McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art is one of the most influential books I’ve read—it’s a must-read for any designer.
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Sans Comic Sans is written by Matt Raw in Brooklyn, NY.
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Category Archives: Smart People
Good service design: Hello Health
I’m devouring any information I can find about Hello Health, which is the first consumer-centered health care service I’ve seen. One of the doctors behind Hello Health has a really illuminating blog post announcing the service and explaining why something like this hasn’t happened before now. Who they’re targeting: Our market is the 47 million [...]
Is user centered design broken?
“The past” is filled with far more examples of products, innovative thinking, and success stories based on activity-centered research, magic, genius design, and just plain luck than UCD can claim even on its best day. What’s cheap and easy is the idea that we can dissect a chef’s work and call it a recipe. That [...]
Microsoft and the new economy; Alaska Airlines check-in process
Two quick—and only tangentially related—reads for Wednesday morning: On imagining Steve Ballmer embracing Firefox 3: But it’s also a nice little “thought exercise.” It is impossible to imagine Ballmer acting with this kind of initiative, imaginative or vision. (I’m not suggesting that what Briggs proposes is a good idea. Only that it is hard to [...]
What do you represent?
Our minds are quick to convert new optical experiences into familiar stories, favored viewpoints, comforting metaphors. No wonder, for how else can we manage optical data flows of 10 MB per second without familiar categories for filing, without the rage for wanting to conclude? An excerpt called "See Now… Words Later," from the Edward Tufte’s [...]
The Microsoft Sound
I had no idea Brian Eno created the ubiquitous Microsoft Windows startup sound. Cool trivia aside, Eno’s description of the creative constraints are revealing: The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I’d been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I [...]
Twitter and phatic communication
Phatic communication. It sounds vaguely NSFW. Grant McCracken walks us through the idea and the value of this kind of communication for services like Twitter: When I use Twitter or Facebook to say that I am entertaining my cat, no one, I’m pretty, sure gives a good God damn that I am entertaining my cat. [...]
“If this messy world is becoming easier to understand, thank Edward Tufte.”
Interesting tidbit from Beautiful Evidence Author Edward Tufte and the Triumph of Good Design: PowerPoint may be a step backward, but the backlash is under way (Google “PowerPoint is evil” if you disagree) and there is abundant evidence that Tufte’s work is rising out of the Flatland of academia. His first book called out the [...]
SXSW 2007 looks so freaking cool
Yes, “freaking.” Check out the SXSW 2007 Interactive panels schedule and try to convince me that these aren’t more interesting and relevant than whatever CHI (or a similarly reputable conference) will serve up this year. Yeah, yeah, different audiences, difference focuses, whatever. If a young designer could only give his money to one conference, I [...]
Crossovers: Daniel Dennett and systems design
I don’t understand more than 25% of it, but I took Freedom Evolves back off the shelf the other day and have been reading it on the way to work. The material is really heady (the book is about free will in a deterministic universe) but Dennett’s words are flexible and he writes in a [...]