« Flash-based blog | Main | Revenge of the Modal Dialog Box »
October 02, 2003
Media reccommendations
Nothing much, just some quick movie and book suggestions.
Last night we saw the wonderful Lost In Translation. I'd been looking forward to this, and it's just great. It's one of those films, something like "Eyes Wide Shut" (which it's otherwise nothing like) where for long stretches, nothing seems to happen, but in really magical ways. It's gorgeous to look at, sad, funny, and is just dead on in capturing the feeling of sleepless jetlag confusion.
I also ran across Nico Macdonald's What is Web Design book last night. Although I'm secretly pleased that there are far fewer of this kind of book put out than there used to be, it's good that Macdonald's made the cut. Yes, it's another rehash of the basic user-centered design principles (personas, wireframes, usability) that are already canonical in books (if not in practice). But Macdonald's really good at this stuff, and it's a nicely designed book with lots of fine examples of work.
Best of all, some of those examples are genuinely new to me; most of the other books of this genre seem to refer to the same buch of sites and applications again and again. The best of them for me was the work of VIsual I|O, an information design firm in Boston that I'd never heard of. You wouldn't know it from their lousy site (could you put your work in even smaller boxes, perhaps?), but their diagrams are just stunning and elaborate in the best way, something like Lisa Strausfeld's stuff for the long-gone Quokka Sports.
Posted by Andrew at October 2, 2003 10:04 AM