Category: design
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In Defense of Sampling: Why Stealing is Inspiring
Audio sampling in contemporary music is a form of budding innovation that proves not only the evolution of the industry, but a method to build on creative works that inspire us. The practice of sampling is common in most creative industries, but often less obvious than it is in music. Music sampling happens to receive…
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Steve Jobs and Circular Visualisations (Not Just Pie Charts)
Pie charts have been having a bad time of it lately* and I can’t see things improving anytime soon. In one of the better articles looking at this humble chart, Brian Suda notes not only at what you can do instead, but what improvements you can make if you’re forced to use the pie chart.…
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The Principles of Edward Tufte
The problem: “presenting large amounts of information in a way that is compact, accurate, adequate for the purpose, and easy to understand”. The solution: Edward Tufte (actually, the solution is “to develop a consistent approach to the display of graphics which enhances its dissemination, accuracy, and ease of comprehension”… but that’s not as catchy). Yes,…
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Making Graphs That Work
Seth Godin offers some advice on creating quality, legible, graphs. Short and sweet. Don’t let popular spreadsheets be in charge of the way you look. Tell a story. The only 4 stories permissible: Things are going great, look! Things are a disaster, help! Nothing much is happening. We need to work together to figure out…
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Developing a Web App on a Shoestring Budget
As the title suggests—and the tips prove—this brief guide to getting a web app up-and-running on a small budget requires, well, a budget (as opposed to no budget and doing it all yourself). The steps: Create a clear wireframe model Outsource the development Use an open source content management system Start a design contest Leverage…
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Iconic Logo Designers
Last year logo designer David Airey launched Iconic Logo Designers. As he describes it from his post announcing the launch: On the iconic logo designers website, you’ll find biographical info and resources on more than 35 of the world’s most outstanding creatives. Seeing this I was reminded of how much I love the elegant simplicity…
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Art Direction for David Foster Wallace’s Books
Marie Mundaca on her art direction for a number of David Foster Wallace’s books: It’s a little odd to design interiors for fiction and literary non-fiction. It’s just text—what is there to do? There are the obvious things, like leaving enough space at the margins. Basically, the designer’s job is to pick a font that…
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The Experience Response
Mark Hurst, author of Bit Literacy and host of the Gel conference, takes a look at Microsoft’s Bing and discusses the problem with Microsoft’s current strategy and ways they can improve. Customers online don’t respond to a brand marketed to them, they respond to the experience they have. If they can accomplish their goal quickly…
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Crowdsourcing and Creative Deflation
Monday Note uses the case study of LG eliciting designs for future mobile phones to show how crowdsourcing is changing how design is done… and how it’s starting to change advertising, too. Altogether, LG is going to spend $75,000, to be distributed among 43 awards. […] Let’s face it: for a company such as LG, seventy-five grand for…
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GOOD’s Infographic Collection
GOOD Magazine (“for people who give a damn”) have put their ‘Transparencies’ infographics on Flickr. I spent some time going through the set attempting to find a few favourites to share with you specifically. I failed—they’re all great. via Kottke