Interesting technology stories

Low end mac is a long running mac website that features a serious of articles called Orchad. Orchad tells the stories behind many world-known technology projects and companies, mostly apple-related.

The articles are extremely well written and I can get carried a way and read a few of them instead of going back to work on my design work.

Great stuff.

I really enjoyed:
The NeXT Years
The Amiga Story
How Jean Louis Gassée Changed the Mac's Direction

Prototyprally

Prototyprally is an experimental flash games blog. It mainly includes quick prototypes of flash games. Interesting stuff.

Interface experiments, EmoChat

Great flash experiments over at Typorganism, I especially like the EmoType Chat which includes several animation effects according to special emotion icons use: ";) ;( ;0"...

Inquisitor is genius

Inquisitor 3 is a great search plugin for Safari (apple's web browser). It implements Spotlight-like functionality for Safari. (just type something in the search box and get immediate highlighted results, autocompletion suggestions, etc).

This application is an immediate Bonzai. The developer just completely nailed it. It works amazingly fast, it's dead easy (since the user is only required to use the search box the same way he is already used to) and it works just great.

I just wish I could have that on Firefox on my mac, and actually, on Firefox everywhere.

The interface is the system

Dan wrote an interesting post on the adaptivepath blog: "The interface is the system". Users perceive the entire system through it's interface and are unable to differentiate one from the other. They are unaware of the system's internals and details - they only see what they interact with...

Flatlab

Flatlab is a home for some weird graphic artwork: icons, pixel graphics and my main intrest: expressive GUI mockups.

Flatlab was formely known as CubeLab in the BeOS community, where several cubelab inspired themes exist.

Interaction Desing Inspiration

Two blog links for interaction design inspiration:

1. no ideas but in things:

2. History of the Button:

Goldmine: no fat clips!

no fat clips is a wonderful, wonderful blog. It contains daily direct-download links to music videos, short movies, motion graphics and other kinds of visual entertainment.

My favourites: psyopp Anthem, Best of August 2006, The Tale of How, Elephants Dream (the open source 3d movie).

Weekend Visuals: Design and Illustration

Some quick links for the weekend:


Tim Gough has a unique illustration style and strong color work.


dqbooks is an interesting collaborative design project.


Sven Kils is an insanely great graphic designer.

Shmentura is online

Shmentura:
A new group blog about design and bakery reviews, ran by me and some fellow graphic design students at Shenkar.

Some of the posts will be written in Hebrew, some in English. Lots of visual for everyone.

url: http://shmentura.blogspot.com

Quick links round 6: Logo / Identity design

Some great logo / identity design links:

first of all, the great logopond, the flickr of logos. (the logopond resource page contains interesting articles and links).

A massive, one-page logo design portfolio: misipile.

the great logolog blog covers logo design. lots and lots of brilliant logos and articles there. (one of my favourites is: sit).

logolog's author, Denis Radenkovic designs great logos - see the logo portfolio.

identityworks - "goal: to promote management understanding of identity as a leadership tool" (great resource).

LeaLea's the art of self branding (3 part guide).

The Logos of Web 2.0 from the fontfeed blog. reviews web2.0 logos and typography.

Songbird is exciting

Songbird is an open source iTunes type media player (from Mozilla) with an internal browser that extract media files from web pages and allows the user to easily download and listen to music all around the web. It's a surprisingly small download (10Mb) and has a nice user work flow.

The default feather (skin) is too dark in my opinion, mostly has problem with the Menu styling, but that's an early pre release and will probably improve with time.

And of course, it works well with the radio station that took me through the last graphic design semester - kink fm.

Quick links round 5 - Comics

Some quick (but great) comics related links:

check out ojingogo, you'll fall in love.

keaner.net makes touching, emotional comics. (and if someone needs a direct link, there.)

boltcity.com - Kazu Kibuishi's great illustration/comics blog, featuring full strips of the great copper, as well as a great step-by-step making-of guide.

Ok/Cancel - Kevin Cheng and Tom Chi's comics strips about user interface design and the tech industry.

flight comics - home blog of the flight comics group books

the creatures in my head - one creature each day.

Quick links round 4 - graphic design

First of all, the great designer's mixtape, filled with fun music and sorted by designer

Amazing amazing imagery from gneborg.net, especially this stuff.

Lots and lots of work from SerialCut, all in one page.

I really love the work of jp33, containig several one page porfolios.

A massive portfolio from superstar Joshua Davis

Great illustrations from CouscousKid.

Quick links round 3

Dan Russell (also from creating passionate users) writes about user responses and learning from design failures - user quote:

“..the most white male fascist tool I’ve ever had the misfortune to use…”

Typeworkshop: home of some experimental typography workshops - students create letters with snow, 100s of books and plain pen and paper.

Artlebdev: huge russian design studio site, lots of great graphic design, identity systems, etc. (and home of the much talked about optimus keyboard).

Conclave: a wacky typography russian studio site. great use of flash and generally creepy.

Quick link round 2

Candy, a wonderful full-length 500-pages design magazine, great, wonderful visuals and inspiration. (downloadable PDFs from the site).

Vectorika magazine, PDF based graphic design magazine, great eye candy.

How to be creative, a PDF manifesto by Hugh MacLeod. (he also responsible for the very well known business card-illustration based blog gapingvoid.com)

Scribbler - a generative illustration app, draw a little drawing and see scribbler manipulate it with lines, colors and such.

Typedrawing - draw with typography, great flash-based app for text based drawing.

Quick link roundup

A few quick links:

*Goldmine* A full-length presentation podcast (mp3) starring Kathy Sierra from Creating Passionate Users in the SXSW06 convention. Kathy talks about helping users kick ass, making them happy, helping users train and improve, make users feel better about themselves as a result...

A new blog for amazing illustrator Ashley Wood. (got the link from Maya.)

Ideas on Ideas - a blog about design, design writing and thinking (also, it has great layout).

Coding Horror - software development horror, ".Net and human factors".

The Lure of the Single Click - peterme from the adaptivepath blog talks about single click interfaces.