My morning scan of the news site sure can be depressing but the web, thankfully is full of a lot of other details. Below are some that caught my attention – not major items but interesting to me as a designer.

But first I want to mention an artist who I met this summer here in MCdV. Sangram Majumdar, Professor of Painting, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD. He was one of the lecturers at the International School of Painting, Drawing and Sculpture (http://www.giotto.org/ ) here, this his first time, as a member of the faculty. Amusingly enough, my first encounter with him was to find him in the main piazza doing a charcoal sketch of the newer section of town, a wonderful architectual drawing. I commented that he ought to be a teacher – his other half who was standing next to him laughed – “well actually, he is”.

The school page for him is at:
 http://www.giotto.org/cimabue/majumdar/index.html And his personal site is: 
http://www.sangrammajumdar.com/

As those of you who have read my background, I have met a few artists in my day – This is one to follow. I think his work is wonderful!

As an aside, he was accompanied by a wonderful violinist this summer, and we had a wonderful time with the couple.

Annelies Mast 2nd Violins, National Symphony Orchestra, Washington DC

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I am alway interested in software that provides interesting methods of showing images. I have previously mentioned JAlbum that will create sites of images, which can then be modified or included inones site. This is another solution

Smooth Javascript Image Zooming For Your Web Pages This much-requested chunk of Javascript to zoom images inline, originally written for this blog but later rolled out to the Panic website and used for screenshots, is now polished up, bug-fixed, available for you to use on your website! More information and details are available at: http://www.cabel.name/2008/02/fancyzoom-10.html

Another approach to image presentation is CoolIris, http://www.cooliris.com which used to be known as Piclens. This works as a plugin to most current browsers

Transform your browser into a full-screen, 3D experience for online photos and videos. *************

For a wonderful reference site on colour, or is that color ?, I suggest you look at -

DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY TUTORIALS – http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/

Learn how to take and edit digital photographs using visual tutorials that emphasize concept over procedure, independent of specific digital camera or lens. Topics range from basic camera tips to advanced techniques

From their site:

Cambridge in Colour was started in 2005, and has since grown substantially both in content and in the number of visitors it attracts. On any given day this site has well over 10,000 different people learning about photography, viewing the gallery and contributing to the forums. Thank you to all those who have helped share this site with others

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If you are having trouble with your downloads speed, but it is not consistent, it might be a case of your ISP throttling some of your bandwidth. When BitTorrent files started they were used for ‘grey’ content so it was simple for the service provider to intervene in this method, for the client to complain would necessitate admitting to downloading quasi-legal content. But the world has moved on, and the format has been adopted by legal content.

The site below may be able to help you pinpoint a throttling issue : http://www.mpi-sws.mpg.de/index_flash.php which will lead you to http://broadband.mpi-sws.mpg.de/transparency/bttest.php?

Certain ISPs have been shown to rate limit or block BitTorrent traffic sent by their customers. While there are multiple reports of this on the web, only a few ISPs have admitted that they manipulate BitTorrent traffic. And, to date, it is hard for users without networking expertise to gain evidence about the behavior of their ISP.This test suite creates a BitTorrent-like transfer between your machine and our server, and determines whether or not your ISP is limiting such traffic. This is a first step towards making traffic manipulation by ISPs more transparent to their customers

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I love visualisations of information. Here is another interesting example I came across.

History flow: from – http://www.research.ibm.com/visual/projects/history_flow/index.htm

Visualising the editing history of Wikipedia pages – History flow is a tool for visualizing dynamic, evolving documents and the interactions of multiple collaborating authors. In its current implementation, history flow is being used to visualize the evolutionary history of wiki* pages on Wikipedia

Below another example of the visualisations of information, this time all in Spanish, I think, but a great graphic of money flowing in and flowing out, and how it has been divided up – from: http://i208.photobucket.com/albums/bb154/chiquiesteban/Presupuestos-dia-1-2.jpg



And here a website of an individual that takes diverse data types and presents them in visually interesting forms – data as ART. Here the mapping of location and intensity of WiFi points during a journey – From : http://yesyesnono.co.uk/ and http://yesyesnono.co.uk/article/30/invisible-journeys

Invisible Journeys May 2, 10:39 AM – Invisible Journeys is my first try at data visualisation. I have seen a few wifi geographical mapping, but they looked a bit too technical to my taste. Here, i aimed at a semi abstract visualisation while keeping the ability to extract sense out of the graphics.

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Those of interested in the history of computing have all heard of the code breaking machines of the war but and article in the NYTimes led me to this gem

The Web Time Forgot : http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/science/17mund.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

PAPER TRAIL The telegraph room at the original Mundaneum in Brussels. (image source – Mundaneum)

The place actually has a site at: http://www.mundaneum.be/

Which is well worth a look if yourlanguage skills are up to the excerpt I have included here:

UN PEU D’HISTOIRE(S)

Le projet du Mundaneum, son histoire:
L’origine du Mundaneum remonte à la fin du XIXème siècle. Créé à l’initiative de deux juristes belges, Paul Otlet et Henri La Fontaine, le projet visait à rassembler l’ensemble des connaissances du monde et à les classer selon le système de Classification Décimale Universelle (CDU) qu’ils avaient mis au point.

Outil de connaissance pour la paix, le Mundaneum était conçu à la base comme un centre de documentation à caractère universel. Il fut durant la première moitié du XXème siècle le berceau d’institutions internationales humanistes dédiées au Savoir et à la Fraternité universelle. A partir de 1920, il occupa une aile du Cinquantenaire à Bruxelles. Ses collections y étaient exposées dans l’esprit des expositions universelles.

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A wonderful set of sites, revolving around one designers ideas and thoughts on Logo Design - http://www.davidairey.com/ and http://www.logosdesigners.com/

And then some specific Logo’s that were done for this years 2008 Summer Olympics in China - http://en.beijing2008.cn/63/32/column212033263.shtml

The pictograms of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games integrate pictographic charm of inscriptions on bones and bronze objects in ancient China with simplified embodiment of modern graphics.

Not ‘Logos’ but ‘Posters’ – not quite so concise a presentation of information but usually so. Here a site that has gathered some great classics: http://www.bobstaake.com/posters/

‘Totally Amzing Posters
 – Throughout my life I’ve been mesmerized by posters — particularly those created by the Europeans of the mid-20th Century. These bold, graphic and inventive posters continue to captivate contemporary illustrators, and while many of us have liberally taken inspiration from iconic poster graphics, they pale in comparison to those created from 1930-1960 in France, Italy, Germany, Great Britain, and virtually every country on the European continent’

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Google SketchUp is a program that you must try. I have mentioned it in a previous blog and have played with it from just after its inception, many many years ago, when I bought it as a product from Alias. Now free, at least for the general version, a number of other companies are making rendering plugins that work with it and produce stunning results. They may not be fast and the free versions do not create large output, but they can take a fairly simple to create SketchUp model and produce wonderful results.

I found Renditioner Express first but at the moment it is PC only ( I have not tried Google SketchUp with Parallels on my Intel iMac – maybe I should!) and then I found SU Podium

IDX Renditoner Express (Free) 
http://www.idx-design.com/IDX/IDXRenditioner/FreeVersionofIDXRenditionerExpress/tabid/1011/Default.aspx

The free version of IDX Renditoner Express includes all the same features as IDX Renditioner but differs in render size and possibly speed. IDX Renditioner Express (Free) supports a maximum render size of 640 x 480 pixels. (IDX Renditioner supports a maximum render size of 4096 x 4096 pixels, a full 16 megapixels. It also supports multithreading for higher performance necessary on the large images.)

IDX Renditioner Express (Free) includes a smaller number of light components, but more will be available on the forums at http://forums.idx-design.com. Lights are easy to create and we encourage you to share.

At this time the PC version is available, but a free Mac version is expected soon.

SU Podium – http://www.suplugins.com/

The simplest rendering plug-in for Google SketchUp now runs on Windows or the Mac.

You can make TRUE photo-realistic rendering of your SketchUp model without the pain and frustration of learning a complex program. Podium runs completely inside Google SketchUp from start to finish. It uses SketchUp features such as textures, background colors, groups and shadows to achieve impressive results. Podium is intuitive to SketchUp users. Plus, its simple interface cuts the learning curve to minutes instead of days. Make an impression without the pain. SU Podium works with Google SketchUp 6 or 5, Pro or Free, Windows or Mac.

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I am not a big fan of gaming software. BUT that said, every so often something catches my interest. The following fall into this category, and appears to have a support community.

Welcome to Celestia : http://www.shatters.net/celestia/The free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions. Celestia runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn’t confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy.

Additional material for this program is available at : http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/

The one Gaming title I have paid for is XPlane. http://www.x-plane.com/ This is a flight simulator that is simply amazing. Currently in version 9, I quote from the web site

‘X-Plane is the world’s most comprehensive, powerful flight simulator, and has the most realistic flight model available for personal computers. Welcome to the world of props, jets, single- and multi-engine airplanes, as well as gliders, helicopters and VTOLs such as the V-22 Osprey and AV8-B Harrier…”

At the moment it is 39$US, a bargain, but they are soon to return to their former higher pricing. Like the above mentioned software this is also a product with a community – didicated to making an already realistic product even better. This one is so good it is actually used by flights schools.

And to sweeten things they have an iPhone and iPod Touch version. This is software that will sell the hardware – really! Go look for yourself at : http://www.x-plane.com/iPhone/X-Plane/iPhone_X-Plane.html For just under $10, the experience of flying this in your hand is, to me, unbelievable…

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I like music, but my tastes are eclectic (my wife says they are warped) That said, we are blessed with internet service, courtesy of ARIA DSL here in Umbria that lets me listen through iTunes to streamed CBC Classics via the internet. I just have to remember to switchoff the remote speakers – iTunes and Airport Express – before I put on any folk or rock music.

So it was with interested I looked at this site below : Relational Music Discovery – http://www.maxkiesler.com/Relational Music Discovery

‘I spend most of my days and nights in front of the computer screen. Needless to say I listen to countless hours of music. I’m always looking for new music to listen to, and face it, iTunes can only get you so far with it’s rather limited discovery features. Recently, I’ve turned to relational, and visual music discovery engines to find more tunes that related to my current musical tastes.’

• Artist Network Visualization
• Audiosurf: Ride Your Music
• Liveplasma Music Discovery Engine
• Musicovery – Content Visualization
• Musiclens – Music Discovery Visualization
• Music Maps – Who is Listening to What and Where
• Podbop – Mp3 Concert Calendar
• TuneGlue – Relationship Explorer
• ScreenVader – Algorithmic Music, Images and Video
• Whitney Music Box – Visual Harmony

And while on the subject of music, what could be more so than the Minute Waltz – Right? Well not in this case but still worth a look Minute Waltz : http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/05/16/opinion/20080516_schott_2.html

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An avid reader of BrookStones (http://www.brookstone.com/) Vermont Country Store (http://www.vermontcountrystore.com/) and Hammacher Schlemmer (http://www.hammacher.com) catalogues, I like interesting gifts. So this site peaked my interest ; http://www.gnr8.biz/

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Getting good at Adobe PhotoShop takes some talent, some reading and a lot of practice. Thankfully there are a lot of sites out on the internet with free content to help you in your exploration. This is one : http://psdtuts.com/

“About – PSDTUTS is a blog/Photoshop site made to house and showcase some of the best Photoshop tutorials around. We publish tutorials that not only produce great graphics and effects, but explain in a friendly, approachable manner. Photoshop is a fantastically powerful program and there are a million ways to do anything, we hope that reading PSDTUTS will help our readers learn a few tricks, techniques and tips that they might not have seen before and help them maximize their creative potential! PSDTUTS is the sister site to VECTORTUTS, NETTUTS and AUDIOTUTS.”

If you have read this far, heaven knows how many typo’s and grammer mistakes you will have suffered through. While the content interests me greatly, trying to keep track of it, for myself and for you, is quite a task. Spelling and correct punctuation is not one of my strong points. BUT this site might help – http://www.retinart.net/miscellaneous/grammar

‘Retinart – Thoughts on graphic design, creativity and beauty. That’ll pretty much sum it up. From analytical essays on the finer points of typography (get it? You’ll laugh later, promise) to interviews with creatives with something special, the goal is to show the creativity and beauty produced by talented people and to hopefully make you think a little different and see things through a different lens.

Alex Charchar – Retinart is written by Alex Charchar. I’m a graphic designer currently living in Queensland, Australia. I graduated from Swinburne in Melbourne, started to work at USQ in the in-house studio and then wanted to develop my knowledge and love for all things creative. From one educational institutional to another.

After far too long thinking about how to do it, I finally did something with the domain I’ve owned for a number of years for more than getting email about making things bigger. I love clever ideas, elegant solutions and all those pretty things that make us smile, so my (very original) idea was to put together a site dedicted to such things.’

Wake Up Later is a website that touches on the subjects of website building, freelancing, blogging, and online entrepreneurship. We cover a variety of topics from freelance tips and programming to SEO and internet marketing. It is also the home of free stuff for freelancers, a growing repository of Flash, audio, and other stuff free for personal and commercial use. Furthermore, the website encourages the sharing of ideas and experiences through Interviews and GroupThinks.

The person behind this website is Samuel Ryan whom I will now refer to in the first person. I am a web designer and developer who currently resides with my wife in the heart of the United StatesIn Conclusion: Although it’s easy to laugh at the past designs of many of these websites while praising current designs, remember that you are a contemporary of 2008 and five years from now, you might think that even these current sites are a mess. Overall, I’m sure most would agree that design standards have been raised over the last decade, and it will be exciting to see what the next ten years hold…

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Now here is my idea of an Entertainment Site – if the conversation ever lags at a party you are at, maybe one of these gems will help ! Unnecessary Knowledge : http://www.unkno.com/

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I have a beautiful friend who used to live in Ottawa and now lives in Washington DC – A fanastic designer who I have had the opportunity to help on occasion. Every time I see an article on shoes I think of her – so this site is for her.

The Virtual Shoe Museum : http://www.virtualshoemuseum.com/vsm/index.php The Virtual Shoe Museum was initiated by Liza Snook in 2004. Once the idea was born, a long search began for designers, photographers and publishers connected to shoes. New friendships developed and our mailbox filled with loads of material on fantastic shoes, art and design on shoes.

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I have already mentioned the iPod Touch that I own. I use us to check stocks, weayher, write notes, surf when I am away from my computer and need some nugget of knowledge, I have paid for the full ‘American Heritage Dictionary’ and ‘Ultralingua, English-Italian Dictionary’. ‘AirSharing’ is a great piece of software that allows you to tranfer nonstandard content to your iPod Touch or iPhone – such as Adobe pdf’s or ‘Apple KeyNote’ slide shows.

I disagree with Apple in that I think electronic reading tablet is a great idea and without a lot of work they could create one – Sure the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Readers are nice but for that price they ought to do all the other things that Apple could allow them to do.

Another recent find has been : Stanza – http://www.lexcycle.com/

‘Featuring a clean, well-organized interface, Stanza is expressly designed for reading digital publications, including electronic books, newspapers, PDFs, and general web content. Stanza is built from the ground up to make reading on your Macintosh or Windows laptop or desktop an enjoyable and hassle-free experience. It gives special attention to details that are usually overlooked in other software readers such as hyphenation, text columnation, automatic text scrolling, and user-friendly page and chapter navigation. Lengthy content that can be tedious to read using a web browser or PDF viewer is easy and natural with Stanza.’

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And the last entry here has got to do with the Gorrila of all software suites – The Adobe Creative Suite. A month agao now we were shown what is would contain and it has now just started to ship. It is one of the reasons that I continue to do a bit of design work. PhotoShop alone is worth the price to entry but I also use, most days, DreamWeaver (yes I have had to switch from GoLive, and now that I have I can see why it wond the battle – I just wish that they had provided thoe coders of MenuMachine (http://menumachine.com/) a heads up – the loss of that wonderful plugin for Golive – is a loss all designers should feel. They are reworking it – from the ground up for Dreamweaver but it is not happening overnight (http://menumachine.com/blog/) – meanwhile I limp along with inadequate soltions…

Adobe Illustrator was my first Adobe product – I don’t use it vey often these days but it is an old friend – InDesign took the place of PageMaker and shortly after its inception left Quark struggling to catchup. A wonderful program that allows content layout for diverse platforms – including eBooks – like those used by the previously mentioned Stanza.

BUT the Jewel is PhotoShop! The new version is worth it, the improvements to an already astounding product adding more than enough features to keep most designers happy for a few more years… And soon to be released is Adobe Configurator a tool for creating your own palletes. John Nack on his Adobe blog explains it in more detail…

Adobe Configurator : http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2008/10/introducing_ado_1.html “By now you’ve probably heard me talk many times about our desire to better manage the complexity and power of Photoshop. The very general interface that Photoshop presents is incredibly flexible, but it can be overwhelming, and it doesn’t do much to show you just what you need when you need it. We can do better.”

There is a very good video of the features here : http://www.russellbrown.com/Transfer/Configurator.mov

And that is it for this entry

Hopefully I will again add to this blog – heavens knows I have a lot of things collected to share with you – R

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:

• http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/automobiles/collectibles/23BAT.html
• http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/03/23/automobiles/collectibles/0323-BAT_index.html

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

I do spend some time each morning reading the ‘Newspapers’ – With web access this is great:

• BBC NEWS
• Electronic Telegraph
• Guardian Unlimited
• CNN.com
• New York Times
• The Globe and Mail
• London Times Online
• Economist.com

Of these sites the only one I pay for is the Economist, the other are free services, although you may have to subscribe so that they can justify themselves to their advertisers. Still, with the ability to read left, right and centre opinions from the western world on the same issue, these do provide an interesting perspective to the world around us. I must say, the fact that I live on a slightly remote hilltop, and that many times the world below is shrouded in clouds, gives me a sense of retreat from the madness of the world!

More on Wordpress:

I have been playing, tinkering, with the code of this blog, and collecting information on how it really works. I have not been brave enough yet to add images. I have come across this information this week:

This seems like a good explanation of what it is all about. So often, to get ones mind around a new program, it is important to know how one slices the information, what parts are presented, and how those parts can be individually altered and integrated with each other. Then the other possibilities start to form.

HOW TO: Customize Wordpress Part 1 Submitted by Suzy on December 13, 2005 – 1:08pm

There are two main ways that I can see to go about customising themes in WP. I’m not really a theme user, as I tend to build from scratch, so it’s difficult for me to say which way would be easier for everyone. One way is to customise the functionality of the blog itself this involves getting into the “Loop” (more on this later), the other is just to build around the existing CSS of an already stable theme. There is a lot you can do by just dissecting your chosen base theme and using the CSS to do the work.

Another article that is very helpful, yet not too detailed is at:

WordPress Guide – Customizing WordPress Theme

For more in depth explanation, this site has a number of articles:

Devlounge : Design, Develop, and Grow

Most of you know we are heavily involved with images, with our PHOTOempt.com web site, our presence on SmugMug and our efforts to sell through agencies such as FotoSearch . One of the newsletters I subscribe to is from Crestock . Others are iStock , and the New York Institute of Photography . In the Crestock newsletter this week there was an interesting article:

13 Minimalist Blog Designs You Really Should SeePosted Thursday, 13 March 2008 by Lars Hasvoll Bakke in Design, InspirationIf you’re tired of websites bursting at the seams with widgets, flash animations and all the colours of the rainbow, check out this list of selected low-key, minimalist blogs. Greetings all! My name is Lars, I’m one of the Crestock regulars and I plan on throwing in an entry here in the blog every now and then.

I mentioned iStock above. Their newsletter this week included a link to the third article listed below:

• http://www.istockphoto.com/article_view.php?ID=392
• http://www.istockphoto.com/article_view.php?ID=395
• http://www.istockphoto.com/article_view.php?ID=413

This is a very slippery slope – one that is being greased by some and not by others. It potentially makes the legal responsibility of a photographer, a huge problem. Is an artist responsible for how his ‘art’ is used? It has been said by others ‘guns do not kill, people do’. Where do we draw a line? Where do we let others draw a line for us? As a seller of images, if I state how an image is not to be used, and the buyer agrees to that – can I be responsible for its misuse? Do I need to worry, that even if not responsible, somebody might take legal action that I would need to incur a large expense to defend myself against. This may seem like an incidental concern to some, but it has prevented me from undertaking product design, my original profession, for 23 years. I was unwilling to take the risk of legal recourse for the misuse of a product I created. How many useful ideas of mankind are wasted by the inappropriate application of ‘intellectual property’ rules.

After those comments, onto some lighter stuff.

Some interesting reading on Colour: MOMA in NYC is having an exhibition on Colour

http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2008/colorchart/flashsite/

and two articles on how colour is used. I was aware of the initial article before, but found out that they had done a second one when I returned to the site today, looking for material to put in this posting. I was particularly interested in the pink/blue use for male/female.

• http://www.colourlovers.com/blog/2007/05/01/11-great-color-legends/
• http://www.colourlovers.com/blog/2007/07/03/13-more-great-color-legends/

This weeks sites from Maurice Belanger include: An interesting collection of Graphic design at:

http://graphic-design.tjs-labs.com/index.php

There is a lot of stuff here – I personally believe the presentation is a little to sparce to do it the justice it deserves but… He also found a link to the forerunner of Apples current AppleTV. Interesting that this information is on Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Interactive_Television_Box

If you are interested in this sort of Apple product history I strongly recommend ‘The Work of the Apple Industrial Design Group‘. To me fascinating, but then given my background, can you be surprised?

I mentioned ‘The Telegraph’, at the start of this entry, one of the big UK daily newspapers. They have run a photo series this week on the best 100 cars, as chosen by its readers. Again, a great collection of product design. The main link to the 5 part series is at:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/main.jhtml?xml=/motoring/2008/03/10/mfcars110.xml&CMP=ILC-mostviewedbox

Following the link to an interesting idea for a digital clock led me to this site:

http://alvinaronson.com/

Do what this page says, and you will be presented with a nice portfolio of work. For those you love, or those who love their coffee, another cute product is shown at:

http://www.yankodesign.com/index.php/2008/03/12/deep-love-of-coffee/

And I guess my last link for this posting will be a site for Water – I had a link to an interesting bottle shape a few postings ago – here is another. A nice site as well.

http://www.seiwater.com/

Back to the other things I need to do, like walk that dog I previously mentioned. Hopefully I will get to add to this blog again soon. In the mean time, your comments would be appreciated, either in private via email or using the site to add your own two cents worth.

All for now – Ross