Design Info

Month

December 2009

A Windows guru spends two weeks with a Mac → macworld.com

and loves it.

“Overall, though, Mac OS X beats Windows. There, I’ve said it. And lightning hasn’t struck me yet.”

His only misstep in the experiment was picking the MacBook Air. He would have had a better experience with a MacBook Pro or iMac.

Dec 31, 2009
Dec 31, 2009
Play
Dec 30, 2009
Readability - An Arc90 Lab Experiment → lab.arc90.com

Brilliant! Why this sort of thing is not a feature (with even more type setting adjustment) built in to all browsers is insane.

Dec 30, 2009
10 Words You Need to Stop Misspelling - The Oatmeal → theoatmeal.com
Dec 30, 2009
Dec 29, 2009
No Plastic Sleeves → blog.noplasticsleeves.com

Web site all about photo and design portfolios. Book out Feb. 2010.

Dec 25, 2009
CBS, Disney Examine Apple's TV-Subscription Service → online.wsj.com

Apple could be a potential new competitor to cable and satellite TV.

I love it!

Down with cable TV.

Dec 22, 2009
“Many who practice design soon discover that they yearn to be involved much earlier in a client’s problem-solving process—well before the point when clients think “design” is needed and may have a preconceived solution in mind. Designers want to—and should—contribute to defining the true nature of the client’s problem. Designers are uniquely capable of approaching such problems holistically, possessing skills that include creativity, empathy and the ability to make ideas visual and accessible. Designing incorporates branding, positioning, strategic choices and human experiences over simply producing designed artifacts.” —

What is AIGA thinking about the future of design? - Ric Grefé writes

(Well, I’ve always thought like this. I have no desire to make pretty things unless they are part of a more complex solution. Was the entire profession not aware of this for the past 20 years? Did designers just want to make pretty things?)

Dec 22, 2009
Dec 22, 2009
FB Obsession → nytimes.com

“In October, Facebook reached 54.7 percent of people in the United States ages 12 to 17, up from 28.3 percent in October last year, according to the Nielsen Company, the market research firm.”

Dec 21, 2009
Dec 21, 20097 notes
Dec 21, 20095 notes
Blog post about paid and unpaid internships centers around famous photographer posting unpaid job. → jamieslist.wordpress.com

Jamie’s List blog with info and links from the Department of Labor and the Wall Street Journal on what an internship is. Very useful.

Dec 21, 2009
Avatar uses Papyrus → bleedingcool.com

After Comic Sans, most hated typeface. $300 million budget not enough to find a better font?

Dec 21, 2009
What Killed I.D. Magazine? → fastcompany.com

“We had the exact same template as that of our sister publication Deer & Deer Hunting,” says Lasky. According to Singer, “We always treated the site like a repository for magazine content, which is exactly what you’re not supposed to do.”

This thinking by publishers, not becoming more than print, is going to kill a bunch more magazines!

Dec 21, 2009
“Go to graduate school, you spend… Five to ten years satisfying a bunch of people so that they’ll say yes at the end of that period. You finally get done with that, and you go and you’re finally on the other side of the table. This is your first chance to really be teaching, not as an assistant, but in your own right. Your first chance to really experience the enormous exhilaration and terror of being the professional. And where are you? You are told that you have six years now to once again persuade a bunch of gray-haired people somewhere that they should say yes. So you are put yet again in what is a very, very quintessentially infantalizing position. And you are told throughout that six years, if any of you have been there, “Be careful. Don’t — just publish your PhD, if you can. Don’t get caught up, and by all means, avoid any subjects that are in the least bit whatever. Wait, wait until you get tenure.”
At 35, if you’re lucky, you finally get this damn thing. And at 35, it’s a bit late to start learning what it is to have the courage. What happens to people instead is, once they get it, man, they are gonna hold onto it. So we have… a world where nobody looks at what it actually does. The worst thing about tenure is not lifetime appointment; it is what it does to people in the process of getting it. And that’s completely at odds with what presumably its purpose is.”
—Elizabeth Coleman on the problem of the tenure process
Dec 18, 2009
Design and the Liberal Arts Education → aiga.org

“This mix — oversimplification of civic engagement, idealization of the expert, fragmentation of knowledge, emphasis on technical mastery, neutrality as a condition of academic integrity — is deadly. When it comes to pursuing the vital connections between the public good and education, between intellectual integrity and human freedom, between thought and action, the very idea of the educated generalist disappears and the very conditions of an active citizenry, which are the maximum development of our fundamental human capacities to reason, to imagine, to communicate, to understand, to act about things that are of shared human concern. In its place, we have armies of self-perpetuating secular priesthoods who are answerable only to themselves, talk only to themselves and have the single objective of “furthering their discipline.”

Elizabeth Coleman of Bennington College

Dec 18, 2009
Danish Students Say Design Drives Sustainable Behavior → greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com

“As negotiators gather in Copenhagen to mull the future of the planet, a Danish design school is mounting the argument that, as it relates to reducing the environmental impact of consumption, function follows form.”

Dec 18, 2009
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Dec 18, 2009
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