Very useful: Corporate Identity Photoshop Layout Mockups
From BluGraphic.com: BluGraphic’s free PSD file for today is a corporate or brand identity mock up for designers to present their identity design in a modern and pretty way for their clients or for presentation in their portfolios. Every designer should have designed a corporate identity at some point in his career. In fact brand identity building […]
Stitching the Solar System: Science as Needlepoint, 1811
From The Vault, Slate.com’s history blog: In the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, girls in the UK and the US used needle and thread to embroider images and text onto pieces of fabric that were called “samplers.” Samplers, which could be quite intricate, were meant to promote basic literacy and to teach patience and carefulness. […]
Wantful.com: Beautifully designed merchandise (also, expensive and a little silly)
Wantful.com: “Exceptional Products, Perfect Gifts” in these categories: Home / Food & Wine / Outdoor / Hers / His
Interactive Map of the Internet App by Peer 1
From laughingsquid.com: (Click here for interactive map) Peer 1 Hosting has created an interactive Map of the Internet app that lets users explore the internet’s infrastructure. The app displays a global view, a network view, and a chronological view that shows the evolution of the internet from 1994 to today and even predicts what the […]
“Digital Omnivores” Devouring Video on Tablets, Study Says
From the Hollywood Reporter: Research firm Deloitte says 26 percent of the U.S. population over age 14 owns a tablet, smartphone and laptop. There were 160 percent more “digital omnivores” at the end of last year than there were at the end of 2011, according to a new study Deloitte will release Wednesday. The research […]
Graffiti artist Shepard Fairey designs a mission patch for the International Space Station
From Cory Doctorow’s at BoingBoing: When the feds start commissioning space decor from graffiti artists turned global fashion brands, you know that cyberpunk has arrived: Artist Shepard Fairey may be best known for Obey Giant and his Barack Obama ‘Hope’ poster, but his latest work will be conquering an entirely different realm: outer space. The […]
NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts seeks to fill a faculty position working at the intersection of art and technology
Are you an educator working at the intersection of art and technology? New York University’s ITP, the Interactive Telecommunications Program, may have a job for you for the 2013-2014 academic year. ITP is a full-time graduate program offering a Master of Professional Studies degree in interactive telecommunications. The department has a strong interest in the design […]
From Smashing Magazine, a social media images generator
Useful sizing and image generator for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and more — including less-common media such as Xing and Viadeo. Social Media Images generator, including avatars and profile images for various social networks. [Full article]
Valcamonica rock carvings brought to life in digital animations
Haunting artwork, chiseled into rock over a period stretching from 7,000 BC to the 16th century, has been digitized for an interactive display in the UK at the Cambridge University museum: On a screen at the Cambridge University archaeology museum, a 9,000-year-old stag yawns and stretches – only to collapse, pierced by a stone age […]
Steampunk Before Steampunk Existed: Charles Dellschau’s Fantastic Airships
Article in Slate.com’s history blog The Vault: Charles Dellschau, a Prussian immigrant who came to the U.S. in 1853, was a butcher who lived in Houston. He spent the years between the turn of the century and his death in 1923 working on these scrapbooks, which combined news clippings, text, and art in visions of […]
Astronaut Karen Nyberg will take art supplies to space
Admittedly I’m biased, but there’s not as much division between art and science as this article makes it sound. Nor is art necessarily the less “super-smart” side of a person, but this is nevertheless a good profile of astronaut Karen Nyberg and her artistic interests. Mention the words ‘NASA Astronaut’ and you’ll usually conjure up […]
Where Design is Going, and How to be There
Insightful article by design pundit Cheryl Heller about past trends in design and other creative practices/industries, and future trends based on that experience. Her main point is that designers, increasingly, will need to be generalists: able to communicate to clients and customers using many aspects of themselves. Design, like almost every industry, has been changed […]
HTML5 forms introduction and new attributes
From the ever-relevant smashingmagazine.com — an excerpt from Beginning HTML5 and CSS3: The Web Evolved by Richard Clark [Buy book]: No doubt you interact with at least one form on the Web every day. Whether you’re searching for content or logging in to your e-mail account or Facebook page, using online forms is one of […]
My friend Bruce Tomb’s flying car
This article from Wired.com explores the gloriousness that is my friend Bruce Tomb’s flying car (not really), Maria del Camino. Maria is a 1959 El Camino on a 5-ton excavator base. I know Bruce from Burning Man and also because he lives just about a mile from me. This past summer I had the privilege […]
A look at life inside the International Space Station
From the GlobeAndMail.com: (Click here to see the interactive infographic) On March 13 – at 5:10 p.m. ET, to be precise — a ceremonial bell will ring and Canada’s Chris Hadfield will take the helm of the International Space Station. He may have the top job, but the space veteran has lived there for almost three […]
A Teenage Charlotte Bronte’s Tiny Little Romance
From Slate.com. Charlotte Brontë and her siblings started writing early and created many works of fiction, including this tiny book: Before they wrote world-famous novels, the four Brontë children—in descending order of age: Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne—constructed elaborate fantasy worlds. The family was reclusive, and the children were educated at home; they spent most […]
Sadly, only one out of three on Pi Day
Alas #1, missed looking at clock at 1:59 on Pi Day (3/14) as I was still in a training session. Alas #2, forgot to get pie on the way home, and the convenience store doesn’t have any, not even frozen. However we will rise triumphant by getting a PIZZA pie tonight.
Uncovering the First, Fascinating Rulebook for [New York City] Subway Sign Design
From TheAtlanticCities.com: Late one night last August, three Pentagram designers rummaging through the design firm’s basement archives found the Rosetta Stone of New York subway graphics: the original Standards Manual, designed by Bob Noorda and Massimo Vignelli in the late 1960s. The 180-page binder, the key to the system’s iconic design choices, outlines a meticulous […]
RIP: Google Reader Meets Its Inevitable End
From Wired.com: Sad but true. Google is killing off its beloved Reader, much to the dismay of the community that has grown up around the web-based program that let people subscribe to news feeds from their favorite sites. It will close up shop on July 1, 2013. [Full article] But according to Twitter pundit Marco […]
Sara Volz, 17, Receives $100,000 Intel First Prize for Research into Algae Populations with High Oil Content
A high school senior who cultivated populations of algae under her loft bed won first place and $100,000 in the Intel Science Talent Search on Tuesday night. The contestant, Sara Volz, 17, of Colorado Springs, Colo., researched ways to create populations of algae cells with high oil content; this algae oil can be converted into […]
Great phone homescreen hacks
A constantly-updated resource of phone homescreen hacks with instructions detailing how the creators made them. Everything from gaming characters to Grumpy Cat. [Full article]
Fantastic post from designer Meng To: How Writing Makes You a Better Designer
Expressing your thoughts through design is great, but is it enough? Can you become a better designer by writing? Designer Meng To thinks yes. Writing Makes Me A Better Designer About a month ago, I decided to start a new discipline: write a short piece about design every day using Day One, which has a […]
Cosmonaut Barbershop: how to get your hair cut when it doesn’t fall to the floor
With the help of a vacuum/clipper hybrid wielded by a crewmate, Astronaut Chris Hadfield gets his fuzz buzzed aboard the International Space Station.
Five Simple and Practical CSS List Styles You Can Copy and Paste
From Joshua Johnson at Design Shack, a short tutorial showing the CSS to make several lists with a bit of interest: We start off with a fun animated vertical list, then style up a list with thumbnails and text, another with just images, [a horizontal menu] and finally an ordered list where the numbers are […]
If you want to see the future of software UI design, look to the history of print design
This interesting article from bjango.com posits that stylistic design choices follow from the limitations of their hardware or production: Like many trends in technical areas, interaction design is being led by technical ability. 8bit games looked 8bit-y, because of limited colour palettes and giant pixels. 16bit games looked 16bit-y because of better colour abilities and […]
Unstable Matter: A Giant Moving Surface Containing Thousands of Steel Ball Bearings
From Colossal: Art & Visual Ingenuity: Unstable Matter is kinetic sculpture by Finnish artists Tommi Grönlund and Petteri Nisunen, a.k.a. Grönlund-Nisunen. The moving table contains thousands of small ball bearings that move and crash within the confines of a giant wobbly table, sort of a modern take on a rain stick. The table is part […]
Kolbrun – “REVIVIFY” fashion collection
Stunning clothing designs reblogged from Daniel Thorsteinsson. REVIVIFY is a fashion collection A/W 2012-2013 by icelandic fashion designer KOLBRUN. The concept of the collection was to recycle furniture into fashionable clothing. [Full article]
Scientists Report First Cure of HIV in a Child, Say It’s a Game-Changer
From npr.org: Scientists believe a little girl born with HIV has been cured of the infection. She’s the first child and only the second person in the world known to have been cured since the virus touched off a global pandemic nearly 32 years ago. Doctors aren’t releasing the child’s name, but we know she […]
Cats haven’t changed much
From medievalfragments: Everyone who has ever owned a cat will be familiar with their unmannerly feline habit of walking across your keyboard while you are typing. One of the manuscript pictures tweeted by @erik_kwakkel [link] revealed that this is nothing new.… Although the medieval owner of this manuscript may have been quite annoyed with these […]
The best resources for learning bleeding-edge web, UI and UX design
Great ideas for web, UI and UX design from Colm Tuite, a great authority, on Quora.com, a great site. Here’s a pretty good resource for learning UX/UI design, if I do say so myself. There is a difference between UI design and UX design. There is a lot of overlap though, so I’ll try to bundle […]
Physicists at CERN caught ‘colliding’ household objects
Inspectors examining a recent malfunction at the Large Hadron Collider found that senior scientists had been “inserting various household objects into the collider,” causing helium leakage and misalignment of several of the magnets. The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, cost over 4.1 billion dollars to build, runs a length of 27 kilometers below Geneva and has […]