Letters Remain

Category: design

  • Online Web Design Tools

    Mashable’s list of over 130 web design tools looks like it may come in handy. Tools mentioned include CSS optimisers, colour scheme generators, attractive background design generators, and many more.

  • The (Data) Visualisation Lab

    I’ve been playing with The New York Times’ Visualization Lab lately and am enjoying it quite a lot, even though the current data sets you can play with are quite limited. However, the system uses IBM’s ‘Many Eyes’ tool, a project of their Visual Communication Lab, and if you head there you can register and…

  • Revolutionary Scientific Minds

    Revolutionary Minds is a new(ish) video series from Seed Magazine well worth your time. Each instalment profiles a number of scientists with one thing in common: their ideas are revolutionising how science advances. So far: The Game Changers Competition, legal difficulties, information overload, a lack of money, and public relations problems can impede the progress…

  • Making O’Reilly Animals

    Like many others, I, too, have wondered about the reasoning behind O’Reilly Media’s animal-themed book covers. While it doesn’t reveal all, this article describes the history of, and the creative process behind, O’Reilly’s iconic covers. Lorrie tries to imbue her illustrations with the historical, somewhat less-than-accurate style of the old Dover engravings. Her technique has…

  • Web App User Flow Library

    In designing any application, creating efficient and easy user flows is crucial to user engagement. Of course, this isn’t as easy as it sounds. Product Planner provides user flows from successful web applications to help others learn from them.

  • World War II Posters

    Ridiculous, shocking, hilarious, offensive: just some of the many adjectives you could use to describe these excellent World War II posters. She may look clean—but Pick-ups “Good-time” girls Prostitutes Spread syphilis and gonorrhea You can’t beat the Axis if you get VD Always good advice!

  • Committed to Past Constraints: QWERTY

    Something I’ve never thought of reading before: the history of the QWERTY keyboard: With the assistance of […] Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule, [Christopher Sholes] built an early writing machine for which a patent application was filed in October 1867. However, Sholes’ “Type Writer” had many defects, [including] the tendency of the typebars to…

  • Data Visualisation: Very Small Array

    My latest RSS subscription: Very Small Array Experts in data visualisation (I still can’t force myself to write that word with a ‘z’), each post is full of information and is beautifully presented. Even better, it’s all CC licensed. Some of my recent favourites (some simple, all beautiful): Length of Weekly #1 Songs by Year,…

  • Great Diagrams in Anthropology, Linguistics and Social Theory

    The Flickr group Great Diagrams in Anthropology, Linguistics and Social Theory is fairly self-explanatory: I’m looking forward to seeing the group grow. via Neuroanthropology and Mind Hacks

  • The Evolution of Language

    Bartleby, the free (as in beer) ‘Internet publisher’, has available a fascinating graphic depicting the evolution of language (all those stemming from the single Proto-Indo-European language, anyway). Now I know the historic route of my native tongue (as opposed to my cradle tongue), Welsh: it’s closest ‘relatives’ are Cornish and Breton (in that order) as…