Overcompensate ※ Art Blanc

Type + Code: Processing For Designers

By Yeohyun Ahn and Viviana Cordova. Type + Code, explores the aesthetic of experimental code driven typography, with an emphasis on the programming language Processing which was created by Casey Reas and Ben Fry.

Don’t know Processing language? Well it’s awesome. It’s my next language to learn after I become fluent with HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Python.

(via graphicporn)

The CS6 Brand System

It takes well over a year to design, execute, deliver, and ensure the proper implementation of the roughly 5,000 or so assets it takes to get a CS release out the door (we’re already thinking about CS7). Along the away, there are innumerable institutional, technological, and political hurdles to overcome. It can be daunting, but we do everything we can to get it made with as few design compromises as possible.

Adobe explains the design process and thinking of their new CS6 branding. For me the Indesign’s splash screen is atrocious, it’s like some drawing errors. Why can’t Adobe settle with something like CS3–CS4 splash screen, it’s elegant and easy on the eyes. These applications are already complex as they were, why further complicate the apps start-up experience with these splash screens? Also please put inner-shadow on Illustrator CS7, thanks beforehand Adobe.

(via Shawn Blanc)

MUD: Minimum Usable Design

Paul Scrivens:

I’m coining the term Minimum Usable Design, and that is when you reach your 50% mark for your design. If you can’t use your design after you have reached 50% (or a person can’t understand at least 50% of what is going on) then you haven’t reached the 50% mark yet.

I have been thinking about this, how we can treat a design project not as a linear process from brief to goals, with a set of deliverable, but as a perpetual flux to maintain. And here’s Paul Scrivens summed it up beautifully along with the term – which he coined also – MUD: Minimum Usable Design.

Curious Case of Internet’s Buttons

Oliver Reichenstein:

Promising to make you look wired and magically promote your content in social networks, the Like, Retweet, and +1 buttons occupy a good spot on pretty much every page of the World Wide Web. Because of this, almost every major site and world brand is providing free advertising for Twitter and Facebook. But do these buttons work? It’s hard to say. What we know for sure is that these magic buttons promote their own brands — and that they tend to make you look a little desperate. Not too desperate, just a little bit.

Dieter Rams on Apple

Over at The Telegraph, along the line of the aforelinked, here’s Dieter Rams’ regards on Apple:

I have always regarded Apple products – and the kind words Jony Ive has said about me and my work – as a compliment. Without doubt there are few companies in the world that genuinely understand and practise the power of good design in their products and their businesses.

I have always observed that good design can normally only emerge if there is a strong relationship between an entrepreneur and the head of design. At Apple this situation exists - between Steve Jobs and Jony Ive.

Apple has managed to achieve what I never achieved: using the power of their products to persuade people to queue to buy them.

I am troubled by the devaluing of the word “design”. I find myself now being somewhat embarrassed to be called a designer. In fact I prefer the German term, Gestalt-Ingenieur. Apple and Vitsoe are relatively lone voices treating the discipline of design seriously in all corners of their businesses. They understand that design is not simply an adjective to place in front of a product’s name to somehow artificially enhance its value. Ever fewer people appear to understand that design is a serious profession; and for our future welfare we need more companies to take that profession seriously.

Determination

By 2008, SpaceX had launched three rockets. They all failed to make it into orbit. Shortly after the third failure, Elon Musk was interviewed by Wired Magazine’s Carl Hoffman:

Wired.com: At the end of the day you’re still zero for three; you have so far failed to put a rocket into orbit.

Musk: We haven’t gotten into orbit, true, but we’ve made considerable progress. If it’s an all-or-nothing proposition then we’ve failed. But it’s not all or nothing. We must get to orbit eventually, and we will. It might take us one, two or three more tries, but we will. We will make it work.

Wired.com: How do you maintain your optimism?

Musk: Do I sound optimistic?

Wired.com: Yeah, you always do.

Musk: Optimism, pessimism, fuck that; we’re going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I’m hell-bent on making it work.

Yesterday, SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft docked with the International Space Station.