Blog

  • Sith Happens

    Sith What the Star Wars movies lack in character development, plot and dialogue they certainly make up for in Design – in every category from typography, sound design, fashion and product design to architecture, character design, UIs and ship/vehicle designs.

    Like the other prequels, George Lucas’ Revenge Of The Sith is steeped in the designs of Doug Chiang – each personally approved and overseen by Lucas himself.

    Where Lucas has failed to coax believable performances from his cast, his real accomplishment of the six-episode saga has been the dense, rich and full realisation of an entire story-verse; an alternate reality constructed such with fine and minute detail that the audience is entirely enveloped in the saga (and can just about ignore the acting!).

    Lucas was perhaps the first artist to saturate and populate almost every channel – radio, videogame, DVD, books, music – with enough material to extend the Star Wars universe beyond the movie theatre.

    Read more about the design work of the final film here…

  • Black Tambourine

    Recipe for Beck’s Black Tambourine video:

    • Hire director Adam Levite
    • Shoot a bunch of 15-second digicam MPEGs
    • Encode each frame as ASCII text
    • Re-animate using iMovie
    • Watch in Real or Windows Media

    Almost as cool as Michel Gondry’s LEGO Fell In Love With A Girl

  • Designers Galactic Republic

    Music2titan_2 The European Space Agency recently commissioned The Designers Republic to create an ident for its Music2Titan project. Evidently, ESA-mission.heads were inspired by  tDR’s Wipeout team patches 😉

    The Cassini-Huygens probe will carry a four-track CD to Saturn’s moon Titan ‘for intergalactic and himan audiences.’

    iTunes users can listen to Music2Titan at their local store…

  • Scrollbars

    Scrollbar Kinda obvious when you think about it 🙂

    From 22nd April to 24th June, Huddersfield’s Media Centre is hosting Jan Robert Leegte’s Scrollbars – ‘a sculptural installation which references the architecture of software’.

    Find out more here… [Warning – link contains scrollbars]

  • The Other DC…

    Acdc …following Dubya’s rebranding of DC as the hotseat of neo-imperialism, the other DCDC Comics – today relaunched its own brand by replacing its much loved 25-year old logo.

    As a long-standing fan of both DC and Vertigo, I’m not so hot for the new logo – there was something timeless and serious about the older brand and its persistance through paradigm shifts in the art and commerce of comics; DC 2005 seems a little too, well, comic-y. I imagine with Marvel’s recent run of cinematic successes and upcoming revisions of DC stalwarts Batman and Superman, DC felt they needed to reposition themselves for a new generation of fans.

    Khoi Vinh says it best here.

  • Newsreaders & Personal Portals

    AddtomyportalAs more RSS newsreaders begin to introduce APIs, the integration of syndicated content with such applications is becoming gradually more elegant.

    Rather than copying and pasting feed URLs from content sources into your newsreader, Weather Underground has replaced the ubiquitous orange XML and RSS buttons with a pulldown Add To My Portal menu that adds the feed in question to one of several newsreaders – My Yahoo, Newsgator, Feedster, Kinja and Bloglines.

    The description of a newsreader as ‘my portal’ is perfect. As more and more content (photos, radio, TV, music, blogs, web) becomes syndicated through XML, newsreaders are delivering on the vision of personalised portals without the usual MSN/Yahoo/ISP walled gardens.

  • City of the future (and past)

    Gaudinyc Dean wrote…

    Interesting collection of images here, of alternate images of New York. The images show what the place could have looked like had certain events took place, either in ‘real life’ or in fantasy. Images are taken from films (AI, Metropolis), and architectural designs, etc.

    What’s most intriguing is Gaudi’s hotel design, which would have stood proudly incongruous on New York’s skyline, had it got the go ahead. Makes you proud to be British, now that more and more daring buildings are popping up, like Birmingham’s Bull Ring and The Gherkin in London.

    The New York that might have been

  • External Cuisine Of The Spotless Kitchen…

    Externalcuisine_2 … um yes, upon searching for the soundtrack to Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, iTunes Music Store helpfully suggested I might be interested in External Cuisine

    I’d like to have seen the lower ranked results too…perhaps in decreasing order of relevance … Internal Shoeshine, Infernal Magazine, External Endochrine?

  • Designing from the outside in

    "Isn’t it curious how many of the applications and ideas getting the most buzz right now are coming from fertile collaborations between designers and developers?".

    He’s right.

    Tim O’Reilly attempts to deconstruct some of this relationship with 37signal’s Jason Fried here…

    Fried’s own advice is to "Start with the UI – there’s nothing functional, about a functional spec!"…indeed in contrast to the linear production-line and risk-averse methodologies of most web service design, 37signals espouse a more organic and iterative approach:

  • Start Designing
  • Start Prototyping
  • Start Experiencing
  • Start Changing
  • Rinse & Repeat
  • More advice from Fried and 37signals here…

  • taga.licio.us

    Folksonomies and tagsonomies continue to inspire new services with the launch of grat.uito.us – which, ironically, I discovered from Joshua Schacter’s del.icio.us bookmarks!

    grat.uito.us lets users compile a wishlist of tagged items that they’d like to receive as gifts. Their lists can be kept private or shared using RSS and limited social network features…I inaugurated my grat.uito.us wish list with a Powerbook 🙂

    I’ve often thought of del.icio.us as a social filing system with a single file format – the bookmark; elsewhere Flickr has done the same for images, 43 Things for personal goals, Ta-da List for tasks

    Each of these services has reinvented an otherwise prosaic application or file format – a social filing system that could support any data format, coupled with the social networking and syndication features we have come to expect, could prove to be a fluid, powerful and intuitive alternative to the upcoming Apple Spotlight and Microsoft WinFS filing systems.

    Indeed Google, Yahoo and others may be better placed than traditional OS vendors in shaping the next generation of file storage and retrieval…perhaps I should add a Social Filing System to my grat.uito.us wish list 🙂