Letters Remain

Category: design

  • Dieter Rams Interview: Design as Art and the Need for Better Products

    Sustainable design and the need for more self-explanatory products are two topics discussed in this brief interview with the iconic industrial designer, Dieter Rams. In addition to not being a fan of celebrity designers–or ‘pop’ design–he also has a dislike for design being seen as a form of art: Design has nothing to do with art. Design…

  • Newspaper Design Using Web Design Principles

    Earlier this year Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger asked Information Architects, a Japanese-Swiss UX-oriented web design agency, to come up with a pitch for a redesign of their offline newspaper. The result is a concept and set of designs that are subtle re-workings of what works for print, integrated with what works online. The concept was: Use all…

  • Blogs Designed Like Magazines

    With the blogs of Dustin Curtis, Gregory Wood and Jason Santa Maria as examples (each worthy of your time, by the way), Smashing Magazine looks at blogs designed like magazines,* discussing what these ‘blogazines’ mean for the future of boring blog posts. Dustin Curtis had this to say on the drawbacks of designing like this on…

  • Simplicity in Japan

    Simplicity, says Kenya Hara, creative director of Muji, is a “central aesthetic principle” in Japan and is what differentiates the visual appeal of the East from that of the West. In an interview for The New York Times looking at the unique design of Japanese bentō, Hara provides a comparison of the East and West’s…

  • The New Rules of The Fold

    In 1996, while discussing the importance of the inverted pyramid style of writing, usability expert Jakob Nielsen wrote that “users don’t scroll”. From there the idea of The Fold as an integral part of web design came into being. But, as Nielsen himself has said, the Internet has evolved and “as users got more experience…

  • The Seven Wastes

    One of the principal goals of the Toyota Production System (TPS) is to identify steps that add value (and those which do not) and then design out waste. Muda is one of the three types of waste (the other two being muri and mura) and the one that has been given the most attention since the TPS…

  • Publishing and the Digital Landscape

    We’ve talked much about what’s happening in publishing, paper, and digital culture, but let’s talk about what should happen. “Book Oven is cloud-publishing: we are an online toolset that enables individuals and groups to make, improve, publish, and sell print books and ebooks. Book Oven is designed for independent writers and small presses.” Regardless of what…

  • Newspaper

    In the spirit of self-publishing, Russell Davies et aliud created Newspaper Club, a mostly UK launched collective dedicated to building a service to help people make their own newspapers. One of my favorite ideas is Things Our Friends Have Shot On Flickr which is a beautiful example of the digital world colliding with print media.…

  • Modern America: Designed by a Frenchman

    “As an American citizen who still loves his native country, France, it is heartwarming to see that this country appreciates the beauty and taste that all Frenchmen prize.” Raymond Loewy (1893-1986) What are the classic designs that define America? If you compiled a list, it may include: The large American refrigerator, as popularised by the…

  • Image Compression and The Origins Of Life

    Human life on Earth is the result of an extremely fortunate environment. This includes our temperate position near a stable star, in a stable area of the galaxy, with neighbouring bodies of the right size and distance to protect us. It is a Rare Earth. As we evolved, this environment continued (and continues) to influence…