It feels like Sunday
24 03 2008But it is Monday ; Easter Monday
Easter here in Italy is the big church festival of the year. In Canada, I always thought of Christmas being the most important church day of the year – but then what would I know! Interestingly, while England and North America include Good Friday as an integral part of the celebration – it is not a holiday here. Today, Monday is.
This allows me an opportunity to add to the blog. Not that I have neglected it!
I have upgraded, re-installed it twice, and re-input all the articles that were there previously! Thank goodness for backups. What really saved my bacon was the program I mention a few blogs ago – ecto – Still in beta 3 and being updated regularly, it is still a work in progress. I have been having trouble trying to make the entries consistent looking but fonts, styles, sizes and all sorts creep in that I do not want. At the moment I have reverted to using a plain text editor – Text Wangler by Bare Bones Software, Inc. This is the free version of their product BBEdit
BBEdit is the leading professional HTML and text editor for the Macintosh. Specifically crafted in response to the needs of Web authors and software developers, this award-winning product provides an abundance of features for editing, searching, and manipulation of text. BBEdit transforms text with high performance.
Then I will open my WordPress pages in Safari. Have all of you downloaded this weeks update from Apple! It is worth it. If you go under the menu item View to Customize Toolbar you will see some new icons. One for tabs, one for a side bar, one for bugs and one for tools – under that tools menu there is a whole lot of new items – or at least new to me. You can now figure out what the various page features are! This adds some of the features that can be added through plugins with Firefox. I also use Saft and Safari Stand – add-ons to the program.
- Saft is a Safari plugin to add features like draggable tabs, full-screen browsing, search-able bookmarks and history, URL shortcuts, kiosk mode and more.
- SafariStand for Mac OS X – Includes: Sidebar (thumbnail tab), ‘Stand Bar’ (Bookmark, History, Side Bar compatible, Simple RSS Reader), ‘Quick Search’,'Stand Serach’ – supports Spotlight
Saft amongst its many features allow me to save single page pdf’s and SafariStand presents the tabs as little page images down the side! Neither are really needed but we must play with out toys!
I have not given up with ecto, and I still bounce between FireFox and Safari – I am itching to upgrade Wordpress to 2.5 – which is a Release Candidate but not yet official and I want to try adding some images to the weblog – but slowly slowly. At the same time I’m continuing to alter the look of our SmugMug site.
Anyhow, onto today’s entry:
AUTO Design
B.A.T. stands for Berlinetta Aerodinamica Tecnica. An article and a slide show from the New York Times:
From a wonderful car shape, onto a green design:
The Lightning Car Company - The Lightning Car Company is proud to release one of the UK’s first electric sports cars for 2008.Combining classic, British sports car design with racing car technology and state of the art NanoSafe™ battery power and Hi-Pa Drive™ electric motor innovation, the Lightning has been developed with exhilarating performance front of mind. Whilst its head-turning looks will appeal to the most discerning of drivers, unlike other sports cars, the Lightning is also easy on the conscience. With virtually no polluting emissions, this energy-efficient car uses clean technology and will have the ultimate green rating. Following production of several petrol Lightnings and with the electric prototype build now well underway, the electric Lightning GT is now available to pre-order.
IDEAs
As a source of ideas I have mentioned TED already. A good idea that is well undertaken and appears to have results by causing the ideas it showcases to snowball. This has in the past been sponsored by the likes of Adobe and BMW. This year a major sponsor was Autodesk
Autodesk not only participated as a major sponsor, but hosted a lunch on Sustainable Design featuring Autodesk CEO Carl Bass and IDEO CEO Tim Brown as well as demonstrated a technology experiment called the BIGVIZ.
In their words:
- The BIGVIZ is an exploration in visualizing the Big Ideas presented on the TED mainstage. Two visual cartographers, David Sibbet and Kevin Richards, created over 700 spontaneous sketches of the presenters’ ideas using Autodesk Sketchbook Pro software running on Wacom Cintiq tablets and rendered on a Perceptive Pixel multi-touch display. These tools illustrate the power of interactive visualization to present the big picture to foster insight and communicate ideas visually, central principles of design innovation.
- THE BIGVIZ-Download a 200 page Acrobat pdf book featuring the sketches, illustrations and ideamaps of each of the TED mainstage presenters.
- THE BIGVIZ Movie -Watch a three minute movie of the TED2008 BIGVIZ sketches created by Autodesk animator and compositor Keith Chamberlain with music scored by TEDster Michael Montes.
I found all that out, and watched the movie and downloaded the pdf all because I was visiting the site to view some of the newer offerings from this years conference. I thought the two listed below were really good:
Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight - Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened — as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding — she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.
Craig Venter: On the verge of creating synthetic life - “Can we create new life out of our digital universe?” asks Craig Venter. And his answer is, yes, and pretty soon. He walks the TED2008 audience through his latest research into “fourth-generation fuels” — biologically created fuels with CO2 as their feedstock. His talk covers the details of creating brand-new chromosomes using digital technology, the reasons why we would want to do this, and the bioethics of synthetic life. A fascinating Q&A with TED’s Chris Anderson follows (two words: suicide genes).
Another exciting project that has been acknowledged by TED through receiving a TED PRIZE is:
The Encyclopedia of Life - This is the very beginning of our exciting journey to document all species of life on Earth. Comprehensive, collaborative, ever-growing, and personalized, the Encyclopedia of Life is an ecosystem of websites that makes all key information about all life
More Reading and Viewing
I love a bookstore – the shelves of books on Art, Design, Photography and Science. And old bookstores with old books on these subjects are just as interesting if not more so, for their historical significance. The new books, the current books have Amazon to bring them to your attention, and in many cases give us a foretaste of the content through the ‘See Inside’ feature. The old books are another issue. The following site in one person interest in old books
BibliOdyssey - Books~~Illustrations~~Science~~History~~Visual Materia Obscura~~Eclectic Bookart. A hard copy in book form, and a review of the book:Touching on the subject of copyright and intellectual property, that I have covered before, with regard to the making of the book Permission Unpossible
Continuing on the theme of intellectual property
You Can’t Picture This - Thousands of UK residents have signed a petition against a law preventing photography and filming in certain public places. Yet this all turned out to be a misunderstanding, and no such law was proposed. Rajesh investigates the way we view the lens and the way it views us.
On the subject of Colour:
Adobe® kuler is an online community where you can explore, create, and share color themes. The color themes in kuler are contributed by its users, many of them designers or in the creative business. You can share with the community your own chromatic ingenuity, too
and a useful spinoff of that is:
Lithoglyph’s Mondrianum is a powerful plug-in that enables Mac applications to leverage the resources of the kuler community. Once installed, Mondrianum acts like a built-in, system-wide color picker, available in any Mac application that supports this feature of Mac OS X. Apple’s own iWork™ and iLife® suites, Google Sketchup™, Adobe® Photoshop®, and renowned applications like Coda, CSSEdit, and many more, all work well with Mondrianum
Colour is but only one type of inspiration one might need. A few other sites that I have found particularly interesting this week are:
- commandshift3 ; A site that shows and rates web site by look. It opens with you deciding which of two images you prefer but as you enter the site you can see what others have voted best and worst.
- A weblog by Andy Rutledge; A beautiful layout and great content. It is called design view
- Royal Magazine ; The Cultivation of Culture – Royal is the private journal of The KDU. (Keystone Design Union). The publication focuses on Collisions, Culture and Capitalism. We believe that we are more than just editors or filters. We believe in active media, and live by the rule of “never just observe, always interact.” We believe that the gravity of our culture is so powerful, nothing and no one are immune to its pull. We are dedicated to injecting sensation back into a numb world.
Images and Thoughts:
How does one express complex ideas in a manner that can be easily understood? This is what we as designers are supposed to do.
We Feel Fine : An exploration of human emotion, in six movements by Jonathan Harris and Sep KamvarHarvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.).
This site and some TED content are included in this Smashing Magazine article that will link you to a wealth of similar stuff.
Data Visualization: Modern Approaches - Data presentation can be beautiful, elegant and descriptive. There is a variety of conventional ways to visualize data – tables, histograms, pie charts and bar graphs are being used every day, in every project and on every possible occasion. However, to convey a message to your readers effectively, sometimes you need more than just a simple pie chart of your results. In fact, there are much better, profound, creative and absolutely fascinating ways to visualize data. Many of them might become ubiquitous in the next few years…
and a similar approach but concerned with time can be found at: mysociety.org Their mission is:
mySociety has two missions. The first is to be a charitable project which builds websites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives. The second is to teach the public and voluntary sectors, through demonstration, how to most efficiently use the internet to improve lives…
It is always interesting to get some idea of the talent that is on the horizon, Papers like the New York Times, or in this case The Guardian follow issues like this:
The top 50 - When it comes to design, the UK is home to some of the world’s biggest talent. But who are the brightest stars? We put together a panel of judges to identify the hottest names. Here they are …
Well that is it for today. Have a lot else I could say but I am off to watch a movie and relax. In closing one more article – not so much political, definitely not entertainment – an article that might add some ‘food for thought’ the next time you hear the term Sharia. Like many people, my understanding of what it is has been negatively framed by miss use and understanding. Like the word Communism vs Socialism these words mask so much – can be interpreted through ignorance, or miss used on purpose, for negative reasons. Anyhow, all this to suggest you might find the article Why Shariah on the New York Times an eye opener and provide you with another perspective on the world around you.Really, that’s it – Ross
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