Good article on visual thinking by Douglas Coupland. I’m definitely a sanserif thinker, but tend to think in variable widths as they give a lot of variety for tone. Oddly enough, it’s usually white text on a black background, or reverse, usually no color, as black and white have the strongest contrast and I’m all about the meshing point of contrasting ideas, shapes, etc.

via the excellently written and beautifully focused daring fireball.

Several beautiful things that caught my eye recently:



“Fantômes” by Rey Ortega



DJ DIABETIC AND Z-TRIP




Christian Huckstadt




Cat by Joe Mclaren

Good post by Warren Ellis on the design of magazines, but really it applies to other things: Design your product to be wanted. It’s a basic tenet that I think designers consider briefly and then forget.

Below the fold are screenshots of elections graphs by various news sites or blogs. It’s surprising how fancy doesn’t mean easy to read and the absolute best counter is surprising low tech.

We’re talking revolution here, man.



found at http://www.threadless.com/product/383/The_Communist_Party

Jeff Jarvis mentioned how stale blogs look. Specifically how they all seem to look the same, with their one page format. While there are various categories and tags which relate to different subjects within a blog. But it’s all organized in a list format on a single page. Shouldn’t there different ways of diaplaying information? ‘Course and newsaper design is good base for looking at how to different information on one “page”.

So I did a extremely rough layout of what that might look like, using the categories from my blog. It’s all info from the same blog, but each box is limited to a single category and it only shows one entry from that category. This presents a problem with entries tagged with multiple categories though, like in that second row. The same entry appears twice, because seperate boxes are tagged to display only “music” or only “media”. But that entry was tagged Music AND Media, so it appears twice. Also, the different lengths of the entries pushes the design (laid out via tables) outta whack. The full url format also throws off the width of columsn and thus the design. Pictures would pose another problem, and where the text goes around the picture. Even if the design was more professional looking, it would still be limited by this exact format. Someone would need to relayout this “page” on some annual basis, be it daily, weekly or whatever and that’s currently quite a task in web design.

A lot of the common tools for doing page layout aren’t available on the web, stuff like multiple colums (Yeah, I know CSS 3 is supposed to handle that, but it’s still a couple of years off), being able to easily layout a age in an EXACT way or baring that a way for boxes/colums/rows etc to flex to the display device in a format that’s reads across all browswers.

So, yeah, the single page list format is getting old, but IT’S EASY for now and someone upthread mentioned, it’s easier for people to adjust formatting quirks than it is for software to adjust us at the moment.

Or perhaps not. Check out the mixed columns and rows category at cssdrive.com

Warren Ellis is writing a new column for Comicon Pulse, called The Ministry, about comics and other stuff. The first one talks about displaying time in comics and linlks to some interesting takes on this by Kevin Huizenga. If that link goes dead, I’ve got’em linked below.




Ellis also mentions Glenn Dakin for good reference on this also.




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What do you say to this?! Great design, but hardly appetizing in current western culture.


via ephemeranow.com

Typographica makes a list of favorite fonts in 2005. All are nice, but some really stand out, like Rough Rider Redux, Incognito and Litteratra. How come nobody gives gift cards for Type Houses?

Interesting post on postsecret.



Wonder if it happened.