I don’t know why I am slightly embarrassed to admit how much these Michael Johansson installations speak to me.
3D seems to be everywhere these days, but is it bad for us? ABC blogger Mark Pesce thinks it might be.
Exposure to the kind of fake-3D we see in movies and video games can affect a person’s real-world depth perception. Unless a different technology comes along, Pesce argues that viewing 3D in this way for long periods of time could cause permanent perceptual damage(!).
But the media companies must have thought of this, right? Not really:
All of this is rolling forward without any thought to the potential health hazards of continuous, long-term exposure to 3D. None of the television manufacturers have done any health & safety testing around this. They must believe that if it’s safe enough for the cinema, it’s fine for the living room. But that’s simply not the case. Getting a few hours every few weeks is nothing like getting a few hours, every single day.
To follow up on this question of ethics, what about 3D accessibility, as well?
Even if it proves to be harmless (which I doubt — more on that next week), as it turns out, some people can’t see 3D. It bears noting than an experience should not require 3D, or one risks excluding at least some of the audience.
As designers, it seems as though we ought to be more careful in our application of 3D.
When it comes to work disputes, even with a contract, a designer can get taken advantage of. The CSS Killswitch is supposed to help even the score.
Say a client takes the site live without paying (which never happens…). The designer can use the Killswitch to hijack the CSS and effectively blank out the site. At this point, friendly negotiations are sure to commence (ahem).
There’s a part of me that finds the idea of getting even (as it were) satisfying. However, I can’t be convinced this is a good idea — at least if one wants anything more than getting even out of the deal.
I think building this into a site shows a huge gap in trust. This is absolutely poisonous for business. If I were the client and I found out that this was in my code, I’d probably fire the designer who put it there. A designer that puts this into a project is already assuming the worst; or worse yet, that person is planning to screw me. On the flip side, if I were a designer who worried about a client enough to think I would need a Killswitch, I’d seriously re-evaluate the arrangement. That’s a client I can do without.
Sometimes being good means being taken advantage of. Turn the other cheek, that sort of thing. If you do things like this to people — even bad people — how can you call yourself good?
One of the best commercials from this year’s Super Bowl was this clever Old Spice piece which seamlessly transitions from a bathroom, to a boat, to a horse.
Was this CG trickery? Apparently not. At least, not the parts that you think. If you have a few minutes to kill, you can watch this video where the ad creatives explain how they filmed the whole thing as one continuous take — with a real horse!
Then, when you’ve been convinced that not everything “fake” on TV is CG, you will be shocked when you see the extent of CG in places you never thought to look.
Before there was Processing, before John Maeda, before even the Media Lab, there was Muriel Cooper, pioneer of computational aesthetics and design.
This is a great tribute. If you’re not aware of her, you should give it a read. Probably the best thing I read last week.
I recently came across Jeff Clark’s portfolio, which features a ton of solid data visualization tools and projects, including a couple of nice applications for Twitter.
Twitter Venn (created using Processing and Twitter Search) takes a set of terms and creates a Venn Diagram showing the rate of tweets containing the each of search terms and combination of the search terms. Twitter Venn also shows a tag cloud for each regions with other common words. Look at the Twitter Venn for design, less, better:
Ok, I’ll take responsibility for the lack of the combo “design + less + better.” Paul, whose tweets are rare and often cryptic, isn’t helping a lot either. We’ll work on that.
Anyway, I also like Twitter Spectrum, which two search terms and shows words that are most commonly associated with the terms in tweets.
Via HBR.
In celebration of LOST’s final season and as a project of fan appreciation, 16 top designers and artists, who are also fans of the show, were commissioned to create artwork celebrating one of the series’ most memorable, and unforgettable, “water cooler” moments. This ultimate “fan art” was then turned into labor intensive, hand-pulled screen prints, limited to an edition of just 300, with less than 200 available to the public through our websites. Each beautiful poster tells its own different story, allowing the fan to relive memorable and influential moments in an artistic manner, as the show’s storied run comes to a close. Once this limited edition print has sold out, they will never be printed again.
Rough Type alerted us to a new Pew study which indicates that blogging “has declined in popularity among both teens and young adults since 2006.”
Here are the highlights of the study:
Not to be too glib about this, but, *obviously*. Blogging is a lot of work. You have to construct and type sentences, often simultaneously. You have to think of something to write about. You have to develop that thought across multiple sentences. You have to make inferences, sometimes even explicitly.
In sum, blogging is a royal pain in the ass, especially when compared to now-available social media technologies (i.e. Facebook, Twitter) which have none of the above requirements.
So, should we be surprised that these average young Americans don’t choose to do more work? No. Not at all. After all, it doesn’t surprise us that MUD-playing and fiction-reading are down significantly among teens, and that MMORPG playing and television-watching are way up.
It takes a special kind of masochist to write a blog, and I think that masochism can only be born of experience. The less people are forced to read and write, the less of them will learn to enjoy it, hence, the less of them will do it. Consider, for example, that instead of this post, I could have just tweeted:
Blogs are over: http://bit.ly/aj1ZfT.
And you could have been on your way five minutes ago.
Jessica Hische has created Day-Ruining Invoice Notepads. The covers are letterpressed and the interiors are 2 color offset. They’re bound with glue black binding tape. As Swiss Miss notes, a set of them will “certainly make any designer snortlaugh if you give it to them.”
You can buy them here.
Dirty White Trash (With Gulls), 1998
Their newer stuff is nice, too.
[T]he precision with which this graphic schematizes the death of a man is unsettling.
This past Friday, Georgian luge athlete Nodar Kumaritashvili was killed during a training run for the Winter Olympics. Saturday, the New York Times produced this visualization of the circumstances which lead to his death on the track.
I was struck by the experience — a man reduced to an abstraction, a projectile — which one manipulates towards the last frame: a photograph showing the moment of his fatal collision. I found the juxtaposition, and my participation in it, troubling.
