63 posts
Self-service checkout machines. Is there any other machine we interact with in the modern world that is quite so odious?
As I stand in line to use one of these infernal devices, listening to the sighs of frustration from the customers ahead of me, I debate whether it’s worth it. The extra minutes I’ll save from not queuing up for an old-school conveyor belt, or the agony of a vein exploding on my forehead from using one of the damn things…
At long last… tomorrow morning we’re off to Austin!
Stu and Antonica, Made by Many’s de facto cat herders, are limbering up even as we speak to corral the lot of us from Heathrow to Dallas Ft Worth on to Austin. Assuming no one offends Homeland Security on the way in (you know who you are…), we should all be ensconced in our Texan digs by tomorrow evening.
Our departure is big news for our website, as it means our super-dynamic, sex-on-Twittter-toast* SXSW special homepage will be live. We’re kind of excited about this page. As well as all our latest tweets and links to our Twitter accounts, it shows off the latest Made by Many blog post and the most recent addition to our Flickr account. It offers a smooth user experience, too, as everything updates dynamically and in real time.
And lo, ready to roll a full week before we take off for Texas, here it is — our Twitter-powered SXSW people-tracker:
For those who haven’t been following the posts and discussions around this project, here’s the story…
Or so I tweeted whilst watching the recent Apple keynote. A month later and I don’t think I could have been more wrong.
Immediately after the iPad’s reveal, the interweb rippled with an argument between two tribes, those that want a computer that allows them to tinker under the hood, and those that don’t care about getting their hands dirty – they just want to email, surf, watch and listen. For me, this isn’t the interesting debate. It’s how the speed, screen size and controlled environment of the iPad now means that content design on screen can finally come of age and grow some balls. Big ones.
Last Tuesday night, I went to the preview for the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year exhibition (aka the Oscars of the design world) at the Design Museum in Shad Thames.
(Photo credit: Luke Hayes, from the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year blog)
It was a fluorescent evening, buoyed up by free-flowing champagne and ebullient design typeslarging it in hats, big hairdo’s, bright lipstick and serious specs.
Recently while on holidays in Melbourne, I went to see an exhibition in The National Gallery of Victoria by hyperrealist sculptor Ron Mueck. Having heard about his lifelike but not life-size human sculptures, I was very excited to enter into his world. I was keen to see the way Mueck plays with scale and creates human sculptures presented at all stages of life.
As I entered the room, I encountered the first sculpture of the exhibition “Dead Dad”; a representation of Mueck’s dead father, naked, lying on the floor, only three feet long. The hyper-realism of the model was so striking that I could feel the fragility and the morbid temperature of the body. The fact that he was naked and exposed to the fully-clothed onlookers made him look extremely vulnerable, and I felt a slight discomfort looking at him.
We’re still keen to open up our creative process by sharing the evolution of our SXSW project.
As mentioned last week, it’s a Twitter-powered execution that aims to give an as-it-happens update of what the Made by Many folk are up to, as we’re doing it. This week we’re sharing three snapshots to show how the design is coming together.
A great blog post by Lukas Mathis has been floating around Twitter for a few days now. In it he talks about the removal of features in software development. Specifically:
If you don’t pay attention, what started out as an elegant, simple application that perfectly solves a single problem, can quickly turn into a huge behemoth of an application that solves a ton of problems, but solves all of them poorly.
This, and some other tweet comments, got me thinking about the iPad (who isn’t?) and how I believe it’s a glimpse of the future for how we interact with personal computers.
In the 35 years since the arrival of the personal computer we’ve been on a continuous upward trajectory of feature enhancement and specification bloat. It’s not just the software, it’s infecting the very machines that we run the bloated software on.
As an erstwhile pedant and ex-employee of a major dictionary publisher, I have had my fair share of run-ins with punctuation. So I chuckled to see this brilliantly illustrated explanation of how to use the semicolon.
I’ve talked before about exploring different ways of navigating and consuming content online.
I first came across Pictory a few weeks ago and absolutely loved it. But as it starts to fill with stories and topics I feel provides some beautiful and elegant ways to gorge yourself on content and is really forging a path into new areas of content layout and navigation online.
Their line ‘Your best photo stories’ explains what it is nicely.
