Pas a Pas is an interactive educational tool for schools that enables children to learn and experiment with different sets of elements using animation. It aims to use the physicality and the animated outcome of stop motion animation to bridge the gap between abstract concepts from maths, physics or arts (usually represented by graphs, equations or words) and reality.

The system consist of three aspects: a platform to record and display animations, sets of elements for animating and a community to share the content generated.

The platform has a display, a camera and an interface with three main modes:

- Assistant: the display shows a guide for the children to place the elements at the right position in each frame. This way it introduces the students to the set of elements and enables them to explore concepts that are being taught in the conventional curriculum. It also intends to give a progressive learning of stop motion techniques in order to create better and more realistic animations.
- Director: children can create their own animated movies using the pieces provided or other objects.
- Collection: children can browse through movies that have been recorded on the same platform, or on remote platforms located in other schools.

Different sets of elements are designed to teach specific content for a certain age group, such as Geometry for 4 to 6 year olds. Each set comes with a cartridge that contains the animation guides. Aside from the sets that the system offers, the collection is scalable as teachers can easily create new animation exercises and share them with the community.

The community serves to provide a space for exchanging knowledge and material generated using the system and discuss new methods of teaching using stop motion animation.

Over the past 25 years, Pixar s team of artists, writers, and directors have shaped the world of contemporary animation with their feature films and shorts. From classics such as Toy Story and A Bug s Life to recent masterpieces such as Up, Toy Story 3, and Cars 2, this comprehensive collection offers a behind-the-scenes tour of every Pixar film to date. Featuring a foreword by Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter, the complete color scripts for every film published in full for the first time as well as stunning visual development art, The Art of Pixar is a treasure trove of rare artwork and an essential addition to the library of animation fans and Pixar enthusiasts.

Andy Brockie from the Guardian's digital design team shares the key stages behind the design development of our new Guardian iPad app

Find color schemes for data visualization.

Color advice for photography.

UC Berkeley’s Geospatial Innovation Facility and the Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) program offers new tools for researchers, policymakers and the general public to explore climate change

You'll find over 1,618,901 user-created color palettes to inspire your ideas.

Easily create mobile web app mocks you can share,
test on multiple platforms, and use in production.

Kor reusable and designed water bottle

The Form of the Book, by Jan Tschichold, is the authority on book design and the best book I have ever read on typography (and I’ve read many, mind you). As a web designer this book taught me how to set readable, easy-to-digest blocks of type. As the lead designer on Unit Interactive’s recently launched Curations series, I found new relevance in these pages. The principles of setting type to be read and laying out a harmonious page transcend medium and materials. A solid understanding of the fundamentals detailed in this book will make any designer better. Instantly.

Users pay close attention to photos and other images that contain relevant information but ignore fluffy pictures used to "jazz up" Web pages.

In February 2008, the New York Times published an unusual chart of box office revenues for 7500 movies over 21 years. The chart was based on a similar visualization, developed by the first author, that displayed trends in music listening. This paper describes the design decisions and algorithms behind these graphics, and discusses the reaction on the Web. We suggest that this type of complex layered graph is effective for displaying large data sets to a mass audience. We provide a mathematical analysis of how this layered graph relates to traditional stacked graphs and to techniques such as ThemeRiver, showing how each method is optimizing a different “energy function”. Finally, we discuss techniques for coloring and ordering the layers of such graphs. Throughout the paper, we emphasize the interplay between considerations of aesthetics and legibility.

Signage—the kind we see on city streets, in airports, on highways, in hospital corridors—is the most useful thing we pay no attention to. When it works well, it tells us where we are (as when an Interstate marker assures us we're on the right highway) and it helps us to get where we want to go (as when an airport banner directs us to our gate). When it fails, we miss trains, we're late to appointments, we spend hours pacing the indistinguishable floors of underground parking garages, muttering to ourselves in mounting frustration and fury. And in some cases, especially where automobiles are involved, the consequences of bad signage can be fatal.

Have you ever wished you could style checkboxes, drop down menus, radio buttons, and file upload inputs? Ever wished you could control the look and feel of your form elements between all browsers?

If so, Uniform is your new best friend.

Uniform masks your standard form controls with custom themed controls. It works in sync with your real form elements to ensure accessibility and compatibility.

Ember is the best way to share your design inspiration with the world - from webpages to screenshots, design to illustration, Ember is built for creatives looking to build an online design scrapbook.

In 2006, the artist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier published an incisive, groundbreaking and highly controversial essay about “digital Maoism” — about the downside of online collectivism, and the enshrinement by Web 2.0 enthusiasts of the “wisdom of the crowd.” In that manifesto Mr. Lanier argued that design (or ratification) by committee often does not result in the best product, and that the new collectivist ethos — embodied by everything from Wikipedia to “American Idol” to Google searches — diminishes the importance and uniqueness of the individual voice, and that the “hive mind” can easily lead to mob rule.

Back in the early 1980s, Dieter Rams was becoming increasingly concerned by the state of the world around him – “an impenetrable confusion of forms, colours and noises.” Aware that he was a significant contributor to that world, he asked himself an important question: is my design good design?

As good design cannot be measured in a finite way he set about expressing the ten most important principles for what he considered was good design. (Sometimes they are referred as the ‘Ten commandments’.)

Here they are.

a massive databse of vintage ads

Once again, The Times Magazine looks back on the past year from our favored perch: ideas. Like a magpie building its nest, we have hunted eclectically, though not without discrimination, for noteworthy notions of 2009 — the twigs and sticks and shiny paper scraps of human ingenuity, which, when collected and woven together, form a sort of cognitive shelter, in which the curious mind can incubate, hatch and feather. Unlike birds, we can also alphabetize. And so we hereby present, from A to Z, the most clever, important, silly and just plain weird innovations we carried back from all corners of the thinking world. To offer a nonalphabetical option for navigating the entries, this year we have attached tags to each item indicating subject matter. We hope you enjoy.

is an online tool that makes it easy for you to create, link together, preview, and share mockups of your website or application.

The Web Trend Map community curates meaningful link trends by choosing sources they trust.

I recently attended an excellent Made by Many event hosted at BBH which featured a re-presentation by Manuel Lima of his 2009 TED talk on data visualisation. Manuel is the curator of visualcomplexity.com and is an eloquent, modest, charming pioneer in this fascinating field. As a novice myself, I could not help wondering why we are all so immediately and instinctively attracted to the best of data visualisation.To start with, I’m sure there is some fundamental truth that for most of us data become meaningful only when we can see scale, change, patterns and relationships. Seeing is understanding.

Convertbot Convertbot is a unit conversion robot. Convert currency, length, mass, time and much more in an exciting new way! Converting numbers will never again be a mundane task. In addition to its innovative interface, our robot is smart enough to convert to and from mixed units. Are you 5 foot 9 inches tall? Other converters require you to convert that to 5.75 ft in your head before being able to enter it. Convertbot allows mixed units like Foot + Inches, Pounds + Ounces, and more!

Some nice Ubuntu Themes (aka Gnome themes).

A 3d colour picker?

This is a self-initiated project based on the scenario – If the world were a village of 100 people. There are a few different versions of this text in circulation about the world’s statistics. I found the data very striking and neatly summarises the world that we live in. So I used information graphics to re-tell the story in another creative way. I designed a set of 20 posters, which contain most of the information. I used simple vector graphics that related to a statistic in order to present the information in the simplest and most accessible way.

While I might use some different language today, this technique I posted in 2004 (inspired by Alexander) is still a major help when I’m designing a UI with many elements to juggle. The reason I come back to it is that it helps me design with language first instead of empty templates. Too often a design starts top-down with empty content areas (maybe a main column and a sidebar) and then we fill those boxes in until its “done.” Filling in the boxes would work fine, except having a bunch of stuff on the page doesn’t mean we served the design goals.

Great use of the flickr photostream (via @gvenk via gizmodo.com)

Rated Five Stars at Amazon.com since the day it was published, “Taking Your Talent to the Web” is now a free downloadable book from zeldman.com

This website is part of the Master's thesis The Form of Facts and Figures, developed by Christian Behrens in the Interface Design program at Potsdam University of Applied Sciences. Its goal is the development of a design pattern taxonomy for the field of data visualization and information design.

Entrepreneur Mark Gorton wants to do for people what he already helped do for files: move them from here to there in the most efficient way possible using open-source tools.

In the late 1800s, the Brooklyn Bridge was built with no power tools, no heavy machinery, and only a basic, evolving understanding of how to make steel. It’s not these facts, but the stories surrounding the facts that inspire me when I take a good, long stare at a suspension bridge. But first…

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One Amish-man told me that the problem with phones, pagers, and PDAs (yes he knew about them) was that "you got messages rather than conversations." That's about as an accurate summation of our times as any.

Great website design.

The 100% Easy-2-Read Standard Most websites are crammed with small text that’s a pain to read. Why? There is no reason for squeezing so much information onto the screen. It’s just a stupid collective mistake that dates back to a time when screens were really, really small. So…

Some of the (..) ideas are already familiar from the film Minority Report, whose characters performed forensic analysis using massive, gesturally driven displays. The similarity is no coincidence: one of Oblong's founders served as science advisor to Minority Report and based the design of those scenes directly on his earlier work at MIT.

As part of the new brand identity of the Dutch government Peter Verheul designed a custom typeface for all forms of visual communications.

Experience the Web, GrApple style, with Firefox: the fastest, easiest-to-use web browser in the world. With its simple, elegant interface, Firefox + GrApple gets out of your way and lets you enjoy the Web faster and nicer than any browser.

Anand Agarawala presents BumpTop, a user interface that takes the usual desktop metaphor to a glorious, 3-D extreme, transforming file navigation into a freewheeling playground of crumpled documents and clipping-covered "walls."

This is the new version of Arthemia. I’ve done some changes in the post list in the front page, solve some CSS problem, added the thumbnail feature for post list in front page, archive, and search page, modify the comment list style, and added the WP-PageNavi plugin support. Pages and sub-pages in the top navigation bar are now shown automatically.

Hilarious! - "The patented alarm clock that runs away and hides to get you out of bed. Clocky gives you one chance to get up. But if you snooze, Clocky will jump off your nightstand and wheel around your room looking for a place to hide, beeping all the while. You'll have to get out of bed to silence his alarm. Clocky is kind of like a misbehaving pet, only he will get up at the right time."

Cleaner and cool look and feel (FriendFeed is already clean, this makes it a lot cleaner)

Dutch design agency

This theme is a sleek and simple minimalist design for wordpress made to bring the content forward, and everything else out of view. The theme is designed with a focus on typography and effective whitespace, and sports the same single column fixed with de

Physical money is disappearing and we are moving towards a cashless society where hard cash only exists to avoid taxes or to buy illegal services and goods. A suitcase of money even had a magic cinematic effect making people do or believe in almost anythi

The Work of Jonathan Harris

Michael Wesch is a cultural anthropologist and media ecologist exploring the impacts of new media on human interaction.

Twistori filters Twitter posts around "I love", "I hate", "I think", "I believe", "I feel", "I wish".

George explains how the Flickr community started, and how the users shaped the Flickr web platform in more ways than the site itself shaped the user interaction.

With the latest release of Ubuntu, I was interested to see how far Linux had come since then in terms of being used easily by the mainstream. So, I tricked my grudging girlfriend Erin into sitting down at a brand new Ubuntu 8.04 installation and performin

This is the official home for the Fauna for Wordpress theme. Grab your latest copy here, and post bugs in the forum.

This CSS tutorial will show you how to display two double-quote images using one blockquote tag. The trick here is apply one background image to blockquote, and then apply another background to the first-letter (pseudo-element) of blockquote.

Contagious is a quarterly intelligence briefing in magazine, DVD and online format. It identifies the ideas, trends and innovations behind the world’s most revolutionary marketing strategies.