MetaFilter posts tagged with design

Index cards inspire Google designs

cgc373 — Fri, 17 May 2013 01:50:59 -0800

A couple of discussions of recent Google design trends, one in The New Yorker (via Bruce Sterling), and one from Fast Company (via waxy).

The many ways of showing how we get from A to B

andrewesque — Mon, 13 May 2013 09:34:22 -0800

Transit Maps. Designer Cameron Booth's blog and review of transit maps, diagrams, design and artwork from all over the world. Whether or not you agree with his assessments -- as a designer, he (unsurprisingly) has some general aesthetic preferences -- Booth's blog is a really fun way to explore all sorts of transit design, ranging from transit design classics to transit-inspired creative art to truly disastrous maps. I know the first post is about one of his personal projects, but he only rarely posts about his own projects on this blog. His personal blog has more details on that kind of stuff -- Transit Maps is almost entirely focused on external designs.

CSS Zen Garden is 10 years old, open for business

fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit — Tue, 07 May 2013 10:27:17 -0800

Today is the 10-year anniversary of the CSS Zen Garden Originally created to showcase and inspire the kind of design possible with CSS2 and standards-based design, the CSS Zen Garden is 10 years old today. The garden has been closed to submissions for a while. However, in honor of this anniversary along with pressure from designers asking when it will reopen, David Shea has reopened the doors. Instead of copying the CSS and HTML from the site, the codebase is up on Github if you want to grab a copy and start work. New guidelines urge you to think about making new submissions responsive, and "Webkit-only designs will be discarded with prejudice." Standards have changed somewhat. The original requirements specified that designs must work in "at least IE5+/Win and Mozilla." Your new list: IE9+, recent Chrome/Firefox/Safari, and iOS/Android.

What determines which New York Times headlines are italicized?

larrybob — Fri, 03 May 2013 17:28:33 -0800

"There isn’t a style book for this stuff," Tom Bodkin, design director of the Times explains. "There’s no consistency."

Remembered, NeXT

gilrain — Fri, 03 May 2013 13:28:50 -0800

As the roots of Apple's OS X, NeXT is fairly well known. Have you actually seen one, though?

The Story of Jess and Russ

So You're Saying These Are Pants? — Wed, 01 May 2013 14:58:31 -0800

An invitation to a wedding you already missed with illustrations you don't want to.

Celebrating The Very Best That Tony Danza Never Did.

The Whelk — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:55:11 -0800

DANZA DID IT! Free Propadanza for Tony Danza. Call the hotline! "Fanza" fan art galleries. Spread Danza. Tony Danza.

Here is Today

AceRock — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 18:38:36 -0800

Here Is Today - a simple interactive animation that helps keep things in perspective.

Endbahnhof, bitte aussteigen Sie!

acb — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 07:35:52 -0800

Endbahnhof , a collection of photographs of every U-Bahn station in Berlin, organised by line and showing the variety of architectural styles in the system. There is an interview with the photographer, Kate Seabrook, here.

FPP below this line _____

Horace Rumpole — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 07:28:31 -0800

Following a 1976 pipeline explosion that left nine people dead, cities adopted the color-coded spray paint DigAlert system to mark the presence of various kinds of buried municipal infrastructure. If you've ever wondered what those marks on the ground mean, the Design Decoded blog breaks it down for you. (The previous entry in their Decoding the City series explained the Fire Diamond.)

There's Amazonian and Then There's...

gilrain — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 15:19:44 -0800

Video game character design is frequently questionable, but some designers don't like being questioned. Penny Arcade imagines equal opportunity questionability, while their reporter Ben Kuchera examines the broader issue.

Imagined Interfaces

dst — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 08:10:22 -0800

The difference between (Graphical) User Interfaces in movies and in real life is that the former have to convey information to the viewer, not the user. The bloggers Nathan Shedroff and Christopher Noessel wrote a book on it, and Noessel et al talked about the subject at SXSW '11. Also these GUIs from Oblivion are just too damn pretty. Previously: Upload this to your alien spacecraft

belters expanse trajectory: working up the Epstein Drive

kliuless — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 23:11:41 -0800

How NASA brought the monstrous F-1 "moon rocket" engine back to life - "The story of young engineers who resurrected an engine nearly twice their age."

The question, though, is whether or not the practical side of the equation can balance the romantic. The Advanced Booster competition will run through 2015, at which point a winner will be chosen, solid or liquid. The F-1B could be the engine sending astronauts to Mars—or it could wind up as one more Wikipedia footnote.

also btw... -NASA's Space Launch System -NASA's Space Launch System Advanced Booster -Comparison of orbital rocket engines -Comparison of orbital launch systems oh and How NASA's Nuclear Rockets Will Take Us Way Beyond Mars &c. Almost 40,000 People Have Signed up to Go to Mars—One Way

City Flags Ranked

escabeche — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 14:55:52 -0800

150 U.S. city flags, ranked from best to worst. Top-rated flags are typically tasteful and abstract, like that of Washington D.C. (#1) or subtly representational, like Madison, Wisconsin's flag(#11), which is more or less a glyph of Madison seen from above. The bottom of the list has some that seem stuck in a briefly popular graphic style, like Provo (#143), but most are timelessly ongepotch like the flag of Milwaukee (#147), which features a boat, a skyline, some smokestacks, some grain, County Stadium, a Native American,and a church. And then there is Pocatello (#150), whose flag was memorably profiled on badflags. (Vexillology previously on MetaFilter.)

“Shopping is so ritualised that we walk around like zombies,”

the man of twists and turns — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 14:47:56 -0800

Sian Jarvis, the supermarket’s head of corporate affairs, had undermined her claims to care about the health of her customers and let slip one of the secrets of a multi-billion-pound industry ... she revealed that one in three Asda checkouts “are what we call guilt-free checkouts”. Jarvis insisted “guilt-free” was merely “a term that’s commonly used in retail”. But it was too late, and her “guilt” gaffe quickly invited scorn in the industry and among public health professionals. Whatever the damage, she had already opened a door to the arcane science of supermarket psychology. To the designers of the modern store, shoppers are lab rats with trolleys, guided through a maze of aisles by the promise of rewards they never knew they sought The Secrets Of Our Supermarkets

Weaponized Architechture: Architechture for Profits Optimization The Geography Of The Supermarket

These obvious gimmicks have paid for themselves over and over again; they’re obvious, yes, but they work. One avoidance strategy, of course, apart from sticking to the outer walls, is to leave the youngsters at home while you shop. Most toddlers are too young to have formed strong brand attachments and will eat just about anything that is put before them, so long as it tastes good. That gives the shopper room to roam down along the lower shelves, where the less expensive generic products can be found, as well as the healthier items on the menu.

6 Ways Google Hacks Its Cafeterias To Make Employees Eat Healthier Behind the Scenes at Google's Cafeteria - "At Google's cafeteria, junk food is out of sight, and pizza is (almost) out of reach." Of course, Facebook Won't Be Outdone

The unsaid subtext was "millions of Gamers JUST LIKE US."

Rory Marinich — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 04:30:26 -0800

"Today I donated my Xbox 360 Elite to Goodwill. It represented a time in my life as a developer that I'm not overly proud about living." A former Microsoft game designer reflects on how his ex-company turned gaming into a bro thing and perfected a formula for the modern console title.

Abort Guidance System? There's a manual for that!

Thorzdad — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 13:58:32 -0800

20 cool covers from NASA manuals and press books For you fellow design geeks, some great pieces of 60's corporate/industrial graphic design from NASA. Culled from the catalog of an upcoming auction.

To Boldly Design....

The Whelk — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 09:13:06 -0800

Artist/designer Shepard Fairey was commissioned the Center For The Advancement Of Science In Space to design a brand new patch for the International Space Station's ARK 1 (Advancing Researching Knowledge) mission. CASIS's Pat O'Neill unveiling the patch and the ARK 1 proposal.

Louis Kahn: the brick whisperer

infini — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 13:58:19 -0800

"Inspired by ruins, DNA and primary geometry, Louis Kahn was one of the 20th century's most influential architects. Why isn't he more famous? Oliver Wainwright on the life and legacy of a man who died bankrupt" ~ The Guardian

Swiper no swiping?

oulipian — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 12:22:17 -0800

The Story of Christoph Niemann's Petting Zoo App, an illustrated article from The New Yorker. "I had this idea of making a simple line drawing that one could naturally manipulate by touching and swiping. How hard could that be?"

Menus as art

brilliantine — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 13:57:59 -0800

A digitized collection of 9000+ menus from the Dijon library, dating back to the 1800s. (Linked material is in French, but fairly easy to navigate). Menus scanned include weddings, baptisms, and wedding anniversaries among other events. Found via Chocolate and Zucchini.

Mechanical Wankelry

cthuljew — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 13:42:32 -0800

Animated Engines has been mentioned a couple times before, but I wanted to highlight the site entire, along with its sister site, 507 Mechanical Movements. Both sites have animated diagrams of a huge variety of engines and (relatively) simple machines, the latter based on an 1868 book by Henry T. Brown of the same name. While all of the engines are animated, the animated machines start on page 3, and go on from there. And every diagram leads to a page that explains the machine's function — step-by-step in the case of the engines.

Raiders of a Lost Art?

oneswellfoop — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 11:26:47 -0800

25 (of the) Top Movie Posters of All Time with commentaries from non-movie-poster designers. Ignore or critique the ranking, note any obvious omissions, or just chuckle at the unstated similarity between #13 and #14. Still, a fine showcase of movie - and movie marketing - history.

"BioShock Infinite is not a formula game"

jbickers — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 11:59:04 -0800

"Propaganda shields ideas from danger, and I think I'd rather expose ideas to danger. I think that's what I like to make in these games, is to take ideas and say, well, let's see what happens when these aren't protected." With the much anticipated release of BioShock Infinite just two weeks away, EuroGamer sits down for a lengthy chat with creative Director Ken Levine about philosophy, politics and God. Levine, who actively answers questions about the game on Twitter, also spoke recently with Fast Company's Co.CREATE and the Los Angeles Times. You can read about what the first three hours of the game are like, and watch the official trailer. (BioShock previously on the blue.)

"Please don't use any less than a 16px base font-size for body content"

mediareport — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 08:53:47 -0800

Stop Using Small Font Sizes "I'm calling you out. All of you. The hackers, the designers, the code monkeys, the word-smiths, the editors, the CSS gurus, and everyone else who works on content management systems and style sheets for news sites. Stop using small font sizes." (The before-and-after examples at the bottom of the post from The Atlantic, Wired and TechCrunch might be useful.)