Letters Remain

Category: technology

  • Periodic Table of Typefaces

    The Periodic Table of Typefaces is a fantastic visualisation of 100 of the most popular, influential and notorious typefaces available. Grouped by families and classes of typefaces ((sans-)serif, script, glyphic, grotesque, etc.), each ‘element’ lists the designer, the year designed and a ranking of 1 through 100. Sites used to calculate the ranking: The 100…

  • Visualising the News (The Guardian & New York Times APIs)

    The New York Times Developer Network is the media outlet’s “API clearinghouse” offering details of how you can get access to the extensive data they have released (from stories dating back to 1981). Using this API, Jer Thorp has created some visualisations of NYT trends using Processing (a language I keep promising to take a…

  • The Problem With Printers

    Not everyone agrees with the development philosophies of 37signals, but you can’t deny that they do have some ideas that are spot-on. This, for example, on printers and why they are so damn annoying: Buying a printer remains the last confusing part of modern computing. […] What makes this an even tougher choice is that…

  • Website Launch Checklist

    Here’s a great checklist for when you’re developing and launching a new website, as produced by Dan Zambonini of Box UK. Topics covered include: Pre-Launch Content and Style Standards and Validation Search Engine Visibility, SEO and Metrics Functional Testing Security/Risk Performance Finishing Touches Post-Launch Marketing Ongoing via @zambonini

  • Designing for the Poorest 90%

    The majority of the world’s designers focus all their efforts on developing products and services exclusively for the richest 10% of the world’s customers. Nothing less than a revolution in design is needed to reach the other 90%. —Dr. Paul Polak, International Development Enterprises Design For the Other 90% is a design exhibition aiming to…

  • Wasting Our ‘Cognitive Surplus’

    From a speech he gave at the Web 2.0 conference in April 2008: Clay Shirky tracks the history of our cognitive surplus, explaining what we could, or need to do with it: So how big is that surplus? If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project—every page, every edit,…

  • Google as the Extended Mind

    In response to The Atlantic’s article, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, Discover Magazine’s Carl Zimmer argues that Google is actually making us smarter thanks to the ‘extended mind’ theory—the idea that the mind exists not only in ourselves but is extended out to the technology we use. via Mind Hacks

  • Mapping Twitter’s #UKSnow Traffic

    Those on Twitter following friends (or strangers) from the UK may have recently seen a flurry of ‘tweets’ tagged with the #UKSnow hashtag. As expected, a use for the abundant data soon arose: Real-time map of #UKSnow: This real-time map of #UKSnow tweets has gained a lot of media attention in the UK. Updated every minute.…

  • Mind and Digital Photography Projects

    Mind Bites is a wonderful photography project from Will Lion combining fantastic CC-licenced Flickr images with quotes from peer-reviewed cognitive science research. (For the masochists among you, there’s an interactive Flash gallery too.) via Mind Hacks Equally appealing is Lion’s Digital Bites; a similar project encompasing “internet, entertainment, media and brands”.

  • Sharing More Than We Think

    Technology writer Nicholas Carr reflects on how what we share online imitates our persona much more than we imagine. Your online self […] is entirely self-created, and because it determines your identity and social standing in an internet community, each decision you make about how you portray yourself – about which facts (or falsehoods) to…