http://www.graphpaper.com Art Science Business Fri, 28 Mar 2008 17:17:18 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Behavior is again looking for people who love making great web sites. Mostly we are seeking people for full-time positions, but for exceptional cases we are quite open to short- to medium-term freelance engagements. We're specifically looking for the following roles -- but as usual we're on the lookout for web ... http://www.graphpaper.com/2008/03-28_behavior-is-hiring My wife is tinydiva. She is a musician. Her band is called Masolit. They are awesome. Seriously. And you should see them play their world debut performance live this Saturday in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Timing: Saturday, March 22, 2008 7:00 pm: The Creationists 8:00 pm: Masolit Location: MTAA 60 North 6th Street, 2nd floor Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NYC (L train ... http://www.graphpaper.com/2008/03-18_masolit I am in Austin Texas at my fourth SXSW. I'm here until Tuesday. So far the weather is nice and the people are as great as ever. Please keep an eye out for me and say hi. Here's a picture of me to help you distinguish me from all the ... http://www.graphpaper.com/2008/03-08_sxsw Fish Magic, 1925, Paul Klee It is said that a fish, even a really smart one, cannot really grasp the meaning of the concept "wet" because it is the only condition they know. There is no "dry" to compare it to. Humans, too, have a tendency to imagine that the way things ... http://www.graphpaper.com/2008/03-02_the-peculiar-20th-century Last.fm's announcement that they will be allowing their users to listen to full-length versions of millions of music tracks is one of the final nails in the coffin of the traditional recorded-music industry. Owning music is dead. The new business model for making money in the music industry is simple: ... http://www.graphpaper.com/2008/02-06_rip-owning-music-1880-2008 A follow up thought to the user personas discussion among Steve, Jared, Joshua, me, countless other people, and in particular to Peter Merholz's thoughts about the value of personas created through design team conversations. Let's begin with a simple premise that I think most practicing UX designers would agree with in ... http://www.graphpaper.com/2008/02-04_research-interpret-produce-design The following is in response to an interesting and thoughtful video and essay by Edward Tufte, posted on his blog/site, in which he argues, among other things, that many of the applications on the Apple iPhone do not adequately take advantage of the iPhone's screen resolution and its compelling and ... http://www.graphpaper.com/2008/01-25_edward-tuftes-iphone A quick thought for this fine Friday: Something about the term "Getting Things Done" always bugged me. Now I know what it is. It's the passive voice. Instead of the indirect phrasing using the verb "to get", maybe we really should simply say "Doing Things". GTD isn't about getting other people ... http://www.graphpaper.com/2008/01-25_doing-things-vs-getting-things-done I have a tendency to be extremely skeptical about user research in the design process. This is mostly because so much of it is, IMHO, (a) fundamentally bad (e.g., employing sloppy research methods or hamfisted statistical analyses), (b) flatly dishonest (e.g., dressing unscientific research in pseudo-scientific drag in order to ... http://www.graphpaper.com/2008/01-24_design-research-is-a-design-process http://www.graphpaper.com/2008/01-23_she-looks-like-a-fing-smeagol http://www.graphpaper.com/2008/01-22_floppies In today's Times, I read a story that included a fallacy that I'm pretty fed up of hearing: The accusation that web-based news and journalism is overly brief and shallow, that it caters too much to the short attention spans of ADD-addled youths, and that the web is ushering in ... http://www.graphpaper.com/2008/01-08_how-deep-is-your-internet-news http://www.graphpaper.com/2008/01-03_get-info http://www.graphpaper.com/2007/12-27_circular-uis-are-fun The One Laptop Per Child, officially known as XO, is now appearing in people's mailboxes. The unboxing photos are up on flickr. The OLPC buzz is hot! But I'm a little sour about it. It feels like I have read nothing but breathless praise for the design and implementation of the ... http://www.graphpaper.com/2007/12-23_challenge-if-you-cant-say-something-nice-about-olpc I bought Peggy a new pair of studio monitor headphones for her birthday last week. So now we have an extra pair of my favorite headphones, the Sony MDR-V600. I decided to try an experiment I've always wanted to do: To separate a pair of headphones from its cord. My practical ... http://www.graphpaper.com/2007/12-09_the-12-inch-headphone-cord-iphone-ready http://www.graphpaper.com/2007/12-06_the-corner I'm not going to say much about Kindle -- as an iPhone owner, I find both the device and the service colossally dumb. But the breathless excitement over the supposed "death of the book" is even more preposterous than Amazon's little white elephant, especially to book lovers like my wife and ... http://www.graphpaper.com/2007/11-25_kindle-review-in-the-form-of-a-photo-collage At the Speak Up graphic design blog, Armin Vit laments the lack of "landmark" or canonical web designs. After giving several examples of iconic designs that are truly landmarks in the history of graphic design, from Paul Rand's IBM logo in the 1950s to Paula Scher's Public Theater posters in ... http://www.graphpaper.com/2007/11-19_in-defense-of-graphic-design-on-the-web I thought it was a pretty bold design decision when Apple discarded the iPod's signature feature, the scroll wheel, in the iPhone and iPod touch. But the new scrubber bar is almost useless, especially for long tracks like podcasts where it's impossible to move the playhead any less than a ... http://www.graphpaper.com/2007/11-14_scrubbing-the-iphone-scrubber