Category: Design
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High and Low in Public Sector Design
New York’s recycling mascots. They used to have an alley cat nemesis, too. In recognition of Earth Day 2006, here’s an environmental design challenge: Inform nine million people how, when, and what to take out for recycling. Your audience, the citizens of New York City, is the most diverse group of people in the world.…
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Writing Technologies: From Cuneiform to Cyborg
In a previous post, I mentioned the “Technologies of Writing” show I saw during SXSW at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center. Since then, I’ve had several occasions to think about the exhibit again. So I thought I’d go a little more into some of the highlights from the show and share some of the related thoughts…
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NYC Gets a Gehry
Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp is building a new headquarters on Manhattan’s west side in Chelsea. And it’s a Frank Gehry building! This is exciting news, and there’s lots to see and talk about even now, long before the building is even completed. New York’s Architectural Draught We’ve all seen Gehry’s signature works over the last decade…
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IA Summit 2006: The Science (and Pseudo-Science) of Personas
I attended a fascinating IA Summit presentation by Molecular’s Steve Mulder called “Bringing More Science to Persona Creation“. Lately I’ve been pretty interested in how different companies approach user personas, so this was a must-see for me. I was impressed with Steve’s insights into user persona creation, but this was tempered by a fear that,…
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IA Summit 2006: Wireframes I & II
Even as we develop more robust wireframing systems, flat printable wireframes are still easy to draft quickly, and easy for clients to consume. Two wireframe sessions in a row were scheduled on Saturday. It’s hard for me to say much about these panels because I have some pretty strong ideas about how to improve the…
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SXSW Confidential, Part 2: They Write Books
Three great new books, all of which came out within the last month or so, were hot topics at SXSW 2006. What’s especially exciting to me is that all three of them are about subjects I am deeply interested in, and all of them are written by people I know and respect. I’m reading all…
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South Xy South West 2006
This is my face. I’ll be at SXSW in Austin Texas starting this Friday afternoon. If you’ll be there, look for me: I’m the guy with this photo (right) on his badge. I had such a great time last year, my first year attending the conference, that as a result I’m bringing two of my…
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Categorizing Design Styles
If you can stomach the idea of reducing Web design creativity to a itemized list of compartmentalized styles and techniques, there are a number of sites cropping up lately that attempt to survey contemporary web design “styles” and to sort them into a neat and useful little categories. First up: Patrick McNeil’s Design Meltdown. It’s…
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Design Patterns: Don’t Reinvent the Widget
Yahoo’s interaction design department has for the last year or two been developing an intranet dedicated to sharing, internally, their interface design conventions and standards (or, to use the current hip jargon, “Design Patterns”) for their internal development teams, to ensure quality and consistency of interface widgets. It’s kind of an IA “style guide” for…
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Olympic Special Effects as Information Design
I am not much of a sports fan, but I am always impressed with the information design on many TV sports broadcasts. I love the little icon in the corner of many baseball broadcasts that quickly sums up the current game status: score, inning, who’s up, who’s on base, etc. And of course, the virtual…