1. 11 May 2007

    Timeless Beauty

    John Lane

    483 days ago

    We have come to talk of music and drama and art and architecture as if they were technical words for remote abstractions or exceptional luxuries, but what is civilization for, if it is not to produce poetry, music, beauty and courtesy? These things are nothing in themselves unless they have a use for life… William Richard Lethaby, 15

    Keats: Negative Capability 24

    Speech is not of the tongue, but of the heart. The tongue is merely the instrument with which one speaks. He who is dumb is dumb in the heart, not in his tongue… As you speak so is your heart. Paracelsus, 44

    The greatest thing that a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and to tell what it saw in a plain way. Hindreds of people can talk for one who cna thing, and thousands can think for the one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, philosophy, and religion – all in one. John Ruskin, 48

    Although human ingenuity makes various inventions, corresponding by various machines to the same end, it will never discover any inventions more beautiful, more appropriate or more direct than nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous. Leonardo Da Vinci, 55

    On the novelty of landscape, John Ruskin, 56

    For the Native Americans, art and religion, art and life, were not separate; nor were the beautiful and the functional. Art, beauty, and spirituality were so firmly intertwined that words neither existed nor were needed to separate them. This wholeness was a function of the fact that everything in their universe worked together: poetry didn’t exist apart from ritual, and ritual didn’t exist apart from vision and meditation and even healing. This philosophy of relating all life and all materials permeated even the simplest of objects, a Pawnee drum, a pair of slippers or a Crow medicine bag. 73

    The earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with god. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 102

    Fritz Lang: Metropolis 139

    We must draw our standards from the natural world. We must honor with the humility of the wise the bounds of that natural world and the mystery which lies beyond them, admitting that there is something in the order of being which evidently exceeds all our competence. Vaclav Havel, 143

    The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wander, not longer marvel, is as good as dead. Albert Einstein, 155

    Walt Whitman on religion, 158:

    Heaven was here on Earth and the physical and the spiritual could not be divided; they were, are, and always will be the same. [...] The future would see a spirituality of meditation and the contemplation of beauty.

  2. 02 April 2007

    Beautiful Evidence

    522 days ago

    Tufte’s newest tome on the art of information design, or whatever he calls it these days. I really don’t do much design of any sort, but find the stuff fascinating to look at and even read about. Here’s a list of things from the book that I’d love to have poster size and hang somewhere:

    • 17 – Prints of fish.
    • 37 – Pages from book on skiing.
    • 46 – Visualization of Chopin piece.
    • 73 – horse by Verrocchio.
    • 84 – Centuar manuscript.
    • 96 – da Vinci sketches of the moon, 103 – da Vinci star chart.

    And a few notes:

    be approximately right rather than exactly wrong 50

    The rage to conclude:

    The rage for wanting to conclude is one of the most deadly and most fruitless manias to befall humanity. Each religion and each philosophy has pretended to have God to itself, to measure the infinite, and to know the recipe for happiness. What arrogance and what nonsense! I see, to the contrary, that the greatest geniuses and the greatest works have never concluded. Gustave Flaubert, 154

  3. 30 November 2006

    The Nature of Order Book 2: The Process of Creating Life

    Christopher Alexander

    645 days ago

    Architects are much too concerned with the design of the world (its static structure), and not yet concerned enough with the design of the generative processes that create the world (its dynamic structure). 4

    Real kindness is something quite different, something valuable in itself. It is a true process, not guided by the the grasp for a goal, but guided by the minute-to-minute necessity of caring, dynamically, for the feelings and well-being of another. This is not trivial, but deep; sincerely related to human feeling; and not predictable in its end-result, because the end-result is not a goal. Unlike the goal-oriented picture, which is imposed intellectually on our substance as persons, real kindness is a process true to our essential human instinct and to our knowledge of what it means to be a person. But the machine-age view showed a process like kindness as being oriented toward a goal, just as every machine too has its purpose — it’s goal, what it is intended to produce. 9

    The Principle of Least Action, 37: The principle says that the evolution of any dynamic system will always follow the path of least work.

    Under these circumstances, as layer upon layer of smooth unfolding takes place, what develops is a system of centers which is stronger, crustier, and more imbricated, and in which the centers (at first hundreds, then thousands, or tens of thousands) all reinforce and intensify each other. 65

    This, I believe, is an essential model which teaches us the real meaning of living structure, and which shows us these phenomena as naturally existing phenomena of beauty which will occur without effort in any world where the wholeness is allowed to unfold smoothly and truthfully, without disturbing previously existing centers. Once this is clear, we shall then have a vision of the world in which the world itself — all of it — animals, plants, mountains, rivers, buildings, roads, terraces, rooms, and windows — is part of a single system and a single way of understanding. 83

    Thus the world has entered a new phase. What is made, what is built now, what develops in the world, is governed by images and rules. It is no longer automatically governed by the existing wholeness. It is now governed by what we decide. 109

    The essence of successful unfolding is that form develops step by step, and that the building as a whole then emerges, coherent, organized. The success if this process depends, always, on sequence. A building design can unfold successfully only when its features “crystallize out” in a proper order. 129

    It goes on like that. It is not complicated, not pretentious, but simple and obvious. It is just common sense. 130

    Thus what I have referred to as the “rough, rambling” quality of so much that is good in the environment, comes from the light-hearted yet profound adaptation which such a simple stepwise process encourages, and which a more formal or controlled design process cannot achieve. 171

    Instead of using plans, design, and so on, I shall argue that we must instead use generative processes. Generative processes tell us what to do, what actions to take, step by step, to make buildings and building designs unfold beautifully, rather than detailed drawings which tell us what the end-result is supposed to be. 176

    *All* the well-ordered complex systems we know in the world, all those anyway that we view as highly successful, are generated structures, not fabricated structures. 180

    The step-by-step approach works. The all-or-nothing approach does not work. THis is the secret of biological evolution. During the course of evolution, the adaptation of the thousands and millions of variables that must occur to make one successful organism happens step-by-step, essentially one gene at a time. That is what makes evolution possible. It would be impossible for nature to “design” a system as complex as any organism all at once. 237

    Butterfly effect, 241: If we examine a complex natural system evolving, each next stage of its evolution depends on its previous stage. Mechanistic 19th-century science created a thought-model in which the next stage would be easily predictable from the previous stage. But it turns out that the world is not like the mechanical thought-model. More sophisticated discoveries have made it clear that in a complex system the next stage is dependent on the current configuration of the whole, which in turn may depend on subtle minutiae in the history of the previous wholes, so “reave-like” that there is no way to predict the path of the emerging system accurately ahead of time.

    To create a living world, successfully, we must again find ways of making all building processes move forward in this experimental, responsive fashion. That on thing alone, as a kind of bedrock for all design and all planning and all building, will change the world. 246

    What steps do you take, in what order? The most basic instruction I can give you as a guide for a living process, is that you move with certainty. That means, you take small steps, one at a time, deciding only what you know. You try never to take a step which is a guess or a “why don’t we try this?” Large scale trial-and-error, shots in the dark, simply do not work. Rather, you move by slow, small decisions, deciding one thing, getting sure about it, and then moving on.

    ...

    When I say that you should move in small decisions, I do not mean that the decisions should be small in physical scale. Rather, I mean that the content of each decision should be limited to a particular subject, to some feature of the design, disconnected from other matters, and floating, to an extent, by itself. 258

    We should run through the possibilities very fast, and reject most of them. If we do accept one, we should accept it, reluctantly, only when we finally encounter something for which no good reason presents itself to reject it, which appears genuinely wonderful to us, and which demonstrably makes the feeling of the whole become more profound. 258

    The crux of every design process lies in finding the generative sequence for that design, and making sure that sequence is the right one for the job. [...]

    Another way of saying the same thing is to observe that for many people, perhaps the most difficult thing of all in understanding living process, and in getting a proper sequence for the unfolding of the whole, is reconciling oneself to the idea of doing one thing at a time. 317

    It is only in its uniqueness to unique conditions, made necessary by find adaptation, that anything takes on living form. This is true to such an extent that if the structure of uniqueness at every part does not occur within a structure, we can be sure that it is not an unfolded whole, not a living structure at all. 324

    Just make it nice at every spot. 337

    In any living process, or any process of design or making, the way forward, the next step which is more structure-enhancing, is that step which most intensifies the feeling of the emerging whole. 371

    What matters is that the building — the room, the canyon, the paingting, the ornament, the garden — as they are created, send profound feeling back towards us. 372

    What I am saying then, is that before making anything, large or small, and before each step in the process of making it — before each step — we must be able to feel its emotional substance. 383

    The idea that a building becomes more “organic” if it has a more complex form, even when based on notions of the interior organization, is almost always wrong. 422

    Simplicity: making the essential in life come forward, and allowing the inessential to be laid aside. 462

    To understand the idea that the symmetries in a structure are “just right,” consider, for example, the flow of electricity in two parallel wires. Other things being equal, the current will flow equally in the two wires. Why is this? If we want to, we can invoke some rule like Ohm’s law or the principle of least action, to show why the wires carry the same current. But the deepest explanation, the most profound one, is simply this: There is no reason for the two wires to carry different currents, because the situation is symmetrical. Therefore, they carry the same current. In the absence of any reason, thing distribute themselves symmetrically. Asymmetries occur only where there are reasons powerful enough to generate them. 472

    ...the lack of need for “image,” again makes it possible for people to do just what is required, and nothing else. 478

    In the 20th century we assumed that to be simple is to use drastic geometric shapes lacking in structure. Yet nature teaches us that what is truly simple — a waterfall say — is vastly complex — as a structure — and yet vastly simple in its essence. Thus we must strive for something which is utterly simple, in the sense that there is nothing unwanted there, nothing extra. At the same time we know that if we succeed in being truly simple, we reach a find filigree of level upon levels in which every part is unique, each adapted to the one unique spot in the world where it lies. 489

    Frederick Taylor, mentioned 515.

    The traditional process of the architect then, what is it? [...] Making, designing, building, helping. 560

    The idea that feeling itself can become both criterion and instrument – that what is done, no matter how large or how small, can become personal, connected to the personal self of all human beings – and that this process then opens the door to a new form of society. That is truly revolutionary. That can shake the world. 567

    What I do know, and am certain of, is that the society of the future, the long future of men and women on our planet, will – must – inevitably be carried forward by this kind of process which allows the nourishment of the individual to happen at the same time that vast, and highly technical developments occur. 569

    It is the vision of a future living Earth that draws me on. Inspired by a throughly new view of structure, feuled by a view which sees living process as the origin of all life, this allows us to contemplate, for the first time, the idea that one day such living process will cover and completely generate, in biological fashion, the natural and human-made and built environment that we may ultimately learn to call our living Earth. 570

  4. 21 September 2006

    715 days ago

    Death 'N' Stuff

    have we become so bored by life that we’ve inadvertently become inured to death?

    via Kjell Olsen715 days ago

  5. 31 July 2006

    767 days ago

    Dangerous Beauty: The Art of the Shiv

    Resourceful design?

    via Kjell Olsen767 days ago

  6. 29 July 2006

    Brilliant Orange

    David Winner

    769 days ago

    A look into the synthesis of Dutch culture, football, and design. A few months ago one of the guys at work mentioned it, and when I saw it again mentioned here there was no stopping me telling the friendly librarians to send it my way. Centered around the freestyle, elegant, beautiful style of Netherlands football from the glory days, Winer looks at how that philosophy merges with the rest of the Dutch world. Lots of talk about Soccer and Design, two good hooks for me.

    Pieter Jansz Saenredam (59), post renaissance dutch painter. Wow, find Interior of the Church of St Bavo in Haarlem and take a look at it..

    Hollandse Velden (62), Hans Van der Meer on photography:

    Football is a game of space So why should you leave the space out? Every Monday in the newspapers you see the same stupid, boring close-ups taken from behind the goals with long telephoto lenses which distort the space. Those pictures show you football situations but you have no idea what they mean. Two players fight for the ball. So what? Where on the pitch are they? IN the 1950s, we had different pictures, more interesting photographs of the crowd, wide-angle pictures of the game. The close-ups tell you so little. When the sports photography archives are opened in a hundred years, there will be a whole part of the history of the game missing because all the interesting little things around the pitch were simply not photographed. 64

    You can’t rationalize it. It’s like driving a car. That is also about being part of a system larger then you… the car becomes you. You can only drive it when you don’t know the rules any more, when you forget everything they taught you. Every time you turn a corner, you don’t get out of the car to measure the curves and then get back into the car. You do everything blind because of the system, the road and the other cars, which are part of the system too… And that’s the moment when you are ‘in form’ in both senses. It feels good and there’s this whole hectic feeling of extension into the world this is being “informed.” Lars Spuybroek (architect), 71

    We played with anything as long as it was round – rolled up papers tied with string, anything. Some people’s parents had money and could get hold of a proper ball, but mostly it was tennis balls. You develop great technique like that. The ground was hard, so you didn’t want to fall because it hurt; so you have good balance. And the game was very quick because the hard ground makes the game quicker. No one ever told us how to play. It was all natural. Arnold Muhren, 119

    I’ve always wanted to con kids into playing soccer with a tennis ball, I kick them around my house and play keep away with the dogs using only my feet, and it’s good fun. But something about having fields and goals makes it hard to use tennis balls, and I’ve never even played soccer in the street. Goddamn privilege.

    Brazil, sadly, is no longer swinging and flaming. I see defenders boot the ball away shamelessly. Holland must never play like that. If we did, people would murder me, and they would be right to do so. Guus Hiddink, 149

    Holland v. Italy, Argentia ‘78: Arie Haan 163 (Whenever a specific goal came under discussion, I checked for it on youtube or google video, and it would be there.)

    I think it is very Dutch to look for a simple solution. And the biggest thrill in our work is to find an even simpler solution. That is what we like. In the end the most satisifying solution is the one where you have cleared everything away and there is no solution at all any more but, at the same time, the problem has been solved. That’s the nicest way of doing it. Benthem, 237-8

  7. 21 June 2006

    Cambiasso

    807 days ago

    I really want this to post up on my wall. Also a fascinating post on design and architecture and football, but that sort of thing just flies right over my head.

  8. 21 April 2006

    868 days ago

    Sci-fi I like, Fictional Futures, Goldsmiths

    This is why I like design, because we can look at all these crazy things and float off into wildly abstracted spaces, but in the end it has to come down to stuff, and the stuff I really like is the everyday. That

    via Kjell Olsen868 days ago

  9. 18 April 2006

    871 days ago

    Hacking A More Tasteful MySpace

    Mike Davidson hacks his myspace page to (_gasp_) look decent.

    Many MySpace outsiders knock the service because its garish appearance and overall clunkiness overshadow anything good that may be underneath.

    I’m going to say that’s a pretty damn good reason not to use the thing. But I might just have to make a profile and take it out for a spin sometime this summer.

    Kjell Olsen871 days ago

  10. 15 April 2006

    Notes on the Synthesis of Form

    Christopher Alexander

    874 days ago

    Alexander lays out a system for designing complex forms, taking into account that just the human brain is completely incapable of such a task.

    His system is a graph of design considerations organized hierarchically to minimize interference between individual subsets of the graph. When subsets are sufficiently decoupled, they will come to functional equilibrium independently of the entire system, allowing the form being designed to be created and fulfill it’s requirements quickly.

    Alexander lays out two traditions of design: the unselfconscious, and the selfconscious. The unselfconscious builder acts within a complete system of design, taught to him by means of example and by hand. The selfconscious is today’s architect – taught in school and putting his reputation on the line, trying to be new and different, with each project undertaken.

    The Mousgoum cannot afford, as we do, to regard maintenance as a nuisance which is best forgotten until it is time to call the local plumber. It is in the same hands as the building operation itself, and its exigencies are as likely to shape the form as those of the initial construction. 31

    I shall call a culture unselfconscious if its form-making is learned informally, through imitation and correction. And I shall call a culture selfconscious if its form-making is taught academically, according to explicit rules. 36

    On the unconscious:

    No complex adaptive system will succeed in adapting in a reasonable amount of time unless the adaptation can proceed subsystem by subsystem, each subsystem relatively independent of the others. 41

    Closely associated with this immediacy is the fact that the owner is his own builder, that the form-maker not only makes the form but lives in it. Indeed, not only is the man who lives in the form the one who made it, but there is a special closeness of contact between man and form which leads to constant rearrangement of unsatisfactory detail, constant improvement. The man, already responsible for the original shaping of the form, is also alive to its demands while he inhabits it. And anything which needs to be changed is changed at once. 49

    This is the second crucial feature of the unselfconscious system’s form-production. Failure and correction go side by side. There is no deliberation in between the recognition of a failure and the reaction to it. 50

    Rigid tradition and immediate action may seem contradictory. But it is the very contrast between these two which makes the process self-adjusting. 52

    The forms produced in such a system are not the work of individuals, and their success does not depend on ant one man’s artistry, but only on the artist’s place within the process. 59

    On the conscious:

    With the invention of a teachable discipline called “architecture,” the old process of making form was adulterated and its chances of success destroyed. 58

    To achieve in a few hours at the drawing board what once took centuries of adaptation and development, to invent a form suddenly which clearly fits its context – the extent of the invention necessary is beyond the average designer. 59

    It isn’t that the designer sucks, it’s that he pretends not to suck. Which makes him suck all the more.

    Language gets in the way of our reckoning with a design problem:

    But once these concrete influence are represented symbolically in verbal terms, and these symbolic representations or names subsumed under larger and still more abstract categories to make them amenable to thought, they begin seriously impair out ability to see beyond them. 69

    Caught in a net of language of our own invention, we overestimate the language’s impartiality. Each concept, at the time of its invention no more then a concise way of grasping many issues, quickly becomes a precept. We take the step from description to criterion too easily, so that what is at first a useful tool becomes a bigoted preoccupation. 70

    In this fashion the selfconscious individual’s grasp of problems is constantly misled. His concepts and categories, besides being arbitrary and unsuitable, are self-perpetuating. Under the influence of concepts, he not only does things from a biased point of view, but sees them biasedly as well. The concepts control his conception of fit and misfit – until in the end he sees nothing but deviations from his conceptual dogmas, and loses not only the urge but even the mental opportunity to frame his problems more appropriately. 70

    We can’t get out from under ourselves, we’re completely self absorbed by nature. We’re so good, who would even want to deviate from his conceptual dogmas. So?

    The dilemma is simple. As time goes on the designer gets more and more control over the process of design. But as he does so, his efforts to deal with the increasing cognitive burden actually make it harder and harder for the real casual structure of the problem to express itself in the process 73

    If theory cannot be expected to invent form, how is it likely to be useful to a designer? 75

    Alexander introduces his program as a layer in between the subjective selfconscious interpretation of a design problem and it’s application to a form. The creation of an interrelated set of specifications (graph theory) reduced to it’s simplest and least coupled form (a tree), can mediate our bias toward a problem and lead to the best solution.

    Form and requirement diagrams: form diagram represents what an object will look like, a requirement diagram represents how it will work. Separate the two aren’t of any help to designing the solution to a problem.

    The solution of a design problem is really only another effort to find a unified description. The search for realization through constructive diagrams is an effort to understand the required form so fully that there is no longer a rift between its functional specification and the shape it takes. 90

    The unified description is the merger of form and requirement, representing all the information pertinent to solving the problem at hand.

    In all these cases, the invention is based in a hunch which actually makes it easier to understand the problem. Like such a hunch, a constructive diagram will often precede the precise knowledge which could prescribe its shape on rational grounds. 91

    And Alexander is already on his way to getting at the idea of a pattern langauge:

    Every component has this twofold nature: it is first a unit, and second a pattern, both a pattern and a unit. Its nature as a unit makes it an entity distinct from its surroundings. Its nature as a pattern specifies the arrangement of its own component units. It is the culmination of the designer’s task to make every diagram both a pattern and a unit. As a unit it will fir into the hierarchy of larger components that fall above it; as a pattern it will specify the hierarchy of smaller components which it itself is made of. 131

  11. 01 March 2006

    919 days ago

    YouTube - microsoft ipod packaging parody

    I figured that this was parody, in which case it’s worth a look, but I wasn’t going to go and elevate it to post on my blog status. But it’s an actual internal MS project, which makes it completely hilarious. Plebs.

    via Kjell Olsen919 days ago

  12. 27 December 2005

    Don't Make Me Think!

    Steve Krug

    983 days ago

    A good look at usability in web design. Quick read with nice illustration. I got the second edition, all nice and glossy, and had I been going anywhere on an airplane, likely could have finished reading it while up in the air.

    Not too much to say about it, but that it will be a nice one to have on the shelf to peek at.

    The overall idea is that of common sense – make things easy for the people using your website. Test the site against actual people to see what needs improvement. Test early in the development cycle, so that feedback can quickly be integrated into the site.

    Applies more to static web sites. There isn’t lots directly applying to web apps, which is more what I’m interested in, but most of it rubs off in some applicable fashion.

  13. 12 December 2005

    998 days ago

    Renzo Piano

    the people who make the most noise often have the least to shout about.

    In some way, people believe that if you are permeable, if you are a good listener, you don’t have the quality of somebody with a firm attitude. But this is not true. I think people should try to teach young children that these qualities – stubbornness and a capacity to listen- might look like they are opposites, but they are not. This is what, fundamentally, I got from my mother.

    If you are the first in the class, I guess – I never experienced that – but I guess you grow up with the feeling that other people will learn from you. You are teaching others, not the opposite. And I feel that there is a moment when, unfortunately, because of that, you stop learning. You stop absorbing. And life is about learning, about grabbing every occasion. And art is about that; art is robbery in the noblest sense. It is taking things. Art! Art! In every sense.

    via Kjell Olsen998 days ago

  14. 09 December 2005

    1001 days ago

    Simple means launching something

    I love these guys:

    If you find yourself talking more than walking, shut up, cut the vision in half, and launch it. You can always fill in the gaps later. In fact, you

    via Kjell Olsen1001 days ago

  15. 01 December 2005

    1009 days ago

    Venom Line by the Specialized - Dexigner Design Forums

    Bas ass sweet prototype bicycles, for release 2006.

    It’s one of the first bikes in the world to have no rear hub. That’s right, no rear hub. The rear wheel has a special magnetically polarized rim that is suspended inside the frame, where it floats inside a magnetic suspension field. [...] The Viper looks crazy, but it works!

    via Kjell Olsen1009 days ago

  16. 20 November 2005

    1020 days ago

    Flipbook

    Bienvenue sur FLIPBOOK.info, un site enti

    via Kjell Olsen1020 days ago

  17. 19 November 2005

    1022 days ago

    paper works

    Paper structures/sculptures.

    via Kjell Olsen1022 days ago

  18. 02 November 2005

    1038 days ago

    Remake/Remodel

    I’m blocking out a site for my yet to be realized business, and it looks lots like this. Almost exactly, but with different colors. Me like.

    My remit? Nothing but content. The content is king. Nice big bold blocks of text. All the fancy stuff kept hidden.

    via Kjell Olsen1038 days ago

  19. 31 October 2005

    1040 days ago

    Material guy

    How long do you think concrete lasts? It has many problems and it’s very difficult to replace or fix. If a paper tube is damaged it can be replaced by a new one. The lifespan of a building has nothing to do with the materials. It depends on what people do with it. If a building is loved, then it becomes permanent. When it is not loved, even a concrete building can be temporary.

    The next year, the Kobe earthquake struck in his native Japan, and Ban came to the aid of the Vietnamese refugee community. “All the temporary houses were outside the city, but if they moved out of the city they would lose their jobs. So they had to live under plastic sheets in the park, and it became very unhealthy. Neighbours tried to kick them out. I thought maybe if I redesigned everything very nicely they could continue living there.” Ban came up with a simple “log cabin” made out of thick paper tubes, with plastic sheeting for the roofs, prefabricated windows and beer crates filled with sand for the foundations. Each cabin can be assembled in a few hours. He also built them a new “temporary” church out of paper columns (and money from his own pocket), which was only dismantled a few months ago – to be reassembled in Taiwan.

    via Kjell Olsen1040 days ago

  20. 27 October 2005

    1044 days ago

    pricing

    I’d want something like this if I was starting up. Interesting thoughts on payments to freelancers.

    via Kjell Olsen1044 days ago

  21. 18 October 2005

    1053 days ago

    How Apple Does It

    Go apple go. I’ve pledged allegiance to you ever since I’ve had an allegiance to pledge. You could rule the world way better then google.

    via Kjell Olsen1053 days ago

  22. 10 October 2005

    1061 days ago

    iPod with Inverted Screen

    The black nano looks spectacularly badass, even more so with a dark interface on screen.

    Kjell Olsen1061 days ago

  23. 14 September 2005

    1087 days ago

    web|works content, part 2

    Sweet presentation on web interface design. Direct to presentation. links.

    via Kjell Olsen1087 days ago

  24. 13 September 2005

    1088 days ago

    Powazek: Just a Thought: Digging in the Dirt

    Second, and this is something I’ve been percolating for a long time, I wanted to focus more on the page bottoms. Page bottoms are the most valuable screen real estate there is. You read that right. All that nonsense about people not reading and not scrolling is complete bullshit.

    In my last redesign I moved the sidebar into the footer – I think it works much better there. I’ve been meaning to fit more down there, and I like what Mr. Powazek has done.

    via Kjell Olsen1088 days ago

  25. 08 September 2005

    1093 days ago

    37signals Getting Real

    A new book is coming out of the crew from 37signals, Getting Real.

    via Kjell Olsen1093 days ago

  26. 21 August 2005

    1111 days ago

    Color for Coders - Color and Design for the Non-Designer [Design Principles]

    I wish I could design better. Colors stump me particularly, in trying to put something together.

    Kjell Olsen1111 days ago

  27. 22 July 2005

    1141 days ago

    Kevin Kelly - Cool Tools | Sketchup

    I’ve had my eye on this software for a year or two, but at $500 it blatantly out of my price range, and will be for a long to to come (but I’m not knocking on wood).

    via Kjell Olsen1141 days ago

  28. 18 July 2005

    1145 days ago

    CSS Reboot Fall 2005

    I just signed up for the second, it coincided well with a redesign I wanted to get working on over the summer. But I’m not going to do it in on fell swoop, it’s going to be iterative from now until september first, at which point I hope to be contented with what I’ve done and leave it be for a bit.

    Kjell Olsen1145 days ago

  29. 05 July 2005

    1158 days ago

    Writeboard (write, share, revise, compare) is coming soon - it'll be better, not beta

    I remember 37signals announced this even before backpackit, but nothing ever came of it. Maybe I’m crazy. But coming from them, I bet it will be jaw droppingly cool, even if I never use it.

    via Kjell Olsen1158 days ago

  30. 25 June 2005

    1168 days ago

    how i learned to stop worrying and relinquish control

    Perhaps the most brilliant thing Flickr did was to provide an API that allows developers to hook into it seamlessly. This meant someone could create a free tool that lets me move photos directly from iPhoto to Flickr. This newfound ease of upload increased my Flickr usage so much that I needed to buy a Pro account. So, get this: Someone else did the work, and Flickr got the money. All because they levy so little control.

    Web applications need to relinquish the control, be open and user driven.

    via Kjell Olsen1168 days ago

  31. 22 June 2005

    1171 days ago

    Web Design References

    Great collection of essays and tutorials on all different kinds of web design.

    Kjell Olsen1171 days ago

  32. 20 June 2005

    The Very Small Home

    Azby Brown

    1173 days ago

    Azby Brown details 18 beautifully designed compact Japanese homes. The mantra of constraints fostering creativity is beautifully reinforced in the book, with incredible solutions to space problems.

  33. 18 June 2005

    1175 days ago

    colr.org

    Neat (tag based :b) site for finding and browsing different color swatches.

    via Kjell Olsen1175 days ago

  34. 15 June 2005

    1178 days ago

    mekentosj.com | Modern Cubism

    A CT scan of the Apple Design Award trophy, wow, apple rocks so hard.

    via Kjell Olsen1178 days ago

  35. 1178 days ago

    Digital Web Magazine - The Principles of Design

    A nice intro to the basics (I do mean basics) of design. I’m getting ready to try another visual design for this site – and I’m looking for a little reading because I really don’t know what I’m doing when it comes to design.

    via Kjell Olsen1178 days ago

  36. 09 May 2005

    1215 days ago

    Ajax and weblogs (kottke.org)

    Kottke comes up with another neat home page outside the box weblog feature – keep your weblog’s front pages from being so boring. Might have to take it from him like I did remaindered links.

    via Kjell Olsen1215 days ago

  37. 1215 days ago

    Matt Webb's Interconnected (Outrageous, alarming, courageous, charming.)

    Sweet website, I’ve had in in my feed since I read Mind Hacks but what a cool design, I love the no images/sweet styling combination.

    via Kjell Olsen1215 days ago

  38. 08 April 2005

    1246 days ago

    Land Living: Modern Lifestyle Design

    Paolo Soleri is an Italian architect who was an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright in the late 1940’s. Soleri later developed the concept of Arcology, the fusion of architecture and ecology, an alternative urban development form. In 1970 construction began on Arcosanti, a prototype town for 5,000 people (there are currently about 60 residents).

    Looks cool.

    via Kjell Olsen1246 days ago

  39. 19 March 2005

    Defensive Design for the Web

    Matthew Linderman and Jason Fried

    1266 days ago

    What you should do to foolproof the ‘critical’ points of your website. How to keep people from getting frustrated while trying to accomplish their goals, ultimately allowing them to do buisness with you instead of getting pissed and walking off.

  40. 13 March 2005

    1272 days ago

    cityofsound: Shortsighted Shuffle?

    As products get smarter in terms of being aware of their behaviour – in some senses, becoming reflexive – and as their raison d’être gets increasingly close to personal, social functionality – in some senses, becoming involved in presentation of self and the behaviour of the users – there is huge potential to build devices which become increasingly, personally meaningful, which can adapt to personal context and preference like never before.

    I know I love having everything I play on my iPod put into audioscrobbler – apparently you can’t do this with a shuffle. But this sort of technology is fascinating – with sites like audioscrobbler and del.icio.us and flickr being able to show you where you fit amidst a group of people with similar interests.

    It strikes me that the basic condition for these products is to be essentially self-aware – in this specific case, that the iPod Shuffle should be able to keep a track of what tracks the user has played on it, and communicate that information such that that metadata can then be transferred and combined with the overall iTunes Music Library. This ecosystem of music experience software and hardware can therefore keep a track of what tracks have been played (track, album, artist etc), when, on what device, and by whom. Upon this basic usage data, we can build a panoply of useful, interesting services. Look no further than Audioscrobbler for some inspiration.

    I really like how community sites are tying people together in their interests – a site like 43things showing you people who have similar goals to you, who live in your city, and eventually both together. When the application fades away and the data that is collected by the application is brought together and made sense of, I think that applications will be able to become entirely more useful.

    via Kjell Olsen1272 days ago

  41. 11 March 2005

    1274 days ago

    Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals) - The new Signal vs. Noise

    I’m no designer, I think these guys have me on that issue – but this is definitely how to keep your site fresh:

    We have a lot of ideas for the new SvN, and over the next few months you’ll be able to watch us think out loud. The site may be different tomorrow. And different again the next day. The design will be ever changing until we settle on what we’re really happy with. But instead of doing it all behind the scenes, we’ll be doing it in the open.

    Why keep all the changes you want to make to your site in a to do list somewhere when all they really take would be 5 minutes of fiddling with templates or css? Just do ‘em, make your site better, and get out of that ‘redesign’ state of mind.

    via Kjell Olsen1274 days ago

  42. 09 March 2005

    A Pattern Language

    Christopher Alexander

    1276 days ago

    A great book detailing some widely applicable ways to design building, and why. Taken from studies conducted by Alexander and his architectural students and colleagues from The Center for Environmental Studies at the University of California, Berkely.

  43. 18 February 2005

    1295 days ago

    how stuff is made

    Sort of like my favorite childhood book – How Things Work. A good look at, well, how things get made. From the faq:

    HowStuffisMade is a visual encyclopedia documenting the manufacturing processes, labor conditions and environmental accounts of contemporary products.

    via Kjell Olsen1295 days ago

  44. 02 February 2005

    1311 days ago

    Veer: Ideas: Lightboxing

    Lightboxing – ultra cool design awesomeness. I wish I could do this.

    via Kjell Olsen1311 days ago

  45. 1311 days ago

    AIGA Design Archives

    Whoa, I need to look through this sometime, I’m gathering my redesign energy right now and hope to overhaul this place in the next few weeks.

    via Kjell Olsen1311 days ago

  46. 23 January 2005

    1321 days ago

    LukeW: Web Application Form Design

    A nice guide to spacing and labeling and coloring and general web form design.

    via Kjell Olsen1321 days ago

  47. 09 January 2005

    Small Spaces

    1335 days ago

    An incredible look at how to best use small spaces, taking storage, utility, and all kinds of other factors into account.

  48. 05 January 2005

    1339 days ago

    GUUUI - Navigation blindness

    Static category/section navigation could be very wrong, not at all embracing the user and allowing him to accomplish his goals.

    The findings suggest that navigation should be a prominent part of a website. Instead of being discrete appendices separated from the rest of the site, navigation should be integrated into the site and make sure that users stay in the flow.

    ...why should we place this burden on people if we can design navigation schemes based on how people actually navigate.

    via Kjell Olsen1339 days ago

  49. 08 December 2004

    1367 days ago

    Forty Media - Phoenix Web Design - Web Design in 2005

    Color of the year – here I come. I love brown!

    Kjell Olsen1367 days ago

  50. Also somewhat recently

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