Various elements may look broken, since Internet Explorer 6 renders CSS very poorly. May I suggest you download Firefox or Safari?
Mar. 27th, 2009
After SxSW interactive, Andy Budd and I jumped in a Dodge Charger and drove 10 hours from Austin to Memphis, for the tenth Information Architecture Summit. The trip was more interesting than it looks in this video.
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Sep. 14th, 2008
I remembered some lovely animated typography this evening, went to see it again, and through the wonder of web 2.0 magic, I’d suddenly discovered a whole YouTube subculture of folks who are animating dialogue from films. Here’s the most impressive stuff I found.
Warning: none of it’s visually unsafe, but some of the audio is NSFW. Put your headphones on.
The one that started all of this for me. It went around in emails ages ago, and I’ve looked at it again and again ever since. By the talented Jarratt Moody, who has more goodies on his own site.
Pretty wild mix of fonts here, but somehow it works, and the timing’s spot on.
Lovely feeling of 3D space, and the graphic illustrations add a bunch. The spelling could do with a check, though.
The grungy background, wobbly camera and type make for a nice change.
One of the best speeches in the movie, and here the colours and layout express the different voices well. The background colour changes also create a good visual rhythm.
I haven’t seen the movie, but the animations nice and smooth. But better than the type animation are the little object details, especially the “dating” table.
Love the palette, the textures also add a lot, but what really makes this one are the silhouette illustrations. I must however admit that I’m getting a little sick of Helvetica. Are students so conservative these days?
I know, it’s not from a movie, but I found this so spectacularly well done that I just had to cram it in here.
I don’t do type animation, and likely never will, but I enjoy looking at it and am sure it gets different creative juices pumping in my head. Andy Budd reminded me that we web designers often live in a fenced in little world, and that we’re cheating ourselves of a world of inspiration. When you look over the fence, where do you look?
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Sep. 4th, 2008
Videos don’t seem to be the kind of content that inspires too many comments, but judging by the links to my Reboot interviews, it seems like you’ve enjoyed them. Going on that—and considering how much I enjoyed meeting the folks I interviewed—I’m planning on continuing the series at dConstruct. I’ll only be there one day so it’s unlikely I’ll get that many interviews done, but there will be plenty of interesting folks there so I’ll do what I can. Top-of-the-list targets are Joshua Porter, Elliot Jay Stock and Leisa Reichelt, but I’m looking for more candidates. If you’ll be there and have something to say about design, @ me on twitter.
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Aug. 10th, 2008
Like a fool, I missed both of Thomas Vander Wal’s presentations at Reboot 10. I heard they were good. So it was only coincidentally (and after the conference was over) that I managed to get this interview with him a the funky Fox Hotel where he was staying.
So what’s design mean to you, Thomas?
It’s the layer on top of things that are used, that makes them comfortable and gives them more ease of use. It’s adding experience but taking away the hard edges, and allow people to embrace the tool or service in a closer interaction.
Other than that, his explanation of “the four foundation layers” for developing social tools gave me plenty to think about.
After the interview, Thomas and I coincidentally discovered a shared love of typography, and spent an afternoon in Copenhagen, a beautifully designed city, hunting interesting type with our cameras (his booty and mine). It was a blast to spend time with Thomas: he spit out interesting stuff the whole time, and I wish I’d written it all down.
I’ll be seeing Thomas again soon, and would love to do another interview. What would you ask him if you could? If you’re as interested as I am in what he’s got to say, leave a comment with your questions, and I’ll gather them up and me and my camera will ask him next week.
I interviewed eleven smart people at Reboot10 in Copenhagen, Denmark, asking the same question: what’s design mean to you? This is the last video in the series.
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Aug. 10th, 2008
Interview number ten is with Kars Alfrink. How’s that for a cool name? On his own site, leapfrog.nl, he describes his work so: “I design the dialogue between people and the products & services they use, with the help of a broad range of sketching and prototyping techniques.”
Kars’ answer went in an interesting direction, quite different from any other answers I got in the interviews:
The unique thing about design, as opposed to other disciplines such as engineering, is the capacity to imagine things that are not actually here yet, and imagine them in such a way that they can be experienced. [snip] The designer has the capacity to make them tangible in some way, for other people, without them needing to be built.
As you’d imagine from this quote, Kars does a lot of prototyping, which he explains in some detail. He also said some pretty interesting, and uncoventional, things about the relationship between design and understanding of, and involvement in, the technologies of implementation.
I interviewed eleven smart people at Reboot10 in Copenhagen, Denmark, asking the same question: what’s design mean to you? This is the next-to-last and tenth video in the series. The last interview with Thomas Vander Wal will be up shortly.
What do you think? Leave a comment…