Posts tagged #design

Originally Posted on: https://hackernoon.com/the-throw-keyword-was-a-mistake-l9e532di

I came across this provocative piece arguing that the throw keyword was a mistake in language design, and while I don't fully agree with the conclusion, it raises some genuinely worthwhile caveats about exception handling that are worth sitting with. It immediately reminded me of Dijkstra's classic "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" — that same energy of challenging an accepted construct that most developers never think twice about.

Discover eSUN ABS+ filaments.

Add displacement textures to STL, OBJ, and 3MF models directly in your browser. Preview, mask, bake, and export printable textured meshes locally.

Parametric gridfinity generator. Generate custom gridfinity bins and baseplates, openGrid components, multiboard, and honeycomb storage wall then download the STL or place an order to purchase.

Custom foam cutouts for your tools

From cozy to towering, at-home libraries come in all forms. Get inspired with homes across the country.

Free online tool for optimizing animated GIF images to reduce file size. Compress GIFs with LZW compression, reduce colors or frame rate, remove duplicate frames.

Magic css library to make your stuff look as good as Tufte

A visual introduction to big O notation.

I see a lot of bad system design advice. One classic is the LinkedIn-optimized “bet you never heard of queues” style of post, presumably aimed at people who are…

Welcome to PyViz! The PyViz.org website is an open platform for helping users decide on the best open-source (OSS) Python data visualization tools for their purposes, with links, overviews, comparisons, and examples.

Easily document cables and wiring harnesses. Contribute to wireviz/WireViz development by creating an account on GitHub.

Beautiful, easy data visualization and storytelling

Documentation and demos for the open source reveal.js HTML presentation framework.

Marp (also known as the Markdown Presentation Ecosystem) provides an intuitive experience for creating beautiful slide decks. You only have to focus on writing your story in a Markdown document.

Write down your thoughts in your favourite text editor, and Deckset will turn them into beautiful presentations.

NiceGUI is an easy-to-use, Python-based UI framework, which shows up in your web browser. You can create buttons, dialogs, Markdown, 3D scenes, plots and much more.

Web based supervisory system for ROS. Contribute to EESC-LabRoM/rosweb development by creating an account on GitHub.

ROS node that turns your robot into a web server to visualize ROS topics - dheera/rosboard

A web-based control center for ROS robots. Contribute to pantor/ros-control-center development by creating an account on GitHub.

Foxglove helps teams explore, collaborate on, and ultimately make sense of their data more efficiently.

Educational robot with support for various drive kinematics - IDiAL-IMSL/Edurob

Create web-based user interfaces with Python. The nice way. - zauberzeug/nicegui

ROS opencv camera driver that uses cv::VideoCapture - OTL/cv_camera

A small set of Python functions to draw pretty maps from OpenStreetMap data. Based on osmnx, matplotlib and shapely libraries. - GitHub - marceloprates/prettymaps: A small set of Python functions t...

Excalidraw is a virtual collaborative whiteboard tool that lets you easily sketch diagrams that have a hand-drawn feel to them.

Wedding Watches: The 10 Best Brands According to Our Instagram Fans –Weddings are an occasion for gift giving, and a fine watch always makes an ideal gift, whether it’s from a parent to a prospective son- or daughter-in-law, a groom to a best man, or exchanged between the betrothed couple in addition to (or in place of) the traditional rings. What are the best wedding watches? We put th

Simple.css is a classless CSS template that allows you to make a good looking website really quickly. - kevquirk/simple.css

Home –Simple.css is a classless CSS template that allows you to make a good looking website really quickly. – kevquirk/simple.css

Center Cam Standard Package includes: Center Cam Assembly, Adjustable clip mount, Lens Privacy cover. Center Cam Specs: 1080p Resolution, F2.1 lens, 30 FPS, 65 degree Horizontal Field of View. Compatible with Windows, Mac, Android, and Linux. USB-A/USB-C. Adjustable Clip Mount Specs: Opens up to 2". Unit is 5 Ft. long

Next generation of automated data exploratory analysis and visualization platform. - Kanaries/Rath: Next generation of automated data exploratory analysis and visualization platform.

Farnsworth House – Wikipedia –

A nice list of so-called “dark patterns”, user interface techniques to manipulate or deceive the user into choosing a course of action which is disadvantageous to the user themselves. –

Non technical, but i love sketching and drawing to pass the time. Author says: “Practice drawing little houses and towers. Then level them up with dimensional views and clusters that create different styles of towns and cities…”

Ethical alternatives to revenue-generating deceptive patterns –Interesting alternatives to so-called “dark patterns”. Author says: “Avoiding deception and building trust: the power of ethical revenue generation with transparent patterns.”

I love rules of thumb. Here are a set of them for graphic or visual design. I am not a designer but I fancy myself being to tell better design from worse. Anyway, this is a good tool for those of us who are wannabee designers

Visual design rules you can safely follow every time –I love rules of thumb. Here are a set of them for graphic or visual design. I am not a designer but I fancy myself being to tell better design from worse. Anyway, this is a good tool for those of us who are wannabee designers

One of many simple CPU simulators. I'm teaching a course in Operating Systems and I've been looking for a really simple and clear visual simulator for a CPU. This one is the best one yet. But I would like a better one. This one is missing any kind of support for IO or System calls or something like that. But it's usable.

An interesting idea, model based testing. The aurhor says: “Again, I’m writing about models because I have a deep desire to keep software minimal. While I don’t think it’s wrong to simply buckle up and deal with the complexity and raw magnitude of implementations as many of us do, that’s just not the path that I find appealing intuitively.”

A new AI colorizer. Colorize anything from old black and white photos 📸, style your artworks 🎨, or give modern images a fresh look 🌶. It's as simple as instagram, free, and no sign-up required!

Futurepedia is the largest AI tools directory. Browse 200+ AI tools in various categories like marketing, image generation and video editing. Search and filter the tools by categories, pricing and features.

This is really useful! Its amazing what you csn create and do with CSS - “How to create a tree view (collapsible list) using only HTML and CSS.”

I hope you know GraphViz. It's a wonderful simple tool for creating diagrams. An interface as well as documentation to the GraphViz program and DSL

This is a gallery of all sorts of interesting visualizations you can do with the GraphViz package.

Command-line interactive multitool for tabular data.VisiData is an interactive multitool for tabular data. It combines the clarity of a spreadsheet, the efficiency of the terminal, and the power of Python, into a lightweight utility which can handle millions of rows with ease.

If you need a polar plot, you need one! They are tricky to do but these examples are helfpul!

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Poster printing services and pricing guide.

37 Easy Ways to Spice Up Your UI Designs –Simple and actionable: “Illustrated tips for making your UI and web designs more visually interesting · Backgrounds · Borders & dividers · Shadows · Text · Other techniques”

WHCC is the premier provider of professional photography printing, products, and services beyond the camera — helping professional photographers thrive in their craft and the business of photography.

This is a very reasonable, rational, practical style guide. “Shopify's Ruby Style Guide. Always useful to see how the ruby experts do it!”

visualize URDF/XACRO file, URDF Viewer works on Windows/MacOS/Linux - GitHub - openrr/urdf-viz: visualize URDF/XACRO file, URDF Viewer works on Windows/MacOS/Linux

Make a cascading timeline from markdown-like text. Supports simple American/European date styles, ISO8601, images, links, locations, and more. - GitHub - kochrt/markwhen: Make a cascading timeline ...

Streamlit is an open-source app framework for Machine Learning and Data Science teams. Create beautiful web apps in minutes.

Huskylens is an easy-to-use AI camera | Vision Sensor. DFRobot Huskylens (SEN0305) is equipped with multiple functions, such as face recognition, object tracking, object recognition, line tracking, color recognition, and tag(QR code) recognition.

Create a visual timeline of any codebase's contribution history.

M43 Lenses: Interactive Micro Four Thirds Lens List

A Complete List Of Micro Four Thirds Lenses | Alik Griffin This is a complete list of just about every lens available for Panasonic and Olympus micro four-thirds cameras. Including native brands and third party brands. May 31, 2022 at 06:55PM

Interactive Micro Four Thirds Lens List | M43 Lenses M43 Lenses: Interactive Micro Four Thirds Lens List May 31, 2022 at 06:56PM

Interactive articles about physics, math, and engineering. Amazing explanations. Watches. Gears. Gps.

DesignEvo s logo maker helps you create custom logos in minutes for free, no design experience needed Try with millions of icons and 100 fonts immediately!

Red Circle Postmark Logo | DesignEvo Logo Maker DesignEvo s logo maker helps you create custom logos in minutes for free, no design experience needed Try with millions of icons and 100 fonts immediately! April 24, 2022 at 03:25PM

Top 10 T-shirt Design Tips Our senior designer gives you his all-time top 10 T-shirt design tips, along with examples and pro tips, to help improve any custom print. April 24, 2022 at 04:03PM

Expert news, reviews and videos of the latest digital cameras, lenses, accessories, and phones. Get answers to your questions in our photography forums.

Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS100 (Lumix DMC-TZ100): Digital Photography Review Expert news, reviews and videos of the latest digital cameras, lenses, accessories, and phones. Get answers to your questions in our photography forums. April 17, 2022 at 03:23PM

Review: The Panasonic FZ1000 II combines versatility and value The Panasonic FZ1000 II is a worthy successor to the company’s first large-sensor, long-zoom bridge camera, and a value-conscious rival to the popular Sony RX10-series. It’s just as fast as its predecessor but produces nicer JPEGs, has significantly improved controls and interface, and more. April 16, 2022 at 03:50PM

Mechanical & Wheels – Hands On Ground Robot Design – Robots For Roboticists This post is part of the Hands on Ground Robot Design series. See here for the full list of posts/topics https://robotsforroboticists.com/hands-on-ground-robot–drone-design-series Robot Size Decision After we have the list of system requirements we start with the design of the mechanical structure of the robot. In this case we decided that a wheeled robot would be […] April 15, 2022 at 02:49PM

Browse and download high-resolution, public domain Paintings, Drawings, Illustrations and Posters.

Artvee Browse and download high-resolution, public domain Paintings, Drawings, Illustrations and Posters. March 20, 2022 at 02:22PM

ROS use OpenCV for camera calibration but the format that it stores the data is different than OpenCV. Also, you need to know where to place the camera calibration files so ROS can find it and publish it. 1.First, you need to install usb cam package from ROS and uvcdynctrl to disable autofocus: sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-usb-cam uvcdynctrl 2.Open … Calibrating a Monocular Camera with ROS Read More »

Calibrating a Monocular Camera with ROS – Robotics with ROS ROS use OpenCV for camera calibration but the format that it stores the data is different than OpenCV. Also, you need to know where to place the camera calibration files so ROS can find it and publish it. 1.First, you need to install usb cam package from ROS and uvcdynctrl to disable autofocus: sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-usb-cam uvcdynctrl 2.Open … Calibrating a Monocular Camera with ROS Read More » March 18, 2022 at 08:38PM

Sinatra Best Practices: Part One While Sinatra’s one-file approach may work well for your one-off, smaller application – it can quickly become a mess as you add on multiple routes, route-handlers, helpers, and configuration.… March 14, 2022 at 04:56PM

Heroku's platform was designed with services in mind. If you're building a service oriented web app, you might find this interesting.

Randall Degges – Heroku and SOA Heroku’s platform was designed with services in mind. If you’re building a service oriented web app, you might find this interesting. March 10, 2022 at 12:16AM

What's Changed

Enable Layout/EmptyLineAfterGuardClause cop by @sambostock in #348
Enable Style/GlobalStdStream by @casperisfine in #350
Allow 'webmaster' for Naming/InclusiveLanguage b...

Old Book Illustrations offers a wide range of public domain, royalty-free images scanned from old books. Searchable galleries include animals, plants, techniques, artists names, books titles, and much more...

Home | Old Book Illustrations Old Book Illustrations offers a wide range of public domain, royalty-free images scanned from old books. Searchable galleries include animals, plants, techniques, artists names, books titles, and much more… January 2, 2022 at 02:16PM

Retool is the fast way to build internal tools. Drag-and-drop our building blocks and connect them to your databases and APIs to build your own tools, instantly. Connects with Postgres, REST APIs, GraphQL, Firebase, Google Sheets, and more. Built by developers, for developers. Trusted by startups and Fortune 500s. Sign up for free.

Library for animated data visualizations and data stories. - vizzuhq/vizzu-lib: Library for animated data visualizations and data stories.

vizzuhq/vizzu-lib: Library for animated data visualizations and data stories. Library for animated data visualizations and data stories. – vizzuhq/vizzu-lib: Library for animated data visualizations and data stories. December 21, 2021 at 04:44PM

OneZoom Tree of Life Explorer

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CardBoard Basics: Full Series with Advanced Basics plus Tools All three cardboard videos in One, adjusted sound, new footage and all new footage and voice over and music for the tools section. CardBoard Basics, a Tutorial guide for Chip Board matte board, Bristolboard and model making for all designers architects model makers hobbyists and crafters.I show how I build some 2″ x 2″ 50.8mm x50.8mm cardboard cubes as well as some more advanced shapes using straight cut x-acto blades and white PVA glue.

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Remove background from images of humans, animals or objects and download high-resolution images for free. You can also edit and resize images as you like.

Remove Background From Images For Free – Erase.bg Remove background from images of humans, animals or objects and download high-resolution images for free. You can also edit and resize images as you like. November 22, 2021 at 08:40PM

27g Ultralight Weight, Magnetic Charging, 30 minutes Recording Time, Remote Control, FlowState Stabilization, Wi-fi Control, Enhanced Camera Protection, ND Filter set.

Caddx Peanut Action Camera 27g Ultralight Weight, Magnetic Charging, 30 minutes Recording Time, Remote Control, FlowState Stabilization, Wi-fi Control, Enhanced Camera Protection, ND Filter set. November 20, 2021 at 02:56PM

As an artist, you probably have drawn the human body several times and realized how difficult it is to do it all from memory. This is where an adjustable online drawing model comes in handy. These adjustable models are also often called drawing mannequins

Free Interactive 3D Model for Drawing Figures, Dynamic Poses, and More – Online Drawing Mannequin As an artist, you probably have drawn the human body several times and realized how difficult it is to do it all from memory. This is where an adjustable online drawing model comes in handy. These adjustable models are also often called drawing mannequins October 31, 2021 at 02:21PM

Style guides for Google-originated open-source projects

DiceBear Avatars

September 8, 2021 at 03:38PM

💡 The perfect tool for inspiration!

Blush makes it easy to add free illustrations to your designs. Play with fully customizable graphics made by artists across the globe.

Handy collection of images to use in development and writing

Blush: Illustrations for everyone Blush makes it easy to add free illustrations to your designs. Play with fully customizable graphics made by artists across the globe. August 22, 2021 at 08:48PM

Search with 1 image on Same Energy Same Energy is a search engine for finding beautiful images. August 22, 2021 at 08:54PM

Flim 💡 The perfect tool for inspiration! August 22, 2021 at 08:55PM

JumpStory Handy collection of images to use in development and writing August 22, 2021 at 08:45PM

Massive collection of images of old movie posters

Movie Posters Collection – Harry Ransom Center Digital Collections Massive collection of images of old movie posters July 11, 2021 at 01:23PM

This is Grammar For Robots. What? Why? 🤖 https://lambdalabs.com/papers📝 The paper “RoboGrammar: Graph Grammar for Terrain-Optimized Robot designer. Very intersting paper ! June 12, 2021 at 07:58PM

The missing link between spreadsheets and data visualization.

Welcome to the QGIS project!

June 9, 2021 at 02:13PM

Guitar Scientist is a Free Online Editor || Create Scales and Chords diagrams, for Guitar, Bass and more. Download your Diagrams, Visualize Shapes. Perform Better!

An online thesaurus and dictionary of over 145,000 words that you explore using an interactive map. It's a tool for people who think visually. The most fun you've ever had with words. The Visual Thesaurus was built using Thinkmap, a data visualization technology.

SitePoint.com - With a vast variety of web design tutorials and articles coupled with a vibrant and well informed community, SitePoint the natural place to go to grow your online business

amazing custom painting

The global creative platform for custom graphic design: logos, websites and more. Hire a talented designer or start a design contest. 500k+ happy customers have used 99designs to grow their business.

The global creative platform for custom graphic design: logos, websites and more. Hire a talented designer or start a design contest. 500k+ happy customers have used 99designs to grow their business.

Splunk Enterprise is the fastest way to aggregate, analyze and get answers from your data with the help of machine learning and real-time visibility.

Picture Frames, Photo Frames, Frame Super Store, Wholesale Frames, Bulk Frames, Silver Frames, Black Frames

The Icon Handbook is a reference manual, how-to guide and coffee table 'showcase' in one. learn how to design icons for interfaces

Noun Project features the most diverse collection of icons and stock photos ever. Download SVG and PNG. Browse over 3 million art-quality icons and photos.

Facebook social design

Turn individual screen mockups into a flow. Very simple. Free.

stock photos

PSDs of UIs. Good way to learn how to do a design in PSD.

Thank you cards etc

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VisuAlgo was conceptualised in 2011 by Dr Steven Halim as a tool to help his students better understand data structures and algorithms, by allowing them to learn the basics on their own and at their own pace. Together with his students from the National University of Singapore, a series of visualisations were developed and consolidated, from simple sorting algorithms to complex graph data structures. Though specifically designed for the use of NUS students taking various data structure and algorithm classes (CS1010, CS1020, CS2010, CS2020, and CS3233), as advocators of online learning, we h...

Learn how Animations works in CSS.

Small business web hosting offering additional business services such as: domain name registrations, email accounts, web services, FrontPage help, online community resources and various small business solutions.

In love with colors, since 2002. A designer tool for creating color combinations that work together well. Formerly known as Color Scheme Designer. Use the color wheel to create great color palettes.

Balsamiq is the company behind Balsamiq Wireframes, the industry standard low-fidelity wireframing tool.

User Interface Design Pattern Library. UI patterns for web designers. See screenshot examples and learn how to do great design like the pros.

Companion site for the book Artificial Intelligence for Computer Games: An Introduction. Includes bibliography, errata, chapter guide, and relevant links.

Regular expression visualizer using railroad diagrams

You can never have this explained often enough

The History of Processing by Casey Reas and Ben Fry

I’m a designer at Sentry and a writer at CSS-Tricks.

SASS and SCSS are practically the same thing, but this article explains the difference in a little more detail

A really clear visual explanation of what a Markova chain is and what it is good for.

Don’t know why we need a new one exactly but a good effort

It’s sometimes hard to figure out a good palette in data visualizations. This is a useful guide.

See previous post. I admit I haven’t built super complicated sites, but I always seem to avoid extra languages or preprocessing if at all possible.

Looks like a pretty amazing simple tool for creating those tedious diagrams. Similar to GraphViz for a different domain.

Another great overview and cheatsheet for Dot

An amazing graphing and plotting web site

This is an AMAZING collection of graphs. Great to have a ruby binding. Haven’t tried it yet but looks very worth while.

A kind of crazy cool dashboard for all kinds of info all in text suitable for display in. Terminal window.

You may or may not agree with these formatting ideas.

Very useful tool for ruby programmers.

A fantastic visualization of various path finding algorithms

A neat interactive, web based, way to create diagrams. Is it related or based on Graphviz?

Looks really useful

Amazing pretty visualizations in Python based on vega-lite platform

I don’t think I agree. But does contain some good caveats. Reminds me of the old “Goto considered harmful”.

Pretty amazing (if it works) superset of markdown.

brew tap saulpw/vd And run it by just typing vd

Very nice and free visualization tool in python.

Interesting analysis. Also follow the links to more good stuff

Great, I think I agree with all of it. We should all be able to live with these!

Looks like a useful addition to the various diagram makers.

Very cool and clever visual programming.

Excellent guide to picking good colors in a UI

From the looks of it this is a super handy library doing charts without needing JavaScript. Does it work? Don’t know yet.

Building Your Color Palette

Excellent guide to picking good colors in a UI

tags: color design palette howto

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Best Free Bootstrap UI Kits of All Time – DEV Community

Always good to have more free things!

tags: toolkit free bootstrap

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Picking a colour scale for scientific graphics | Better Figures

Picking colors is not an obvious thing. This is a good article about this!

tags: graphics colour color palette

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Weekly Command: managing processes with htop

tags: processes command cli

Leveraging Mental Models in UX Design

tags: models design

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Low-hanging design fruit: why you should use Google Font Superfamilies

tags: fonts design

CSS at Scale: LinkedIn’s New Open Source Projects Take on Stylesheet Performance

t...

How to improve your workflow with VS Code and Jupyter Notebook

tags: jupyter vscode

7 Rules for Creating Gorgeous UI (Part 1) – Erik D. Kennedy – Medium

Great actionable tips

tags: UX user interface ...

7 Practical Tips for Cheating at Design – Refactoring UI – Medium

Awesome useful tips for pretty design!

tags: css aesthetics design

Why CSS Grid is better than Bootstrap for creating layouts

tags: css grid ...

I’ve seen commentary that it’s “disappointingly familiar”, i.e. it looks just like several other computer watches, like the Pebble or even the iPod Nano attached to a strap. Or that it’s...

Check out this article that shows off how visualizations can help you understand how algorithms work. It’s an amazing piece of work: Creatively, he figured out how to illustrate an algorithm so I can better understand how it works; Technically, the code that implements these visualizations is itself very clever and elegant; and Aesthetically, the overall effect on the page itself is quite beautiful. I am jealous!

Check out this really interesting article plus lovely animations. I have to go find out how it actually implements the animations. Even though the examples are in Python, what is actually embedded into the page? We shall see!

Visualizing Alghorithms

Jonathan Harris is the creator of several really interesting web sites that in very creative ways combine art with computing. From his home page one might conclude that he’s a bit

“This is the website of Jonathan Harris. I make projects that explore the relationship between humans and technology, incorporating computer science, statistics, storytelling, visual art, and other techniques. I see our species evolving into a single meta-organism, brought to life by the Internet, even as we live our individual lives, searching for meaning and beauty. My projects straddle these scales of existence—from the planetary to the personal. I make ...

Point Solving Problems for Real World, Using Design – NYTimes.com:

While the projects had wildly different end products, they both had a similar starting point: focusing on how to ease people’s lives. And that is a central lesson at the school, which is pushing students to rethink the boundaries for many industries.

A fascinating article about the “Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford” also known as the D.School.

Everyone knows that Design Thinking is great and the new hotness. I love great design, and am in awe ...

You probably don’t know what a social login button is so forgive this bit of geekyness. I am sure you’ve seen them: “login with facebook or twitter?” If an app or a site wants to “save you the trouble” of registering a username and password, they may “make your life easier” by allowing you to register using your facebook or twitter password. Conventional wisdom in the world of apps has been that this is a user requirement, and plus beneficial to the business as well. Here’s an interesting article that refutes that belief, at least in certain significant scenarios.

...

Starters Guide to iOS Design:

As someone who does work on both the development and design side of iOS apps I find that many designers struggle with the transition to UI work, or with the different processes involved in iPhone and iPad app design. In this guide I’ll describe the deliverables you’ll be expected to produce, outline the constraints of the medium and introduce fundamental iOS and UI design concepts.

A really charming article about John Karlin who was one of the first UX guys. He worked at Bell Labs back in the day and helped determine lots of little details about how telephones are designed. Simple silly things like that putting a dot (to “aim” at) visible through each finger hole of a dial phone improved accuracy and speed of dialing.

He determined, through testing, the best shape (square) and arrangement (a rectangular grid) and ordering (1-2-3 in the top row) of the buttons in touch tone telephones. Yes many other...

[](Y.Squarespace.Utils.lightboxAsset()I designed the calendar to the right to help me keep track of my piano practice. As you know, maybe, to learn piano you need to practice every day. Well I don’t do that regularly enough, and as a result (and general clumsyness) my piano study is going at a snails pace. So of course, technology to the rescue.

Jerry Seinfeld described how he would force himself to do something every day. In his case, work on his comedy. He would put an X on each day in his calendar when he worked. He would then psych himself up to never break the string of X’s, and the longer the string was, the more it h...

One of these two is from Apple and one is from Google. They both contain coupons and cards. Which is which?

I was rather proud of the art I designed for a t-shirt this summer. It’s cool but of course it’s a direct ripoff, um, no, I mean, it was inspired by a well known piece. If I show you my design, below:

You will immediately see the resemblance. You might say, oh that was on a postage stamp:

Or you might say, oh, that was a New York City thing. But you would be remembering wrong:

Actually, the stamp was based on an design and sculpture by ...

James Dyson (the vacuum cleaner guy) said something which may seem obvious but is nonetheless very controversial:

“Apple’s success as a technology company is built on hardware. The current fixation with digital is misplaced.” (fromThe Real Meaning and Future of Apple’s Mantra – Designed in California)

Good article. Read it.

I first came across Sandy Metz in this video:

[vimeo 12350535 w=500 h=281]

2009 – Sandi Metz – SOLID Object-Oriented Design from Gotham Ruby Conference on Vimeo.

If you are interested in Object Oriented design you will enjoy this. She is a wonderful speaker, and fun to listen to. Even if you don’t agree with (or understand) some of the concepts, I promise that you will enjoy listening to it. Since then Sandy has come out with a wonderful new book which I highly recommend: ...

I created this quick and dirty list of useful resources for some friends who wanted to dig into the latest thinking on web and mobile user interface design. I am sure this list is incomplete and quirky but I thought it would be good to share:

I’ve had great luck with Lynda.com courses. It’s only $25 per month, and you can watch as many as you like. Here’s one about CSSS for Developers Here’s another to teach you Photoshop. I’ve actually taken a lot of this one. The author is great. A famous book with basic concepts on ...

Code T-Shirt, © Pito Salas, 2012. Let me know if you want to order one!

A good article in the Atlantic about game designer Jonathan Blow. Interesting quote:

“I continued. “You’ve been chasing some deep form of understanding all your life, and what I think you’ve found is that questing after that knowledge brings alienation with it.

The further you’ve gone down that road, the further it’s taken you from other people. So the knowledge is ultimately destructive to your life, just like the atom bomb was—it’s a kind of truth that has a cataclysmic impact.

You thought chasing that knowledge would make you happy, but like Tim, part of you eventually wished you could turn back time ...

A friend of mine hates, HATES, the new Facebook timeline. She wants to turn it off, but can’t. I happen to think the timeline is really cool, well designed, useful. On occasion it even gives me goosebumps. But. She. Hates. It. Wants to turn it off. Can’t.

I was thinking, Facebook has something like 700,000,000 users, right? I don’t know the right number or how many are online every day. But there are many.

So imagine you are responsible for the design of this important new Facebook feature called the TimeLine. You need to invent the look and feel of the new Facebook Timeline. You design your little heart out. You have user tests, A/B/C/D/E tests. Hundreds of people and thousands of dollars later you release your baby.

95% of the users love it. Success right?

35 million people still hate the design.

Bummer.

99designs is #1 for Button & Icon Design

Funny thing, I like many people are trying to figure out what Pinterest is good for. Well I found a use.

From yesterday’s post, you saw that I am searching for a new application icon for BlogBridge. In fact I listed a series of out/crowdsource design options. What I need to do now is to provide them with design guidance, a design brief.

So as you may imagine, I’ve been looking around the web for icons and logos which I like because one of the best ways to tell a designer what you are looking for is to show them the stuff you like.

See where this is going?

Voila, what better use for Pinterest can you think of?

Here’s my Pinterest “BlogBridge Icon Inspiration” Board

I will try to set it up so you can add an idea or two if you have any contribution. Whoops, that might be dangerous. Shall we try?

Well, it’s been about 5 years with the same (lovely) BlogBridge application icon and as we are redesigning the web site and releasing a major new release of the product, we thought, hey, it’s time to update the icon to something, ahem, a little more modern.

In case you forgot (or never knew),here’s what the BlogBridge app icon looks like today:

I guess, nice, but boring, yes?

So what I am looking for is a beautiful new, 3D rendered, and meaningful application icon. Something that will look really cool in my dock (but equally on a Windows or Linux desktop.)

So far I’ve considered using:

99designs.com crowdspring.com vworker.com (used to be rent-a-coder) guru.com freelancer.com

So far I am liking 99designs.com the best. But if you have suggestions, please send them to me!

You can’t be a self-respecting computer or science geek and not have heard about the Fibonacci series. You know, 1-1-2-3-5-8… etc. How about Fibonacci’s Ratio? How about the Golden Mean or the Divine Proportion? Not sure, right?

Fibonacci, and its role in art, design and photography is a little less well known. As I continue to study photography and art I came across this excellent article about that very topic:

“Hopefully, this article has shed some light on a somewhat mysterious subject in the world of photography. Fibonacci’s Ratio is a powerful tool for composing your photographs, and it should’€™t be dismissed as a minor difference from the rule of thirds.

While the grids look simila...

If you are interested in design and especially design and architecture of software, and you have a philosophical bent, you will enjoy this essay… I can’t even attempt to summarize it’s content, and even the abstract from the paper itself is quite inscrutable:

“Conceptual integrity arises not (simply) from one mind or from a small number of agreeing resonant minds, but from sometimes hidden co-authors and the thing designed itself.” (From Designed As Designer)

What can I tell you. The author is the Richard Gabriel, a luminary of the computer world. Here’s the article: Designed as Designer.

Recently I wanted to get feedback on one of several ideas for the design of the new BlogBridge web site. I had selected 6 product web sites that had a nice look and wanted to somehow visually compare them. Here are two free tools I used:

Papparazzi! is a free Mac utility that does one thing and does it well. It makes a screen shot from a URL of a web site, importantly, including the whole page not just the part that is visible without scrolling. Pintrest is a free web site that facilitates sharing of images of things. Kind of like a delicious for images … or something. It’s kind of hard to describe whic...

I know my own Christmas/Channukah gifts have already been purchased by Santa. So this is not for me, but I saw a bunch of cool ideas on this list, so I thought I would share it! Check this post 10 Great Gifts For Photographers Under $20 from Digital Photography School:

“It’s that time of year again – the time when most of us photographers find friends, family, and co-workers asking us what photo related gifts we’d like to receive. As much as we’d love to say, “Oh I wouldn’t mind a EOS-1D X or a Nikon D700,” the cold, hard...

I don’t know if you need an account to see the amazingly useful, elegant and well implemented bit of data visualization in the Wall Street Journal. Typical of a nerd like me, I focus more on the design and technical elements than the data that it is trying to show. The data, by the way is polling data sliced in all kinds of ways that are useful and easy to use. Well done WSJ!

I continue to spend spare time on developing my Android tablet game. As you may remember from my last post, it involves a top view of a city. I’ve taken the time to learn a lot of Adobe Illustrator so I am used slightly more advanced techniques than last time.

I have to admit that when I walk around town I am constantly noticing the width of sidewalks, the color of streets, whether there is grass right up to the side of the building and other silly details.

Anyway, here is what I have so far. How do you like it?

I’ve spent the last few weeks in dribs and drabs building a new game for Android. Lately I got deeper on what it means to have a ’tiled’ game space display where you construct the appearance of the game space by arranging a series of graphic images based on what’s needed for a certain level of the game. The idea is that you get essentially data driven graphics.

In my case the game space is a maze, ostensibly a map of a neighborhood. Creating these, still rather ugly tiles, is fairly painstaking both to understand what the tiles are in your vocabulary to be able to create a variety of game levels, and then to do the graphic design and actual image files for these baybies.

Here you can see a...

Can you compose crappy music? I had a field day today ‘designing’ a bit of music for my “Game Of Life” Android game. In the old old days, when computers for the first time allowed you to choose a font for your text. we all became bad amateur typographers and book designers. Do you remember the “ransom note” font in the original Macintosh (yeah, that was 1984?) It looked like this:

We loved it and everyone played with it. And there were lots of other ugly fonts but how did we love them.

Well now (for me) the same thing is happening with music. Yeah I am an amateur piano and guitar player but designing a sound track is not some...

I got some of this list from Lee Sheldon’s course syllabus. I have not read all these books but I want to:

Designing Virtual Worlds. Richard Bartle.

Character Development and Storytelling for Games. Lee Sheldon.

Developing Online Games. Mulligan and Petrovsky.

Massively Multiplayer Game Development. Thor Alexander et al.

Synthetic Worlds. Edward Castronova.

Community Building on the Web. Amy Jo Kim

My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World. Julian Dibbell

A Theory of Fun. Raph Koster

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses. Jesse Schell

I read about Quirky.com in the paper the other day. From my perusal it’s a site where people (you and me) can submit ideas for manufactured products.

For example, let’s say I have an idea for a dog leash with a built in flashlight. Clever eh? Well, you can describe it to the best of your ability and submit it to the Quirky.com site.

Ideas are socially curated (translation: visitors to the site can vote on how much they like the product.) Once they reach a certain threshold then the Quirky staff analyzes the idea from a design, marketing, manufacturing perspective, ...

Very cool photographs:

“Last summer, Sacha Goldberger decided he would take on a very interesting project. He assembled a team who helped him create an outside studio at Bois de Boulogne, a park located near Paris that’s 2.5 times the size of New York’s Central Park. He stopped joggers, asking them for a favor – would they sprint for him and then pose right after for his camera? Many obliged. Out of breath, these joggers showed an overwhelming amount of fatigue on their faces.” Check this out!

A good read if you are interested in fast iteration in user experience design and redesign:

“By the end of the iterations and tests, every single one of the users liked the new version better than the old, and we had a very good idea why.” (from Case Study: UX Design and Food on The Table)

If you are into fonts and typography, you might enjoy this Infographic that will help you choose.

My head is full of democracy and elections these days. How come, you ask? Well for the last year or so I’ve been working for the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation, on elections technology. This month’s focus is generating ballots for two elections happening in November. So more than usual, I am dreaming in black and white forms. Anyway… I came across a couple of instructive blog posts about the new non-lever voting that New York unveiled this month. Predictably, when dealing with humans, some people don’t like them. You can’t please them all, right? But really the objections raised here are quite legitimate.

If this important yet rather esoteric topic interests you, here are three good ...

Ok, that’s my own curious headline for this interesting article in the New York Times: “What, after all, is a more recognizable symbol of the capriciousness of life than a deck of cards, out of which your fate is randomly dealt? And yet here the deck icon is only superficial. At heart it’s not a random-card generator but the opposite: a highly wrought program with a memory, an algorithm and a mandate to keep children in the game. An app posing as a spatiotemporal object.” (from The New York Times)

In my graphic design work I’ve gotten to know scratchboard (aka clayboard.) It’s a very cool material that I’ve had a lot of success with. Here’s an early example. Here’s a pretty good rundown of many of the tools, materials and techniques for working with clayboard. I found it very informative.

If you’re interested in design and illustration, you might like this video of how Microsoft went about designing the default desktop for Windows 7. Also some interesting commentary about the challenge of designing an Operating System for an astronomical number of different PC configurations.

I’ve gotten more interested in logos and graphic design lately so I guess I am noticing stuff like this more than before…

I came across this ad in the New York Times magazine. I should say, I was riveted by this ad. Is this a real building? Is it built yet? You have to take a look at some of the images on (what I think is) their main site. But really the ad in the magazine is the one that is still the most impressive.

Which leaves me with the question, is this thing a good idea? I wonder?

Just quickly looking around some of the stuff I read online about it leaves me with the question of whether this is an architectural/engineering/construction tour the force which in the end will not much improve the world.

Check out “Forget Photoshop: 15 Online Graphics Generators“: “Shiny edges, reflections, neat 3D effects – you love them and can’t get enough of them. Well, there’s no reason to spend any time in Photoshop creating them since there are so many tools out there that will do the dirty work for you. Without further ado, here’s a roundup of 15 online Web 2.0 graphics generators.” (from “Forget Photoshop: 15 Online Graphics Generators“)

...

Jeremy Wagstaff, in his regular “Loose Wires” column tells some truth about icons in software: “One day, probably quite soon, people are going to look at the little icon in their software program that denotes “save” and say, “What the heck is that supposed to be?” That’s because, in most cases, the icon in question is a floppy disk — one of those plastic-enclosed disks some of us still use to store and transport data. And, of course, one day there will be computer users who have no idea what a floppy disk is.” (from “...

Daylife is a new news oriented web site that came onto the scene a little while back to a lot of fanfare. I’ve used it on and off and it’s ok. It’s certainly a lot prettier to look at than things like Google News. Daylife’s emphasis on design and the use of photography both are quite striking and make the site worthwhile. Today they are introducing another wonderful bit, via Daylife Labs (does everyone have to have a ‘labs’ now?) It’s called Daylife Universe.

What is it? I can’t quite explain it. It’s a super mega visualization of all the news that is happening or is...

Someone forwarded this to me the other day. You might have seen it, but I still thought it was worth mentioning, because I had not come across it before. In fact I didn’t even know about the site where the article was published, SiteReference.

Here are a couple of brief excerpts:

“That’s right – ugly websites are surprisingly effective in making money. As a person who puts business before technology, a profitable website is a website is an unbelievably attractive website to me.” (from ...

I came across this the other week and made a note of it.It really shows off all the cool stuff that can be done with Flash. Yeah Ajax gets all the attention lately, but in many ways Flash is cooler.

[Check it out!

](http://www.jeroenwijering.com/whatsup/)

Technorati Tags: ajax, flash

Creating Passionate Users: What a graphic can tell you

What your life looks like as a bunch of dots. Interesting visualization.

(tags: Visualization Design information soflow)

Agile Work Artifacts – the Work Item List (Agile Advice)

Interesting summary of the work list or backlog in Agile methodologies.

(tags: scrum agile backlog)

This just proves that you can get just about anything on the web. Here’s a site that provides custom font sets immitating the type face used in a whole bunch of TV Shows and Movies. Amusing.

Technorati Tags: funny

All the words of the english language, ordered by frequency, coupled with some really nifty graphic design and ajaxian coding. Enjoy!

This is the work of Jonathan Harris. Here are some of his other projects. Quite cool!

Correction: In fact as several readers have said, this site is not Ajax, it’s Flash! Which again proves why everyone’s obsession with Ajax is almost as bad as their our obsession with Web 2.0

Technorati Tags: ajax, graphicdesign

Check out these amusing images which I came across on the Advertising/Design Goodness Blog. Yes, they are all fake, but very cool!

Technorati Tags: advertising, attention, cool

This is kind of cool.

I am playing around with the Last.FM music service.

Among the many things it does, is that It ‘watches’ everything you play with iTunes to figure out your music tastes. And then with that, Last.FMrecommends music that you might like.

What caught my eye is the first use of the famous ‘long tail’ graph as a User Interface element. You can drag the vertical bar right and left to affect whether the recommended music is more in the popular or obscure range of possibilities. Cute!

Technorati Tags: cool, longtail

I saw this in the Wall Street Journal:

“Marcos Weskamp, a 27-year-old Web designer in Tokyo, created a graphical interface1 for Google News as a way to see how much attention is given to individual stories. A headline that has appeared in several publications is represented by a large box, while a story that is less widely covered shows up as a smaller square. The boxes are grouped by color into categories like business and entertainment.” – Wall Street Journal, subscription needed.

What a totally cool idea, and beautifully implemented!

Technorati Tags: cool, UI

I came across a fascinating article,a transcript of a speech by Christopher Alexander, architect and author of “A Pattern Language.” Alexander is the guy who invented Patterns as they have now been broadly adopted by the Software Design community. In this piece Alexander tells of the thinking and objectives that led to the Pattern approach to architectural design – much more than simply cataloging patterns that were known work. He was hoping that when architects used these patterns they would be led, driven, forced into creating living and livable structures.

In his words:

...

Someone whose oppinion I listen to, Karsten Lentzch, recommends these books about user interface design:

Jeff Johnson: GUI Bloopers: Don’ts and Do’s for Designers Ellen Isaacs: Designing from both sides of the screen Mullet: Designing Visual Interfaces

Background: I went to a couple of presentations by Karsten Lentzch at Jav...