http://www.designlessbetter.com/blogless A weblog of restraint Fri, 04 Jul 2008 21:00:38 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Before things get rolling, I should say that I’m only going to provide a 1,000 ft. view of our process. This is for two reasons: 1.) every project is different, so the best I can do is provide a summary of the steps we take, and 2.) this needs to ... http://www.designlessbetter.com/blogless/posts/3d-at-dlb-%e2%80%93-part-two We've said it before, and we'll say it again. Designing a restrained billboard might be rare, and even culturally antonymic, but when it's done right, it's incredibly effective. Billboard Advertisement for the Denver Water Public Utility Here, the Denver Water Public Utility takes the Eskom strategy one step further, actually chopping their ... http://www.designlessbetter.com/blogless/posts/less-is-better-vol-4-billboards In the late 1870s, scientist and eugenicist Sir Francis Galton developed an image of the prototypical "face of crime" by creating composite photos of men convicted of serious offenses. Though Galton failed to discover anything abnormal in his composite criminal faces, he did find that the resulting visages were shockingly handsome. ... http://www.designlessbetter.com/blogless/posts/capitalizing-on-perceptual-fluency The 3D tutorial is going to be delayed until next week. It's taking me a long time to prep all the models and images I need. Instead, I'm going to share something I came across recently on Drawn!. (If you're a fan of illustration and animation, this site belongs in ... http://www.designlessbetter.com/blogless/posts/evgeny-parfenov "What happens to a hamburger is what happens to the people."- Mark Fenske, I Hate Capitalism, Branded Food & the Internet (ruminations from a drive across America). A standard Fenske blog post takes the form of a letter to his students. Here is an example excerpted in its entirety (sans picture): Q: ... http://www.designlessbetter.com/blogless/posts/mark-fenske-advertising-bureaucracy-jouissance My warm fuzzy for the day: Hail to the king, baby! Newly-installed RISD President, John Maeda with newly-enrichened RISD Alumnus, Seth MacFarlane (creator of Family Guy). Not quite Brad Pitt with Rem Koolhaas, but I am big fan of both of these guys and it makes me smile to see them together in ... http://www.designlessbetter.com/blogless/posts/family-guys Last month, the Software Usability Research Laboratory (SURL) at Wichita State University put out a new eye-tracking study, focused on differences in eye-movement patterns between single- and two-column web pages. For some reason, I always read these, and inevitably end up frustrated. Not just because of the standard objections to eye-tracking ... http://www.designlessbetter.com/blogless/posts/3-web-design-lessons-from-eye-tracking-studies One of the hallmarks of “Web 2.0” style are graphics that use 3D effects—glossy reflections, depth cues, etc.—but aren’t truly 3D at their source. At DLB, we often take the opposite approach, using 3D models to produce graphics that aren’t overtly 3D. We’ve found over the years that this method ... http://www.designlessbetter.com/blogless/posts/3d-at-dlb-%e2%80%93-part-one Apropos of a continuing discussion between Nick and myself about the nature of design here at Blogless, it seems almost compulsory to mention Jess McMullin's Design Maturity Model. Jess contends that both corporations and designers are at different levels of design maturity, ranging from No Conscious Design — where "design value ... http://www.designlessbetter.com/blogless/posts/stratifications-of-design-maturity Some time ago, we were working on a website that required a contact form with the ability to attach a file. This sounds like, at this point in web design, it should be incredibly simple. Imagine my chagrin as I learned that, in fact, styling the FileUpload Object had a ... http://www.designlessbetter.com/blogless/posts/fancy-file-inputs