature art).
games  inspiration  rock  superbrothers  design  designaboveall  justmakeit 
march 2010 by infovore
Preview: Instapaper on iPad - Instapaper Blog
"No huge surprises, except maybe that I changed to dark toolbars. No multi-column reading, no fake book-page animations, and no giant newspaper graphics." Great explanation of Instapaper on the iPad from Marco. And: I'm sure it'll be great; in the past two months, I've become a total Instapaper convert.
instapaper  ipad  app  design  software 
march 2010 by infovore
Above 49: Poor Tools Make Us Shoddy Craftsmen
"By decoupling their data to minimize exporting, they said their polish actually became fun, not to mention efficient. I think many projects would benefit from finding a way to similarly decouple their tunable data." Yup.
tools  games  design  iteration  process  micro 
march 2010 by infovore
Placehold.it - Quick and simple image placeholders
"How does it work? Just put your image size after our URL and you'll get a placeholder." Nifty!
web  design  markup  mockup  images  dynamic  service  useful 
march 2010 by infovore
Chris Heathcote: anti-mega: post-digital media design, an introduction
"Institutions are platforms / Sketching in things". Chris' introduction from the #mbsp SXSW panel; really good stuff, and that was only the introduction! Would have loved to have seen the whole thing.
mbsp  design  chrisheathcote  media  services  curation 
march 2010 by infovore
GDC 2010: Design in Detail: Changing the Time Between Shots for the Sniper Rifle from 0.5 to 0.7 Seconds for Halo 3 « Double Buffered
Ben Zeigler's notes on Bunge's Jaime Griesemer's talk at GDC, all about balancing. Sample quotation: "It can be tricky to balance, because designers can misinterpret competence (getting good at a weapon) with the weapon being balanced. We CANNOT use our intuition at this stage because it will lie to us. Changes will have to be done in larger batches, and we need to avoid bias effects." Really, the whole thing is jampacked with interesting stuff (not all of which I agree with, but most of it is very good indeed).
bungie  games  design  balance  gdc  gdc2010  psychology 
march 2010 by infovore
About this Blog | Free PeepCode Blog
Lovely, lovely article explaining just how the PeepCode Blog works. The blog itself features unique layouts for every post. There's no CMS, no database, but what's going on under the hood is at least as clever - and the flexibility makes the beautiful and clear pages much easier to build.
blog  code  design  ruby  sinatra  markup  sass 
february 2010 by infovore
Designing Armitage | i love typography, the typography and fonts blog
"I had been studying this style of letters on similar buildings in Washington, D.C., and something about them always felt a little dull. But in the Claremount letters I found life in the charming way the awkward proportions and loose spacing came together. So I set about designing a Claremount typeface." Nice article on designing a typeface, and, I must admit, it's rather good-looking (especially for something named after me).
type  typography  design  armitage  narcissism 
february 2010 by infovore
70+ of the Best Free Fonts for Graphic Designers.- unstage
Some of these are very nice; many are likely to end up on posters for dubstep nights in Shoreditch soon, I fear.
free  fonts  type  download  design 
february 2010 by infovore
Mule Design Studio's Blog: The Failure of Empathy
"As an industry, we need to understand that not wanting root access doesn’t make you stupid. It simply means you do not want root access. Failing to comprehend this is not only a failure of empathy, but a failure of service."
culture  service  design  ipad  products  computing  generalpurpose 
february 2010 by infovore
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