design
Like a lot
Reasons the Internet is Brilliant #2B
Here’s a reason, right here: http://www.penciltalk.org/. It’s a website about pencils. I like pencils. Actually I kind of love pencils in a strange sort of a way. But this guy loves pencils more. More than me. More than everyone I know…
Jonathan From Spotify Ruined Your Playlist
http://jonathanfromspotifyruinedyourplaylist.com/ is my favourite website of today. If you don’t know Jonathan from Spotify, he’s the guy who interrupts your listening pleasure with his little adlets. I’m sure he was forced to do it, so…
FS me from FontSmith
I rarely blog about stuff that I get sent in the post, because most of it isn’t very inspiring. But this booklet that I got this morning worked for me on lots of levels… Here’s why I liked it: It’s a lovely booklet They’ve developed a font…
Adverts Restored My Faith in The Internet
I’ve been a bit down on the internet since I got back from holiday. It’s been as if someone deleted all the good stuff ;-) Then I accidentally stumbled on this site through a Google image search. It’s one of those sites that’s just bloody…
Things to do to escape your computer (or TV)
…hire a bike or roller skates or a boat. Please help by adding to this in the comments. Following on from this weekend’s activities. I’ve been thinking about what a great bunch of things Jason set me to do. All could be done with little…
Earning Eternal Respect In 48 Hours The Twitter Way
I had a fun weekend this weekend. Thanks to a number of things. 1. Weekends are good anyway. 2. The weather was pretty nice. 3. I did normal stuff with Sophie like have nice lunches. Laze around. Drink a bit of wine. Get some chores done…
Judging Books By Their Covers (and Page Edges)
I’m terrible for judging books by their covers. It’s precisely how I make my first decision about whether or not I’m going to enjoy them. This technique may have been around for ages, but it was new to me on Saturday. It’s using coloured…
Urban Play Amsterdam – Moving Forest
I was in Amsterdam at the weekend and was lucky enough to pass through a bunch of things that were going on as part of the Urban Play festival. I particularly liked the mobile forest. I’m not sure it was supposed to be this mobile… But…
The Value of Really Big Pictures
Still at Webby Connect: Michael Zimbalist from the NYT has just said that the Big Picture Blog has doubled traffic to Boston.com year on year. Big pictures are in. ‘The fold’ is out.
What I’m Feeling About Webby Connect
It’s interesting. But through the sessions it’s becoming very clear that it’s a world of 2 halves. One half is people who believe that it’s just business as normal. Everything conforms to the old rules in the end. It’s all about talent…
The Taxi Driver’s Question
I just lazily took a cab ride from the other side of town back home (and it wasn’t the taxi of the beast as pictured above – that was the first picture I found on Flickr). Anyway… The cab driver was a chatty and charming young guy. He…
Reusing not Recycling
Just realised I posted a dumb comment over on Ben’s blog. He’d blogged about how we should re-use our Amazon boxes and how it’d be better than recycling. I commented about how I’d cleverly thought of re-using some Innocent pots the other…
Chupa Chups Trivia
Some lollys arrived in the office from Tom’s trip away. I dropped the trivia bomb of: ‘did you know that Salvador Dali designed the Chupa Chups logo‘ on a couple of people. Expecting them to know. But they didn’t know. So I wondered if it…
Hang on Tight!
Artist Kenny Irwin posts under the name perfectlymadebirds on Flickr. His photos and their descriptions are totally amazing. I found myself getting sucked into his weird universe for more time than is strictly acceptable for someone on the…
Flickr Unleashes the Might of the Animated GIF
I just went to enable Flickr Stats so that I could see what’s been going on in my world of photos. And imagine my surprise and joy when the ‘processing stats’ page threw up an assortment of the finest in old-skool animated giffery… This…
A New Design
Sophie’s away. So I spent most of the weekend geeking out and re-building my blog. I learned a lot of CSS stuff. But it did quite often feel like it was the boss of me rather than the other way round. Which I’m sure isn’t how it’s meant to…
An Amazing Animated Gif Video
Absolutely incredible – also from http://www.perishfactory.com/. It’s just one long scrolling scene made up of thousands of animated gifs. I quite like the song too, it’s jolly. Whoops, almost forgot the track is by The Sea and Cake and…
Lovely Becks Art Beer Bottles
When packaging just works. I couldn’t resist them in the shop. They just stood out a mile. I went in to buy 2 beers. And when I saw these I’d have bought all the designs they had. But they only had 3… I don’t even feel like a sucker. Much…
Finally Someone’s Done Cool Bike Helmets
Big up the Danish company Yakkay. I’m so glad that someone’s made cycling helmets that don’t look like some piss-poor Tron rip-off or a bit of Super Mario fancy dress. It’s been on my list of things to sort out in the world for a while…
The Girl Effect
The design of this charity site is really lovely. To my ill-trained eyes the typography is nice. And I like their promo film too. Everything about just feels like it works together. And they made sharing so easy I’d have felt mean not doing…
DIY Love:Hate Posters
I liked this poster set. You get a love poster and a hate poster. And 3 sheets of Letraset based words and phrases. Without wanting to be a wanker about it, I like the fact that it forces you to make a simple binary decision about a bunch…
Love’s Powerpoint Website
I’m gutted. But impressed. And glad. Love have made their new website in Powerpoint: http://www.lovecreative.com/ I’m gutted because I’ve been whanging on about doing a website in PowerPoint for the last couple of years. But impressed…
14tracks.com – A New Boomkat Offering
I’ve whanged on about Boomkat before. They’re a great example of a niche e-commerce player – although I’m guessing they’re a pretty big niche player now. They sell music online – mainly electronic stuff – they started selling CDs and Vinyl…
My New Favourite Quote
By Michael Beiruit (in conversation with Peter Merholz): It’s a dirty secret that much of what we admire in the design world is a byproduct not of “strategy” but of common sense, taste and luck. Some clients are too unnerved by ambiguity…
Is It Just Me…
Or has the language of dots next to something taken on a meaning that perhaps it didn’t have before… When I spotted this in the window of a hotel I thought to myself: “How odd that they’re promoting the fact that their facilities are only…
O2 Bad Web Page
The new O2, we’re out of stock of the 3G iPhone, page is bad. For a number of reasons. The whole upgrade/ordering thing was a farce, but more on that elsewhere… But worst of all is the padlock in the top right hand corner. In my book a…
Email From A Hero
I just got an email out of the blue from Don Norman. He’s a dude. He wrote a great book called the Design of Everyday Things, a book that I love dearly. Apparently he’s been using the above photo that I took years ago at the Aladdin Hotel…
Hooray For The Design Police
I’ve been banging on to a couple of designers about how they need to start up something like this. They need to hunt down and bring to justice all of the horrible design that keeps creeping into some of our documents. Now someone’s done…
Roller Coaster Mini Game
This little Roller Coaster flash game from the University of Cambridge teaches you how to get the balance right in the design of big dippers. Too much thrill and people pass out, not enough and you can’t progress. Although it’s incredibly…
10 Things I Learned from Mental Detox Week
If you’ve just arrived here from AdBusters you might also be interested in what I got up to this weekend – I did still use the Internet a little bit – but it’s primarily a bunch of offline stuff that I did started by an online thing… Might…
Crayon Madness
This is the kind of thing you miss when you’re away from the Internet: Color + Design Blog / All 120 Crayon Names, Color Codes and Fun Facts by COLOURlovers All 120 Crayola crayon colours in Hex and RGB along with their original names and…
Zoomquilt 2
Some more infinite oddness. One scene just morphs into another in a captivating manner. Click here and get sucked in…
I’m Chatting at Under The Influence
Iris are putting on an interesting event next week in London. It’s totally free so go and sign up if you like the look of it. It’s called Under the Influence and it’s 20 talks spread around 5 pubs in Borough Market. Each one has a…
Judging Viral – Viral in 5 Words
I’ve been doing some bits and pieces of awards judging for various folk this year. It’s all been interesting so far. The one I’m most worried about is the D&AD Viral Category. I’m the chairman of the jury and I’m guessing that there’s…
Tshirt of Absolute Genius
The design is not nice. But conceptually I love it dearly. Buy one here. If you’re into tshirts, Nik’s buythistshirt.org has some nice/nasty ones.…
The Rise of The Ad Man 2.0
[I’ve written this post once already. I got to the end of it just as someone phoned me up. I picked up the phone. Fumbled it. And dropped it on my laptop which duly crashed in a spectacular fashion. The second revision is slightly shorter…
Pissing Contests
I seem to be witnessing more and more intellectual pissing competitions these days. And it’s not just in planner-land, although that’s where I’ve witnessed some of the ‘best’ ones. I’ve seen a few good technical ones, and even designers…
Scratch Stickers
Superb. Temporary stickers that make your bike or car look like it’s an old rustbucket to deter thieves. I spotted these in SCP the other day. Availible online from http://dominicwilcox.com
NewsGlobe
Charticles one day, NewsGlobes the next. It’s all getting a bit ‘Day Today‘ round these parts. NewsGlobe is a project that’s come out of the next.yahoo.net stables. There’s a description of how it came about here. For last month’s Yahoo!…
Scrabble Seating
I really like this ‘seating installation’ at the Bloomberg offices. Designed by Stephen Reed – see more at his site.…
Tutortainment or Entertorials
Connected to the entertaining demos post the other day. I love the way that these Photoshop Tutorials manage to tell a story of marital breakdown and infidelity through a bunch of nerdy design-tip-screencasts. I was laughing out loud at…
The Webbys – A Trip Back In Time
Nik’s written a piece on why he likes the Webbys over here. I like the Webbys too. For me they’re the awards that get closest to recognising the important things online (in the English speaking parts of the interwebs anyway). It tends to…
Facebook and ‘The Man’
This article from the Guardian seemed to be the most visible thing on the Internet round these parts yesterday: With friends like these… by Tom Hodgkinson Facebook has 59 million users – and 2 million new ones join each week. But you won’t…
India – Signs and Odd Designs
Here’s some more photos from India. Don’t know really what to describe the set as. It’s broadly interesting signs or bits of designish stuff that caught my eye
Greg’s Show (and Marc’s Flickr)
Greg’s a very modest man and a very good coder at Poke. He’s also, it turns out, an awesome photographer. He’s got a show on at the moment which you can see here: http://www.nottingstill.co.uk/. Or you could just go to his Flickr Page and…
How To Do Digital Planning
I’ve been trying to post something like this for a few months now. But it kept morphing into a badly researched history of planning mixed with a poor how-to guide. And of course I kept veering off into bloody flag-waving about how digital…
Pani Puri – Food 2.0 @ Slideshare
I love Pani Puri. So I was really delighted to see this presentation on SlideShare. | View | Upload your own My prediction for the day: Online viewing of slideshows set to overtake video by 2010. Nah, not really. But there are some really…
Digital vs Advertising
I did my talk about ‘10 Reasons that Digital is Better than Advertising‘ again the other day. I enjoyed it, and I did feel that bits of it are true. But at the same time it also felt a bit futile, It was never designed to be an important…
WTF WWF – Massive Paper Plane and Boat Project
Here’s the short version of the story: With the WWF we’re building a massive paper plane and massive paper boat. We’re then going to fly / sail them (somehow) to the Houses of Parliament. If you sign up to the online petition your name…
Free Dub!
I downloaded an album from Boomkat earlier. It’s dub. Big shaky dub music that make everything wobble in a good way. It’s called Foundation Bit by Disrupt. It’s Boomkat’s album of the week and they say: Probably the most talked-about BASS…
Nike, is it Supersonic?
Right now you can’t move in London without seeing some kind of ad for Nike Supersonic. According to the blog spam I got the other day: “Nike is launching an exclusive invitation only event for 3,000 people in London to push their pace…
Saving the World One Design at a Time
Ben’s blog is always great. But here’s a bit of greatness that you should make a special effort to read: I’m a designer, use me better – it’s Ben’s presentation from the Applied Green conference. It’s just dead good. It shows that…
Blogger Relations – Digital Agencies Suck at it Too
In retrospect I shouldn’t have had a go at the Ogilvy PR Blogger Outreach Code of Ethics – incidentally they’re back with a V2 which you can find here. Having looked at some of the things I’ve been getting recently, people involved in this…
Courses I’d Love to Do
I’ve just been helping out with a D&AD / IPA talk about ‘sharpening your creative skills’ for wannabe Creative Directors. Not sure how much help I was, but hey ho, I told a few stories and gave my opinion on some stuff. (The image above is…
Sharing Audio On YouTube
It’s interesting that people are using YouTube as a way of sharing audio. Obviously it’s not designed as an audio sharing site, but it does the job pretty well. I’m guessing that people are using it this way because: 1. YouTube has a…
Super Supermarkets
Normally I’m a bit hurried or hassled going around the supermarket, but on Saturday I decided to have a bit of a wander and look around the shelves to see what caught my eye. I even bought some of the things I thought were interesting…
Concrete Truck
From a designer’s point of view there’s probably all kinds of sins going on here. But I love the side of this truck. It makes me feel that concrete is both fun and very tough.…
Toshio Iwai’s Tenori-On From Yamaha
Toshio Iwai has made a load of cool audio widgety things. The thing I know best is Electroplankton on the Nintendo DS. But he’s done lots of other stuff too. I’ve just come across his latest device to hit the streets, Tenori-On, it’s a bit…
The Image of Joy Division
Lots of stories around this weekend about the sad death of Tony Wilson. It also span off lots of stories about bands that he’d been involved with and that time in Manchester. This story in the Observer caught my interest: Closer to the…
House Sign Typography
I always get overexcited by nice type on house signs. Whenever I go to Europe I’m impressed by the layouts of their flat numbers and suchlike. They always look so, well, European, and sophisticated. So when I was walking home in Brighton…
Interactive Visualisation
I love this a lot. It’s basically an interactive way of showing how CEO’s salaries have risen in relation to the average worker. Of course a graph or table could have done the job adequately. It just really brought the data to life for me…
Shift Happens – Watch This Video
The second thought provoking animation of the week… Watch it. It’s good. Makes me realise that understanding and appreciating bits and bytes is really important. And maybe one day I’ll be able to apply it to something that makes a…
I Can’t Watch…
This is me presenting “10 Reasons Why Digital is ‘Better’ than Advertising” at the PSFK conference in London. I can’t even bear to hear recordings of my own voice so there’s no way that I’m going to be able to watch this… (I tried watching…
Logic+Emotion: Thought of the Day
Caught this great quote on the excellent Logic and Emotion blog: “Design is so popular today mostly because business sees design as connecting it to the consumer populace in a deep, fundamental and honest way. An honest way. If you are in…
Vimeo Ads
Vimeo have just redesigned their site (they’re a video sharing site a bit like YouTube). They’ve always had a nicely designed site and I think I quite like the new version too. One thing I really liked was their approach to ads – they’re…
I Consume Therefore I Care
Those ‘I am not a plastic bag’ bags really make me sad. When they launched in the UK and created a consumer frenzy I was a bit upset. Now I read about their launch in the US I’m getting even more upset. I think it’s such a shame that the…
I do like Vimeo!
Following my post about 20 seconds ago asking if I liked Vimeo I got a comment from Jacko from Vimeo. He doesn’t sound very angry at all. And he had a problem with Quicktime, so I guess he can say that. I had a problem with Virgin Media…
Do I Like Vimeo?
I like the player of Vimeo. I quite like the design of Vimeo. I like the fact it’s smaller than YouTube. I like the thing that shows activity on the homepage, it’s nice and it makes it feel active and stuff. But then I saw this: And I…
Designer Web Site’s
Cool. A £100. But I’ll write the copy, OK?
Bill Banned This Photo
Doesn’t that look like the most amazing sandwich you ever saw? Take it from me, it’s an amazing sandwich from an amazing shop. Bill’s in Brighton (there’s a branch in Lewes too but I’ve never been to that one. If you’re ever in the area…
10 Reasons Why Digital is Better Than Advertising – Number 1
Digital agencies sometimes do advertising. But only a few of them call themselves ‘digital advertising agencies’. This means that we’re given permission to do lots of other things. If you work in advertising you are typically expected to…
Some More Thoughts On Twitter
From Ian Curry at frog design: Twitter: The Missing Messenger He makes the connection between Twitter and Tumblelogs too. But there’s two bits in his post that I especially like. It’s basically blogging reduced to what the Russian…
Evil Recruiters
Not all recruiters are evil, but lots of them are. In my inbox today I’ve got 3 unsolicited candidates from cold-mailing (i.e. spamming) recruiters. This is bad. And it’s unfortunate for the candidates as I’m not even going to look at…
A Couple of Cool Things
Burton have designed this (as yet unreleased) sleeping hoody. I’ve always struggled to find the perfect item of clothing for long journeys. This looks like the designers have nailed it (or at least had a damn good go). The Complex blog…
I Got My First Haters…
I knew it would happen someday. It was only a matter of time. But I’ve got my first haters! Sam and Highly Miffed are upset about the post and subsequent comments around on the Youth Marketing conference that I didn’t like. See their…
Go and See Alan Fletcher
I suppose that’s not really possible so visit this exhibition of his work at the Design Museum instead. I went on Saturday and it was great. Amazing to see the work of someone who’s both era-defying and defining at the same time – some of…
Venice Project Becomes Joost
The project formerly known as The Venice Project has now turned into Joost. It’s the latest venture from the guys behind Skype and in a nutshell it hopes to do to television what Skype did to telephones. As they put it: ‘taking the best of…
Another Apple Post
This will just be one blog post about probably the most blogged about thing ever. The new Apple iPhone. Here’s a couple of thoughts… It is the ultimate in gadget porn Features some proper interface wizardry Looks like another…
My Top Stuff of 2006
I’ve been thinking about doing a post on stuff I’ve liked in 2006, if you’ve got a blog it seems like you have to. But I didn’t know what to put in it or how to organise it. But I got re-inspired by The Design Conspiracy annual (a thing of…
Age Coins
I was in Holland on Monday and I had a very nice time. One of the odd little things that caught my eye were Age Coins. I’ve never seen these before and thought they were a lovely, simple solution to a problem. Vending machines are a really…
Powder Your Nose in Style
I like this. A luxury private washroom on Oxford Street. Brilliantly named WC1 (well I liked it anyway!). A glamorous urban sanctuary, WC1 is the world’s first one-million-pound powder room. It has been designed with impeccable hygiene and…
One Laptop Per Child
I’ve not paid much attention to the development of the One Laptop Per Child project recently. But looking at it again, it’s truly one of the most inspiring projects around right now. Their aims are really interesting: The MIT Media Lab has…
One Day in History
I liked this idea about capturing a day in history through blogs: ‘One Day in History’ is a one off opportunity for you to join in a mass blog for the national record. We want as many people as possible to record a ‘blog’ diary which will…
Masculine Man
I’ve been pondering issues around this whole Carnival of the Modern Man thing. And one thing that sticks in my head is that the word masculine almost conjours up an image of the exact opposite in my mind. The only people I can picture in…
Organic Blog
Not a blog about stuff with no pesticides. Stuff about the web agency Organic. Actually they might be pesticide free too, in fact they probably are. They’ve got a nice blog: Three Minds @ Organic. A smart blog with interesting things in…
Application Love
After an earlier gripe about YouTube’s shoddy error message, here’s a beautiful piece of application design that’s cheered me up no end. From the brilliant and ever useful backpackit.com and their writeboard (collaborative document editing…
New Design
Stan Lee suggested that maybe I should consider a new web 2.0 logo, and pointed me in the direction of the Web 2.0 logo generator. What do you reckon?…
Crackunit gets a tidy up
It was time for a tidy-up. My blog template was starting to break in places. And I’ve found that I was writing longer posts. Which may or may not be a good thing depending on your point of view. But it meant that the big type was getting a…
Companies get 2.0ed
The YayHooray community get all over redesigning big corporations in the style of web 2.0. It’s all over Digg and del.icio.us, so you might have seen it already. But it is pretty funny (if you’re a design geek). All the cliches are there…
Trial By Blog
As I’ve mentioned before, we’re working with Zopa at the moment to do a redesign of their website. It’s a great company and a great project. I was in a meeting last week when Dave from Zopa said “Oh, I’ve stuck some of the designs on the…
The Stuff Designers Wish You Knew
If you’re in the business of design or working with designers you ought to read Seth’s post on how to live happily with a great designer. I know the designers I work with would like you to read it ;-) technorati tags:design
We’re fucked
OK, not totally. But this is an interesting development. A startup that will take your designs and turn them into coded web pages by outsourcing it to cheap places around the world (returning your pages within 5 days). Prices from $150. If…
Web Dogma
It’s been a while since I’ve read Boxes and Arrows, it’s a very good collaborative blog about information architechture and related jiggery pokery. One thing caught my eye today: Dogmas Are Meant to be Broken: An Interview with Eric Reiss…
New Flickr Layout
Eek! I guess it’s just because I’ve been using it a lot recently. But I just logged on to Flickr and the new design really freaked me out. I guess that’s what happens when something that you use all the time changes without warning. If…
Sphere – Blog Search
Sphere: a useful new blog search engine. Seems to index things very fast. My posts from yesterday were already in there. It’s got a particularly nifty ‘custom date range’ function which shows time and volume of posts in a nice way…
Ugly Design Works
This is an interesting debate. I think I might not share it with some of my colleagues for fear of inciting a mini-riot Ugly Design Works… Most Web Designers Miss the Point. I do think there’s some truth in it though (eBay anyone?). It…
Egglings
When I first saw these I thought they were great. A really lovely bit of ‘design’, but then I thought about it some more and started to think they’re really a bit freaky. The idea of a plant growing out of an egg made me feel a bit funny…
Techno Faux-Pas
Whilst browsing in Micro Anvika today I was looking at the plethora of digital music players, ranging from the gorgeously designed to the truly horrible. When out of the corner of my eye I saw one particular piece of gadgetary. I thought…
The Joy of Stats…
Whilst checking my lovely new easy-to-read stats package ‘Mint’, I noticed that an old friend and colleague had linked to me. A click later and hey-presto Kief Morris is alive and well. And he’s even said a nice thing or two about me and…
Hulger and Skype
Nik, one of my co-partners at Poke has, in my opinion, finally nailed a proper useful-use for his Hulger Phones. Although an interesting design statement and a humerous novelty when attached to a mobile, I don’t think anyone would really…
Papa Stour
I don’t know why really, but I love this little site. It’s only wee, but it’s perfectly formed. Kind of like one of thost little boutique shops where everything has been hand picked by a shopkeeper who cares. It’s just nicely designed…