Snapshots: Week of 28 March, 2011

An Unknown Master of Poster Design, Rick Poynor [article] design, posters, Karel Teissig, Czech, surrealism, grotesque
coralie bickford-smith great food covers, Design Sponge [illustration] design, illustration, Penguin Books, series, ceramic styles
Sex-Crazed Smutley Calls Attention to AIDS, AIDES humor, awareness campaign, AIDS, animation, Smutley the Cat
New York City Typography, NYC Type [photography] typography, street, New York, functional, graffiti, building signs
Blinky™, Ruairi Robinson animation, robots, helpers, pets, the future
The Sunk Cost Fallacy, You Are Not So Smart [article] psychology, economics, loss aversion, sunk cost
Do You Have Free Will? Yes, It’s the Only Choice, The New York Times [article] philosophy, free will, determinism, neuroscience, moral responsibility

Snapshots: Week of 21 March, 2011

1960s & 1970s Scandinavian design logos, Oliver Tomas [photography] design, Flickr, logos, logotypes, trademarks, Scandinavia
The Redesign Disease, Dmitry Fadeyev [article] design, usability, metaphors, content, trends, realignment
FOMO and Social Media, Caterina Fake [article] social media, fear of missing out, human behavior, kilesa, participation
Solo [web application] project management, freelance, business management, usable interface, data aggregation
Lean UX: Getting Out of the Deliverables Business, Smashing Magazine [article] design, Lean UX, user experience, Agile, process, prototyping, concept development, iteration
More, better, faster: UX design for startups, The Cooper Journal [article] design, Lean UX, user experience, Agile, process, cycles, iteration, startups
History of Science Fiction, Ward Shelley [illustration] painting, science fiction, timeline, chronology, tentacled beast
Web Standards Sherpa [web project] expert advice, web standards, accessibility, best practices, discussion

Snapshots: Week of 14 March, 2011

The Most Important Company of This Year’s SXSW Is: SXSW, Mike Davidson [article] south by southwest, conference, commercial endeavour, panels, paradox of choice
IE6 Countdown, Microsoft [marketing] impossible, unbelievable, out of character, end times, Internet Explorer
Fuel to the Fire, Chris Atkins [article] churnalism, publicity stunt, journalism, public relations, newsrooms
Buddhism and the Brain, Seed Magazine [article] religion, neuroscience, impermanence, illusory self
Anselm Kiefer at White Cube [exhibition] collage, found objects, seascapes, abstract, spattered, beautiful
Media Queries, Eivind Uggedal [collection] CSS, responsive web design, development, contextual presentation of content
Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer: Making Of, Visual Editions die-cuts, printers, innovative, publishing, making of
Why Angry Birds is so successful and popular: a cognitive teardown of the user experience, Charles L. Mauro [article] user experience, cognitive science, response time, short-term memory, visual design

Snapshots: Week of 7 March, 2011

My Super8, Rino Stefano Tagliafierro music, animated sequences, surreal, eyeshadow, love and hate, taxidermy, girls
life is simple, Moritz Resl [print] poster, design, happiness, doing stuff I like
small measures with ashley: naturally flavored coffee, Design Sponge [article] tips, coffee, cinnamon, whole beans
The Secret History of the Edgelands, Rick Poynor [article] urban developments, spaces in-between, decay, sparse, landscapes
Putting Back the Face into Typeface, Erik Spierkermann typography, design, visual language, design process
Saul Bass at Kemistry [exhibition] film posters, design, raw, powerful, minimalism
Frédéric Chaubin’s subversive Soviet superstructures [photography] architecture, Soviet, communist, social change
Isotype: International Picture Language [exhibition] design, design systems, pictograms, Otto Neurath, information, statistics
Mapping happiness across space and time, George MacKerron TEDx, talk, mappiness, LSE, mapping

Snapshots: Week of 28 February, 2011

Work on Paper (pdf), Stanley Donwood [exhibition] abstract, woodcuts, pencil, Radiohead, trees and branches
CSS: Innovative Techniques and Practical Solutions, Smashing Magazine [article] CSS3, development, animation, lightweight effects, progressive enhancement
WordPress 3.1 [software] post formats, consolidation, administrative efficiency, CMS
Conceptual Type?, Peter Bil’ak [article] typography, letterforms, extremes, conceptual art, concepts
10 Lessons for young designers, John C Jay [article] design, advice, persistence, originality, authenticity
How to make work-life balance work, Nigel Marsh TED, talk, work-life balance, societal change, individual action

Snapshots: Week of 21 February, 2011

A Food Manifesto for the Future, New York Times [article] nutrition, sustainability, diet, America, food production
The King of Limbs, Radiohead [music] drum beat, electronic, divisive, experimentation
Back to the Future, Irina Werning [photography] nostalgia, retro, imitation, portraits, reenactment
TD 63-73: Total Design and its pioneering role in graphic design, Ben Bos [book] design, Dutch, Wim Crouwel, modernism, corporate identity
Paper Tweet, Knock Knock [print] humor, Twitter, communication, technology
Gnome Life [photography] garden gnomes, New York, identity

Snapshots: Week of 14 February, 2011

The External World, David OReilly animation, irreverence, post-modern, pop culture
Feltron 2010 Annual Report, Nicholas Felton [print] design, annual report, data visualization, ancestry
Explorations in Typography, Carolina de Bartolo with Erik Spiekermann [web application] design, typography, experimentation
CSS powered ribbons the clean way, Harry Roberts [article] CSS, progressive enhancement, common sense
United States Postal Service Re-Branding, Matt Chase [case study] design, rebranding, retro, brand identity
Remnants of a Disappearing UI, Design Language News [photography] design language, user interaction, fingerprints, iPad

Weather-stained thoughts

This is my Moleskine notebook. I have a number of Moleskines in any number of formats and sizes, but this is the only one that matters. I purchased it four years ago. It contains notes, sketches, recipes, hand-drawn maps, addresses, phone numbers and countless half-formed thoughts written in moments of inspiration or intoxication. So much information, in fact, that I have exhausted the available writing surface. The notebook is set to be retired this week; an identical Moleskine will replace it. The pages of the new notebook will slowly fill, the spine will deteriorate and everything will start anew.

Snapshots: Week of 7 February, 2011

Warm Signal, silja film, sound, abstract, metamorphosis
How to build a corporate website, Brad Colbow [comic] design, corporate clients, process, user experience
Explanations worth reading, Khoi Vinh [article] design, user experience, instructional text
Deserted City, Kim Høltermand [photography] ambience, fog, monochromatic
mappiness, London School of Economics [iOS application] happiness, academic research, mapping, iPhone
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mentor, Or, Why Modernist Designers are Superior, Michael Bierut [article] design, modernism, influence
On Governing by Design, Paola Antonelli [article] design, government policy, conceptual method, social agenda

Snapshots

Starting tomorrow, I will begin publishing a series of weekly “snapshots”. A snapshot is, in essence, a handful of collected links that I find useful or inspiring: spanning a broad and diverse range of topics and medium. My intention is to create a sort of personal archive of links that are otherwise haphazardly strewn across Twitter, Vimeo, Tumblr, Flickr, RSS and everyday peer-to-peer sharing. However, the content is subject to a certain degree of filtering; a curated archive is the only archive worth reading.