Archives for Design
Visualising your last.fm listening... (September 16, 2007) I've been having enormous fun playing with Lastgraph over the last week or so. You tell it your last.fm username and it runs off and plots you a nice colourful graph that visualises your listening behaviour. I've been with last.fm...
On the IA Summit, Vegas and the Leica D-LUX 3... (March 24, 2007) Tomorrow I'm going to be talking at the Information Architecture Summit in Las Vegas on a panel about Information Architecture beyond the level of the individual site. Myself, Margaret Hanley, Matt Biddulph and Lisa Chan will bet talking about the...
On Space Art in Sebastopol... (January 22, 2007) This is so much fun. Where to start? Okay. So in September last year a few of us went to the O'Reilly FOO Camp. It's an invitation-only event in Sebastopol in California where everyone's expected to present what they're thinking...
On Wattson and Electrisave... (November 12, 2006) Thanks to a fascinating conversation on haddock the other day, I'm now completely obsessed with a brand new class of personal lifestyle gizmos - a class that is very much in sync with the emergent energy puritanism that I find...
The visual identity of the Future of Web Apps... (October 15, 2006) One thing you can say about Ryan Carson is that he knows how to make something look and feel ultra-sharp—you only have to look at the way he packaged up the Future of Web Apps conference to see that. I...
Maps, Invaders, Robots & Throwies... (FOO 06) (September 8, 2006) So I thought I'd end my series of posts on FOO (which some of you may have determined was originally one grotesquely long post of approaching 5,000 words, roughly chunked to last as long as possible sometime last weekend) by...
On Carbonmade... (August 7, 2006) There's a site that I keep coming back to because it's so simple and well-constructed, and yet also represents so many of the visual and interface design principles of the current zeitgeist. It's a site that has design smarts massively...
On the design of American State flags... (August 6, 2006) A few weeks ago I found a weird little sideline in the project I was working on that I decided to explore for a while and it drew me inexorably towards a subject that I'd never even thought about before...
The RCA Summer Show 2006... (June 26, 2006) Once a year the RCA Summer Show opens its doors - showing over six weeks off all the incredible creative work that its students have created across all their disciplines. The show comes in four main parts, three of which...
Yahoo! launches new beta homepage... (May 16, 2006) One small aside that I should probably bring to people's attention (and get some feedback on) is the new Yahoo! homepage (Yahoo! UK version) which has launched in beta. Richard MacManus of the awesome Read/Write web has a good review...
More del.icio.us visualisations... (April 25, 2006) A while back I received an e-mail by a guy called Kunal Anand asking about whether he could get his mitts on the raw dump of my del.icio.us data to work some visualisatory / processing magic upon. I sent him...
On tiny, beautiful, little business cards... (April 7, 2006) I've always wanted to get some sexy plasticbag.org schwag made and now I have some! And even better than that, soon it won't just be people like me (the successful, the sexy, the preternaturally flexible) who can get their hands...
My 'Future of Web Apps' slides... (February 13, 2006) Right then. My slides. I've been trying to work out the best way to put these up in public and it's been more confusing than I thought it would be. Basically, the slides are so Keynote-dependent and full of transitions...
On Metafilter's folksonomic subdomains... (January 14, 2006) I'm going to move on quite quickly back onto something way way less embarrassing and mainstream back into the boring semi-beating heart of one of my pet work-related fetishes, the folksonomy. In particular I thought I'd talk about a new...
On the clumsy milking of mass amateurisation... (January 4, 2006) It's reading all this processed text that gets me so backed-up, I'm sure. I need a webloggic irrigation to get the flow back. But at the moment, every scant fragment is a movement in the right direction, so I'm going...
BP adverts look just like my site! (November 17, 2005) About a month ago I was watching television and an advert for BP appeared and goddam did their new advertising aesthetic look like my site. Now I'm not seriously suggesting that they ripped off the design of my site, but...
A quick review of Yahoo! Podcasts... (October 10, 2005) Double disclaimer time here - firstly I'm knackered and what follows is badly written and I will edit it later for clarity, punch and drama. The other thing is that - of course - the viewpoints represented here do not...
On redesigning icons, Superman and politics... (September 12, 2005) So it's a rare week that sees me talking about the redesign of two icons - but with both Superman and The Guardian fighting for the little guy in brand new outfits, I couldn't really not comment. My first reactions...
Looking forward to the new Guardian... (September 12, 2005) So the big typographic / design story of the moment should be the redesign and resizing of The Guardian. But, I have to be honest, most of the design sites I normally visit don't seem to be talking about it...
Type Challenge: Redesign the Superman logo... (September 5, 2005) I have more folksonomy-related posts coming, I'm afraid, but in the meantime I thought I'd point people in a completely different direction that's almost nerdier if you can imagine such a thing - towards Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's upcoming...
How to build on bubble-up folksonomies... (September 2, 2005) [This post takes up some of the themes that Matt Webb, Paul Hammond, Matt Biddulph and I talked about in our paper at ETech 2005 on Reinventing Radio: Enhancing One-to-Many with Many-to-Many. A podcast of that talk is available.] A...
Three generated artwerks from Scribbler... (July 8, 2005) I'm still trying to work out what I think of all the things that happened yesterday. When I got home last night, I spent most of the evening watching Close Encounters of the Third-Kind and trying to distract myself with...
A life portrait for a business card... (May 22, 2005) Awesome - after posting up my business card side effects of the plasticbag.org redesign, I got sent this terrific e-mail from Siobhan Curran of Tranniefesto: A while back, I purloined a couple of images from your Flickr photostream, ran them...
Some side effects of the plasticbag.org redesign... (May 21, 2005) While I was doing the redesign for this site, I was trying to find an aesthetic that I could use in all kinds of other places as well. I experimented a bit during the process with some business card stuff...
On David LaChapelle, Selfridges and a Vegas Supernova... (May 14, 2005) Every day on the way to work my bus passes Selfridges. And from my elevated seat on the top floor, I get a pretty good view of the extraordinary themed displays that they put up each month. Sometimes they're pretty...
A few words while I switch the designs around... (April 18, 2005) Wow. Ouch. So there we go. I've redesigned the site and I'm struggling to get it all up and working properly as soon as I possibly can, but there are scratchy bits and clunky bits and I swear to got...
My vain search for a simple business card... (April 14, 2005) I have a strange request for help from you guys - the wider weblogging community - and it's not terribly interesting, I'm afraid. I'm really enjoying the process of creating my new stark and simple templates for plasticbag.org and I'm...
More on the Warwick Blogs marketing... (March 29, 2005) After talking about the awesome publicity surround the Warwick Blogs project the other day, John Dale sent me a link to the full design treatments. There's some stunning stuff in there. As I said the other day, I think it's...
On trying to get an image right... (February 19, 2005) A long time ago during all the Warchalking palaver, I got interested in the idea of trying to find imagery that might convey they concept of an available wifi network to people. Warchalking obviously had its utility - it was...
Amazon's Top 10 Secrets of a Successful Website... (February 5, 2005) You'll like this. Small post. Don't really do so many of those any more, but this one has three links in it so I can't stick it into del.icio.us. Oops. Four links. It starts with a little tiny post at...
Towards tag-based bookmark management in web browsers? (October 4, 2004) So since playing with Flickr and working on a little fun project at work on (cough) folksonomies with Mr Webb, I've become obsessed with tags and the ways in which they can be used to build better navigational interfaces. Currently...
Developing a URL structure for broadcast radio sites... (June 27, 2004) One of the most common questions I've had about the Radio 3 redesign work that we've been doing has been about the URL structures that we have used to identify individual episodes of individual programmes. I'm really keen to address...
The new Radio 3 site launches! (June 26, 2004) Ladies and Gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to direct your attention towards the new Radio 3 website, which I (along with a great number of other people from every discipline and from all across the BBC) have been working...
A New Font for a New Year... (January 13, 2004) After a highly entertaining half an hour with my work colleagues and fontifier, I now have a full operational font of my handwriting. It looks a little childish and insane, like the kind of thing you'd write threatening letters with,...
Using Wikis for content management... (January 9, 2004) So here's a thought partly inspired by an e-mail from a work colleague and partly by Haughey.com. Creating and editing wiki pages is extremely simple and elegant once you get past the first 30 minute learning curve. And essentially you...
On The Guts of a New Machine (Part One) (November 30, 2003) I've been reading The Guts of a New Machine, the latest (and longest) article on the iPod perpetrated by the New York Times. It's an interesting article that does the journalistic job of covering a variety of angles well while...
If people don't notice it, it's not architecture... (November 15, 2003) I've just caught up on my Dreamspaces and been confronted with a conundrum. In a piece about brutalist architecture, they featured the Tricorn centre in Portsmouth. Here's a picture of the building in question: Now, this building hasn't had the...
A brief design history of plasticbag.org (September 16, 2003) I've wanted to do this for ages, but I've never had time just to push it out into the open. So, without further introduction, here's a brief design history of plasticbag.org neé Barbelith. Barbelith, it has to be said, had...
On Jenny Everywhere... (September 3, 2003) My wonderful cult are getting a bit of exposure at the moment and it's all because of Jenny Everywhere. My involvement in the whole enterprise was fairly negligible - I started a thread to try and get people thinking about...
On the 'one big site'-ness of weblogs... (August 28, 2003) Here's a weird quote about weblogging: "I believe in my heart that people should come up with their own publishing methods. Frankly, it's boring to surf the blogosphere and see so many sites using the same, tired weblogging tools. The...
The Ugly Wiki (Part Two) (August 21, 2003) A few months ago a conversation emerged across the net about whether or not wikis were ugly (see also Many to Many) (and moreover whether the fact that they was ugly affected how useful they were). Obviously, the whole issue...
On Camden's tube redevelopment... (June 7, 2003) The plans for Camden Town's proposed tube redevelopment have been around since the end of last year, and I imagine debate has raged in the area. I've only just stumbled upon them though. My only real issue with them is...
Subtle signage in San Francisco... (April 21, 2003) The area we're staying in isn't the most salubrious. Even the cabbies talk about it as a 'bad area' (just before they ask me questions about the National Health Service). Today as we came back to our hotel, about eight...
BBC News redesigns... (February 19, 2003) The newly redesigned BBC news launched last night - the redesign being an attempt to keep the basic UI and architecture of the site intact while bringing its design in line with the rest of the BBC. The most substantial...
On Undesign... (January 26, 2003) Much to my delight, there's a picture of plasticbag.org in an article on "Undesign" in this week's copy of Graphics International: Lo-fi Allstars. If you want to see the article in context complete with images, then you have to download...
On the possibility of using web-navigational schemes to communicate data rather than site-structure... (January 12, 2003) I'm two-thirds of the way through my second Edward Tufte book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Now, before your eyes glaze over and you start skipping over to one of those proper weblogs where they talk about sex and...
On Dan Hill's "Adaptive Design" Piece... (December 10, 2002) I still haven't completely formed my opinions on the recent IA seminar on "Adaptive Design" I attended (Dan Hill from cityofsound speaking). He's put up the presentation along with some notes which should make the whole process rather easier. The...
On the manufacturing of scarcity... (December 4, 2002) I really want to write a proper response to this piece on randomchaos.com which discusses the ethics of 'manufacturing scarcity'. But I've been meaning to write something thorough and intellectually satisfying for days, and nothing's coming. So I'm just going...
On the manufacturing of scarcity... (December 4, 2002) I really want to write a proper response to this piece on randomchaos.com which discusses the ethics of 'manufacturing scarcity'. But I've been meaning to write something thorough and intellectually satisfying for days, and nothing's coming. So I'm just going...
In praise of the sub-optimal solution... (October 8, 2002) Here's an interesting trend - an increased incidence of people praising the ill-designed. Firstly let's start with a post at new favourite weblog diveintomark.org. In a long post about RSS called In praise of evolvable formats, he states: "RSS 0.9x...
Being a statement of design irritation with train tickets... (October 7, 2002) Over the weekend I went to visit my younger brother, Peter, in Oundle where he goes to a boarding school. My parents came as well - they picked me up from Peterborough train station and we all went out for...
Antitrust Antivert... (May 13, 2001) Antitrust Antivert: As I said earlier I went to see Antitrust this evening. What I didn't say was that it actually was really quite poor. However, there were some incredibly (unintentionally) funny bits. By way of an affectionate tribute to...
On background gifs in Netscape... (July 29, 2000) I've been inside all day, on one of the nicest days of the year, and why? Because I'm finally getting some redesigning done - getting some code together which isn't completely awful. Picture the scene - I've got a mock-up...
I respect honesty in reviews... (March 16, 2000) If there's one thing I respect it is honesty. But it's a dangerous thing - particularly when the question you are answering is loaded. Take for example Oh Messy Life's DLOG (presumably is to Designlog as blog is to weblog...
