I often do an assignment with my students where they go looking for letterforms in nature. Leigh Wolf just sent me this link to GeoGreeting.com which takes the same idea - but conceptualizes it on a global scale. Check out this example.
Posts related to: Good | Bad Design
100 greatest mathematical theorems
Title says it all... check it out.
The commodification of ugly
Noah, one of the students in my design doctoral seminar sent me this video by Ze Frank. Check it out.
Brilliant advertisement
I don't want to give anything away... watch it once and then once more... [Youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQbl1c63Ofo]
The KISS principle & weather
Keep It Simple Stupid is one of those adages you hear lots of times, but here is a website that has truly taken it to heart. See how an online weather related website can be taken to its logical, simplest extreme. Check out Umbrella Today?
véjà du, on seeing anew
I recently learned about véjà du (see here to learn more). I was sufficiently intrigued by this idea to use this as an assignment in the CEP818, Creativity in Teaching and Learning course I am currently teaching (with Mike DeSchryver). The assignment students were...
Word cloud
Tag or word clouds are visual visual depiction of user-generated tags or words on a website. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. Fonts, color, layouts can also be used to convey information. Now Kara Sevensma...
Understanding Chromics
Scott McCloud is one of my favorite people. His book Understanding Comics is just wonderful and I have used it in many of my classes. It is a great way to start a course. Scott made news recently for creating a 38 page comic book to introduce Google's new browser...
Photoshopping in the cloud
Cloud computing maybe the next big thing. Google Apps and Chrome, gmail and flickr, YouTube and Yahoo Groups, I am moving more and more of what I do online. Even this blog in some way is an example of how I archive my work on the net. And today I discovered Pixlr....
Jugaad, India-genous creativity
Jugaad is a Hindi word which does not have a straight forward equivalent in English. I guess the closest phrase I would say would be "situational or indigenous creativity," the ability to make do creatively with the tools/resources one has at hand. On Jugadu.com I...
Capturing CAPTCHA or If it can be outsourced…
... it will. We have all see CAPTCHA's (aka Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). They are images with somewhat garbled text on them that websites used to tell humans from automated programs. The idea is to prevent prevent...
Twittering a tale
My favorite short short story is by Hemmingway. It is all of six words long - but boy, does it pack a punch. It goes, "For sale, baby shoes, never used." Wow! It turns out that such short stories are not merely a novelty. The advent of Twitter and microblogging, with...
Tweaking the design
Someone once said that all design is redesign - and it has never been truer than trying to design your website. A few weeks ago I found out that my site looked terrible on the iTouch and the iPhone. I made a quick fix (adding a template and plugin) that would allow...
Visualizing mathematics
I love visual proofs of mathematical theorems. One visual proof I use quite often in my design courses (CEP817 or CEP917) is a visual proof of the fact that the sum of consecutive odd numbers is a square number. In other words: 1 + 3 = 4 = 22 1 + 3 + 5 = 9 = 32 1 + 3...
Truly grasping 4-D
Understanding 4D while living in a 3D world. A stunning series of videos (freely available for download or online viewing) that teach you how to to visualize four dimensions. Titled Dimensions, these videos were created by a French professor of mathematics in...
Design for democracy
Very nice piece in today's NYTimes about ballot design (How Design Can Save Democracy). The article offers a list of problems with the traditional ballot and suggests a solution. A good example of the value of information design. Check it out here
By the Numbers
I just discovered a blog by Charles Blow, visual Op-Ed columnist for the NYTimes. Titled By the Numbers it is a site for "discussion about all things statistical — from the environment to entertainment — and their visual expressions." Pretty cool. Check it out.
TAPS / TPACK videos
A few years ago, as a part of our PT3 project Matt Koehler, Ken Dirkin and I video taped a series of teacher interviews around authentic problem solving in teaching using technology. The teachers were winners of the TAPS (Technology in Authentic Problem Solving)...
Is the web making us stupid?
... or just narrow? I just discovered Britannica blog, a pretty lively virtual space for intelligent discussion. How I had not come across it earlier is a mystery - but again that is the beauty of the web. Anyway, there is an ongoing discussion there about how the web...
Digital before his time
A recent story in the NYTimes about Peter Gabriel (An Old Rocker Gets Digital) brought back memories of Peter Gabriel's album covers. It tells you a lot about me that I know album covers better than I know his music! During his time with Genesis and later, when he...
Life is about editing
A fun and thought provoking, recursive music video by Allee Willis titled "Editing is Cool." The video attempts to capture the process of creating this very video, from the lyrics, to the music to the special effects and so on. Denise Caruso (at Salon) quotes Allee...
Blogging for the iPhone
I have been playing with an iTouch for the past few days and have have been quite impressed. What bothered me somewhat though was that my website (something I have spent hours designing) didn't morph itself as gracefully as I would have liked into this new interface....
How does my browser know I am Indian?
Over the past few weeks I have noticed that some webpages I visit have banner ads that are targeted to me quite specifically - in particular to my Indian origin. For instance this page (a story about ipods being used by the army) contains a set of banner ads that seek...
On finding the right (parking) spot
I had posted earlier about a "virtual speed bump" a visual illusion that make drivers think that they were approaching a speed bump when in actuality it was just a design cleverly painted on the ground. Now here's another one: Directions in a car park... As the...
Browsing for gender
Just found out about this rather nifty tool that looks at your browser history and estimates your gender. My personal results were as follows: Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 24% Likelihood of you being MALE is 76% Try it out for yourself, or read more about how...
Calvin & Jobs!
This is just too good to be true! Also see here and here.
The end of practical obscurity
There is a somewhat troubling story in NYTimes a couple of days ago: (If You Run a Red Light, Will Everyone Know?) about CriminalSearches.com, a free service that lets people search by name through criminal archives of all 50 states and 3,500 counties in the United...
Ask-ing Cuil questions of Google
How do we evaluate a search engine? Chris Wilson attempts to answer this question (with help from the crowd) in his article on Slate "How To Talk to a Search Engine: Three queries to help decide if Google or Cuil or Ask is right for you?" The three search items he...
AllTop
I just came across a rather different kind of news aggregator, at least compared to Google. The brainchild of Guy Kawasaki (ex-Apple evangelist and tech guru) you have to check out AllTop. This may actually become a regular destination for me.
Visual thinking
While researching my previous post about véjà du and Abraham Wald I came across "The Back of the Napkin Blog" (a.k.a. Digital Roam). This blog is devoted to visual thinking and representation. Very cool and very interesting... well worth a visit. Turns out that there...