"I call this technology Pictures Under Glass. Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade....Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It's a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best. And yet, it's the star player in every Vision Of The Future."

"Every character from a to z is drawn using every single font with a low opacity."

"While roughly consistent with Bloom’s Taxonomy, her research yielded much greater insight into the sequential nature of learning and its implications on the digital environment." from A List Apart.

A demonstration of what can be accomplished with only 1 K (Kibibyte) of CSS.

a collection of responsive web designs

"'I confess that I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much undetermined and unpredictable, to a pretence of exact knowledge that is likely to be false.'"

"The bookmarklet will scan the CSS of the page in order to identify existing web fonts. Then, using magical unicorns and javascript rainbows, FFFFALLBACK clones the page and provides a tool where you can test and analyze different fallback font choices."

"The answer is simple: the process of identifying a product opportunity and value statement is not easy and the skillset required is still coming of age."

"A tiny radio show that explores the 99% invisible activity that shapes the design of our world."

"One thousand journals are traveling from hand to hand throughout the world. Those who find them will add their stories and drawings, and then pass the journal along in an ongoing collaborative art form."

"Mind reading is no way to base fundamental content decisions."

"URLs are universal....They are the one universal syntax of the web. Don’t take that for granted."

"eyeo brings together the most creative coders, designers and artists working today, and shaping tomorrow - expect an amazing three days of talks, labs, demos & events fueled by the people and tools that are transforming digital culture."

"In this course students will learn to use the principles of Interaction Design to define a software project..." from WaSP InterAct Curriculum.

"I took a trip once."

The new business book from 37signals.

"Designing for .edu has some unique challenges, but some great opportunities as well." from Viget.

"Once you overload the user, you train them not to pay attention." Seth Godin.

"My point is that responsive web design isn’t something that can be tacked on to the end of an existing workflow. It requires a different mindset, one that considers the medium from the outset. If you’re currently thinking in proportions rather than pixels, the transition to responsive web design will be relatively painless." from Adactio.

0to255 is a simple tool that helps web designers find variations of any color.

"The Institute For Figuring is an organization dedicated to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science, mathematics and the technical arts. The Institute’s interests are twofold: the manifestation of figures in the world around us and the figurative technologies that humans have developed through the ages. From the physics of snowflakes and the hyperbolic geometry of sea slugs, to the mathematics of paper folding, the tiling patterns of Islamic mosaics and graphical models of the human mind, the Institute takes as its purview a complex ecology of figuring."

Design that Matters (DtM), a 501c3 nonprofit based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, creates new products that allow social enterprises in developing countries to offer improved services and scale more quickly.

"We love cool gadgets as much as anybody else. We just want to be thoughtful about the stuff we've bought. Even the most cutting-edge, tech-savvy geeks in the world are choosing to hang on to their phones or their iPods that still work just fine."

"...research results such as eye-tracking studies, reports, analytics, and usability surveys..."

The mission of the Society for News Design is to enhance communication around the world through excellence in visual journalism.

"Remember, multi-touch interfaces don’t make computers more human, they allow us to be a little more human while we are using them."

"Urbanized looks at the issues and strategies behind urban design, featuring some of the world's foremost architects, planners, policymakers, builders, and thinkers."

"Part of the graduate thesis of designer Dominic Flask, this site was created as a teaching tool for young designers just beginning to explore graphic design and as a reference tool for all designers. It is supposed to provide brief overviews of a wide range of topics rather than an in-depth study of only a few. It is a constantly evolving, changing, expanding reference library."

"As the distance between the maker and user increases, so does the difficulty of designing a great user experience."

"1. You can influence your audience on the Web, but you can’t control them."

"Inspired by ecological survival, TERRA PLANA believes in a variety of non-generic products supporting ideas of sustainability: lightness, anatomic design, disassembly and durability."

The Green Products Innovation Institute (GPII) is a non-profit organization created to bring about a large scale transformation in the way we make the things we make.

The Touch Gesture Reference Guide is a unique set of resources for software designers and developers working on touch-based user interfaces.

"We don't have to maintain the pretense of a magical process that guarantees optimal results, but neither are we given free license to design whatever we want. Our decisions become accountable to the best available evidence whenever possible."

Welcome to 48 Hour Magazine, a raucous experiment in using new tools to erase media's old limits. As the name suggests, we're going to write, photograph, illustrate, design, edit, and ship a magazine in two days.

If you can't open it, you don't own it: a Maker's Bill of Rights to accessible, extensive, and repairable hardware.

Web users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page fold. Although users do scroll, they allocate only 20% of their attention below the fold. from Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox.

IxD10.

from slayeroffice.

Designer Steven Heller traces the evolution of the tiny symbols for each Olympic sport since their appearance in 1936. from NYT.

Emphasizing collaborative design-led research, the MFA Transdisciplinary Design in the School of Design Strategies at Parsons will serve as an academic laboratory in New York City for graduate students seeking to define the next phase of design practice globally.

adaptable, minimalist interfaces

Material ConneXion is a consultancy that connects materials scientists and design specialists with anyone seeking a better—stronger, lighter, more sustainable—material. They also curate a library of innovative materials that everyone from industrial designers to fashion students can access for research. In their annual Medium Awards, they recognize 12 exceptional new materials, now on display at their headquarters in New York City. from Seed.

Scroll features in depth articles by deeply experienced practitioners in the fields of user experience design, web design, web development, information architecture, accessibility and more.

A discourse on the process of designing for real people.

Favourite Website Awards. Web awards at the cutting edge.

In praise of the chrome logos and lettering affixed to vintage automobiles and electric appliances — those unsung metal emblems and badges that are overlooked, forgotten, damaged, lost to time or the dump.

If I was standing in 1995 and looking ahead to 2009 and was told how all of those technical restrictions would be lifted, of what would be technically possible, I’d imagine 2009’s web to look a lot more exciting than it does.

The increasing deployment of sensors and hand-held electronics in recent years is allowing a new approach to the study of the built environment. The way we describe and understand cities is being radically transformed - alongside the tools we use to design them and impact on their physical structure. Studying these changes from a critical point of view and anticipating them is the goal of the SENSEable City Laboratory, a new research initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Digital Design and Dialogue

CSS3 introduces a couple of new ways to specify colours, and one of those is RGBA. The A stands for Alpha, which refers to the level of opacity of the colour, or to put it another way, the amount of transparency. from 24 ways.

With toxic compounds turning up in animals, food, and people all over the world, scientists are calling for green chemistry: a sustainable ethos of product design.

Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture.

"Basically, the only thing that matters in terms of consistency going forward is consistency of the quality of user experience."

Sound sound™. Hand-crafted sound systems for iPod.

The color palette is shrinking.

1501 East Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN 55414

"An unlikely mix, perhaps, but what we have in common is passion for creating the next generation of computers. Our two-year pursuit has been continually fueled by enthusiasm and excitement about our mission, and the opportunity to design each and every part of litl. The results are simple, useful and delightful."

This site is dedicated to the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better. Be it for yourself, for the environment, or for something entirely different, the only thing that matters is that it’s change for the better.

Did you know the first “brain-tweet” was sent out this year? How about that we may someday be customizing windshields with widgets?

Too often I notice designers and non-designers alike equating creativity with design. I find this assumption disturbing because it is one of the many fallacies that allow unskilled but creative pretenders to consider themselves capable design professionals when they’re nothing of the sort.

immersive projection design

they say in space, "no one can hear you scream." well, they can't hear the low drone of the internal power generators kick on again when you're half way to nowhere. i can. i work for a shipping company called "intergalactic transport." i travel back and forth from rock to rock carrying those two all important gems- salt and vinegar. there's a lot of time to kill up here so i downloaded a grandma program and she's been teaching me how to quilt. there's no "log cabins" or "poinsettias" around so i just stare out the window until something catches my eye. it's nice every once in a while to shoot the shit with a fellow traveler, or get caught up in the new dawn celebrations in the outer rim, but mostly it's just me; with a lot of time on my hands.

We invite you to help turn the open Web into a rich learning environment and explore new possibilities for learning online as part of the Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge, sponsored by the Mozilla Foundation with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

The design ideology can make or break a site. from Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox.

An open collection of communication tools used in design processes that deal with complex systems.

Interaction design. Usable design. Knowledgeable design.

Lumadessa is a little art and design label by Josh Brill.

Billions spent on this. Billions spent on that. from Information is Beautiful.

Photomicrography Competition. Small World is regarded as the leading forum for showcasing the beauty and complexity of life as seen through the light microscope.

Over the last year or so, there’s been a lot of talk about grid systems and using column grids for website layouts. from a list apart.

Typeface designer Jonathan Hoefler, type designer and president of Hoefler & Frere-Jones and Steven Heller, co-chair of the MFA Designer as Author program at the School of Visual Arts. From WNYC.

RedesignGoogle lets you completely customize the look of Google Search by installing user-submitted designs from an online gallery. from WebMynd.

Nowcasting is the first conference to apply contemporary design theory to emerging issues in the digital humanities. Showcasing digital humanities projects at every level from google mapping to supercomputing visualization, the Nowcasting seminar proposes that learning from communication design, interaction design, and industrial design will be vital to 21st century humanistic inquiry.

Print is a bimonthly magazine about visual culture and design.

Touch is a research project that investigates Near Field Communication (NFC), a technology that enables connections between mobile phones and physical things.

Image Spark lets you upload and create a library of images that inspire you in whatever it is you do.

Hard skills from a soft science. from the MIT Sloan Management Review.

In this installment, you’ll find stuff on productivity, some history on web typography (as well as tips on effective web typography), and a few nice design showcases for inspiration.