Websites as Graphs
Aharef’s Websites as Graphs is an interesting project: he’s rendered HTML page tag structures as diagrams. As is to be expected, the simpler and more cleanly structured pages result in more beautiful and cleanly laid out diagrams.
Archive | Design
Icograda Design Week
“Icograda Design Week in Seattle is an international forum for discussion about the role of design in the face of incredible change in the world.” Wow, I’d love to participate in this. Link.
Web 3.0
Jeffery Zeldman, on the Web 2.0 hype:
To you who are toiling over an AJAX- and Ruby-powered social software product, good luck, God bless, and have fun. Remember that 20 other people are working on the same idea. So keep it simple, and ship it before they do, and maintain your sense of humor whether you get rich or go broke. Especially if you get rich. Nothing is more unsightly than a solemn multi-millionaire.
To you who feel like failures because you spent last year honing your web skills and serving clients, or running a business, or perhaps publishing content, you are special and lovely, so hold that pretty head high, and never let them see the tears.
[Link]
My team and I fall in the latter category, although I can’t say we feel like failures. That said, the temptation to “productize” the tools we’ve developed in-house is strong: the costs are minimal, and there are potential gains. Regardless of the hype, there will always be a place for solid products that serve a clear need and place the interests of users first.
Elephant Design
“Elephant Design is a multidisciplinary design office that has created, redefined, and repositioned several brands across a wide range of industry segments.” India.
Design and Games
Jess McMullin is looking into games as tools to facilitate design thinking:
I’m not talking about learning from traditional games like Go or Quake, or socially aware games that are built to persuade for a variety of good causes, but specifically games that are created to facilitate design thinking…
I got my start in design because of games. Computer games, specifically. As a kid, I was entranced by this magical plaything with its monochromatic, chunky graphics, beeps and buzzes. This was in the late ‘70s / early ‘80s when designing games for computers was all about constraints: with 16KB total system RAM, every design decision needed to be carefully considered. Would it add to the overall value of the experience? Was it worth the memory space it would consume?
In retrospect, it’s amazing that such entertaining (even addicting) games could be produced in less space than is taken up by most jpg files. This was an important lesson: all design decisions are tradeoffs, and you must always aim for the maximum effect at the minimum cost. Games have made me a minimalist in my approach to design problems.
Of course, being eight years old I didn’t think of it in such sophisticated terms. This changed when I came across a book that changed my life: Chris Crawford’s The Art of Computer Game Design. (I’ve written about it before. The book, long out of print, is available online.) TAoCGD was my first exposure to organized design thinking, from the most basic principles on up. It was also my first exposure to taxonomies, a concept that has become central to my professional life.
Thank you Chris Crawford for your amazing book!
