Filed under “design”

Data-driven, content-first design

DonorsChoose-TextLengths
 I’m working on an app for the DonorChoose.org Hacking Education Contest. DonorsChoose works by having teachers submit classroom project/supply needs that people can then donate to pay for through the internet. Right now the only way to “share” those projects is through the usual email, Facebook and Twitter; my idea for am app is to create [...]

Reductionist function and practice

 Rob Haitani on Palm OS from Designing Interactions: One bit of advice that I gave to people designing the Palm OS was, “If you can really understand the one thing your customer wants to do most frequently, and make that a one-step process, then I guarantee people will like the product.” Just say, “What is [...]

Belief-based design

 Matt Webb posted “Inbox Hero” about a month back (via AJ): Rand: The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about an email app built on a principle of Objectivism. At the moment, my email client defaults to doing nothing, and I must intervene [...]

Advocacy in print — Survival News for 2011

 Today I sent another issue of Survival News—“the voices of low-income women”—to the printers; this is my second year as layout artist for the newspaper. At 40 broadsheets (11“x17”), the newspaper is the same size as last year. Published by Survivors, Inc., Survival News is the official newspaper of the National Welfare Rights Union and [...]

The medium is the method

 Jeff Hawkins, founder of Palm Computing, from Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge: I think paper is just this wonderful medium; it’s been honed for a thousand years. It’s really great! To try to do what you do with paper, with just drawing—line width, sketching, and so on—it’s very hard to get a good experience. Where [...]

Laying out latest layout

SurvivalNews-W2010-chop
 Since November I have been working on print layout for the Winter 2009/2010 edition of Survival News. “The voices of low-income women”, Survival News is half-yearly-ish compendium of news, personal stories, and advocacy information. Nearly half of this edition is devoted to Survival Tips, a collection of services and advice from legal aid to food [...]

Motivated design

 From David Barringer’s “Myths of the Self-Taught Designer” in his book of essays and more, There’s Nothing Funny about Design (and available online in parts 1, 2 and 3). Designed as a dialogue, this piece is, as Barringer says, “a hybrid mess of a literary shenanigan, inspired by the dialogues of the philosopher Denis Diderot (1713–1784). [...]

Graphical Organization of the Talmud

 Interesting explanation about the traditional layout of the Talmud. From Andrew on the Marks and Meaning mailing list I’m reminded as you discuss this of the arrangement of texts in a traditional manuscript copy of the Talmud. Most printed copies are a bit different, but originally a Talmud page was divided into nine squares like [...]

Design Analogies

 Kill Switch release I was having a talk today with Danielle about this proposal on “Open Source Engagement” on Milla Digitalia. Mostly I was being critical of the manner in which the authors sling around “open source”. But back to Danielle, and the analogy. The fallacy of that proposal is that the authors are confusing [...]

A new look

 Island94.org has undergone some revision today; I hope you noticed. I upgraded Drupal to 4.7 and rethemed the site. Drupal 4.7 adds a lot of really great features, the main one, from a ‘nifty’ perspective is free tagging. This gives a lot more granularity to organizing posts. There is also a lot of nice stuff under [...]

Making Art with Inkscape

 Lately I’ve been spending more time than I should with a great free/open source software illustration program: Inkscape. Before I get to far into an explanation of the fun and wonder I have with Inkscape let me make a little caveat. I’ve used Adobe Illustrator in the past and never liked it much; I admit [...]