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Monday, April 30, 2001
Somebody apply to go to Ivrea with me? I might be free this summer.
Friday, April 27, 2001
What could be more fun than this: slot car racing on the web. Not in English (and is in Shockwave), but it's pretty easy to figure out.Choose 1 or 2 players, drag pieces of track to the screen from the top. When you complete a loop, click the checkered flag to race. Step on the gas by clicking and holding the controller, but don't be a lead-foot! "Niva" seems to mean "level" if you want more of a challenge.
In this post to CHI-WEB, Kent Dahlgren points out that you can use Google's Ad Keywords Tool to check out the likely popularity of various keywords (and, of course, get the rates for running ads that appear when people search for them). Free word-valuation, that's pretty rad.
Dont' miss the new edwardtufte.com. Coupla things of note: it's run on the ArsDigita software. Nice to see Tufte's keepin' it real. Also, the site was designed by EyeArchitect, which I've never heard of but which has a pretty nifty site oriented around an introduction to IA. The site's presented in four ways: flatland, hierarchical, linear, and associative, each with its own style. That's pretty cool, though it's the sort of thing that probably only appeals to other IAs and designers.
Wednesday, April 25, 2001
I've just started to poke around Amazon's People lists. It's kind of interesting; you get not just reviews written by people, but lists of other people they are interested in and all their reviews and wish lists. Here's peterme's which is useful since he has 44 people on it. What books has Danny Hillis reviewed lately? How about Stewart Brand? Don Norman has only reviewed one book? Why, Phil Greenspun's reviewed 75!
Friday, April 20, 2001
From Apple's OSX Developer site, a good article on IA Tools for the Mac is good even if you're not on OSX. The best thing is a navigation storyboard .pdf for a fictional web application. It's a good storyboard format to swipe if you want one.
What Is a Print? is just great, a really solid use of usable Flash to add a level of understanding to instructional design. via xblog
Thursday, April 19, 2001
I can't imagine Phillip Greenspun deserves this.
I had a chance to look at Paul Kahn and Krzysztof Lenk's book Mapping Websites yesterday. It's one of your lavish design books like this and this and this and more.
It looks to me like most of the content of Lenk and Kahn's book is on the Dynamic Diagrams site in the seminars section. There's an Information Architecture one and a Mapping Websites one. I have to say I'm a little down on the kind of gorgeous, wall-size, dense IA maps featured in the book. Maybe because I don't get to make any right now :-( . But I see these things and think: we're making these for each other to read. Clearly that's the case if there's a $40 glossy book of site maps on the shelves of Borders. (And by the way, it ain't in the Design section, xperience designers, it's in the Web Development section, next to Learn XML in 24 Hours or something.)
IAs are basically Modernists. A simplified generalization would include a preference for function and utility, a tendency to create products (like maps, schematics, and specifications) that are themselves abstract, efficient, and visually austere even when dense with data. We like to see structure made explicit and dislike ornamentation. Unfortunately, it can wrongly equate a set of very specific aesthetic values with functional value, which I think is what I see in a lot of those maps in Kahn/Lenk. Developers don't want them, since they're rarely as useful as references as a spreadsheet. Graphic designers may be cross that bounds are overstepped. Managers may not see the value in them. Clients (who they?) will, I'm guessing, be rapidly losing patience with these great luxurious deliverables which they can't really decipher.
I'd like to see some IA work that's really sloppy, dumb, material, and physical. I have no idea what that would be, just that it would be the opposite of what is currently done, which seems like a good reason to do it. Nathalie Jeremijenko's talk at Doors might be one place to start.
Monday, April 16, 2001
One of my all-time favorite things on the web, which I thought was long gone, is still around. Electrica is a noise-synthesizer-static-electo-interaction kind of thing. You'll need the Beatnik plugin for it.
Thursday, April 12, 2001
Philip Agre's Notes on the New Design Space is an excellent read. He asks not to be quoted (it's a draft, written October 2000), so I can't chop out the best parts here. Nadav's notes from a recent talk on Experience Modelling dovetail nicely with it.
Monday, April 09, 2001
What the Font? is so cool: point it to a graphic or upload one and it will attempt to tell you the fonts used. How do it know?
If one is a huge fan of unknown genius Scott Miller, one might enjoy this elliptical deconstruction of Lolita Nation, Miller's late-80s algorithm-pop masterpiece. One might also enjoy "Super Tuesday"(at MP3.com) by The Shazam!, a band that sounds rather a lot like Miller's more straightforward stuff.
Tuesday, April 03, 2001
Pretty much everything Ben Fry does amazes me. His thesis is online. How have I missed this until now?
