01.02.06

Mario Unleashed

Posted in Design at 5 pm

If you’ve got Flash, take a look at this… Mario Unleashed from Google Video’s archive. “Mario, Luigi, and Princess Peach take on the marimba.”

Happy New Year!

12.23.05

The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible

Posted in Design at 10 pm

The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible by Beatrice Warde (1900 — 1969) could also be known as the Zen of Design…

Imagine that you have before you a flagon of wine. You may choose your own favourite vintage for this imaginary demonstration, so that it be a deep shimmering crimson in colour. You have two goblets before you. One is of solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patterns. The other is of crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble, and as transparent. Pour and drink; and according to your choice of goblet, I shall know whether or not you are a connoisseur of wine. For if you have no feelings about wine one way or the other, you will want the sensation of drinking the stuff out of a vessel that may have cost thousands of pounds; but if you are a member of that vanishing tribe, the amateurs of fine vintages, you will choose the crystal, because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain.

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12.22.05

Bartelby the Product

Posted in Career, Design, Life, Media at 7 pm

Over at Design Observer: writings about design & culture: Dmitri Siegel: Bartelby™

In his essay “Free Time,” philosopher Theodor Adorno explains how our time away from work has gradually been filled with economically productive activities masquerading as leisure. He further explains how we become habituated to this functionalization, so that when we have free time we don’t feel relaxed, but instead feel an anxiety to function, commonly known as boredom.

The article prompted me to see if I should add Bartelby to my Amazon wishlist… which I could but then realized that Melville’s work is almost all available through Project Gutenburn’s Archive.

Both the essay by Dmitri Siegel and the short story by Melville made for some great reading. However I’d like to learn more about Adorno’s work as that “Free Time” essay sounds like a major problem in my life at times.

02.28.04

Flabbergasted

Posted in Design, Media at 4 pm

Um. Colin Mockery, a singing airplane, Mr Bean and Harry Potter… together again for the first time.

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03.10.98

Great Information Sites

Posted in Design, People, Web at 1 pm

Long day. Attended Amy’s PCOS Support meeting tonight. It had some good information, but I got trapped in the kitchen by a guy going off about his glory days. He seemed nice, but his stories were frightening. It’s a difficult situation to try and get out of.

Saw a great site today: <http://www.cool404.com/> has cool ‘Page Not Found’ pages. Some of them aren’t that great but there were a few pages with some innovative things on them. I worked on OMSI’s error page because of it: <http://www.omsi.edu/qqqqq> will bring it up.

Some other Web design pages I want to check out at some point are: <http://goldray.com/webdesign/design_resources.htm> and <http://goldray.com/webdesign/course-content.htm> but I’ll wait until I get back into work for the T1 access.

I’m so tired. I’ve got to finish reading a few digests, then I’m off to bed.

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03.06.98

Properly Placed

Posted in Design, Meta at 1 pm

Those last few tweaks really cleaned the whole thing up. I’m glad I didn’t have to resort to a horizontal rule or some such device.

It seems like properly placed white space can do such a better job of laying out information for quick reading.

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