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Perhaps you’re sitting here, reading this on your phone, absently checking your email whenever your attention drifts, tapping text messages to the friend you’re meeting tonight for dinner.
You stand at the end of a long line of inventions, which might have never existed, but for the disabled. The keyboard on your phone, the telecommunications lines it connects with, the inner workings of email: In 1808, Pellegrino Turri built the first typewriter, so that his blind lover, Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano, could write letters more legibly. In 1872, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone to support his work helping the deaf.
And, in 1972, Vint Cerf programmed the first email protocols for the nascent Internet. He believed fervently in the power of electronic letters. His proof was his own experience: Electronic messaging was the only seamless way to communicate with his wife, who was deaf, while he was at work....
Website layout designs naturally tend to make use of horizontal and vertical lines due to the blocky nature of the coding behind them, but designers are breaking free from these constraints by using dynamic angles in their designs. Sometimes these angled lines are simply background images created in Photoshop, but others are animated elements made directly in code. Check out today’s web design showcase to see some great examples of website interfaces with angled lines....
It’s the end of the day. You’ve just finished an exciting project, and it’s time to bill the client. You pull up your invoice template and instantly your good mood is gone. It’s so boring! Why can’t your invoice reflect your branding and express your thanks to the customer for their business?
Just because the invoice is a business document, doesn’t mean it has to be boring. An invoice is usually your last contact with a client, so why not leave them with a lasting impression? Done properly, your invoice can be an effective part of your marketing strategy....
San Francisco artists Ransom & Mitchell blend photography, digital painting and 3D CG to produce portraits of sideshow acts seen in traveling Carnivals from long ago.
These pieces were created by Jason Mitchell & Stacey Ransom for The Rough and Ready Sideshow, a group show at the Bash Contemporary. The show also includes artwork by Stephanie Vega, whose work I shared with you last Halloween, Alexandra Manukyan and Aunia Kahn.
Director/photographer Jason Mitchell and set designer/photo illustrator Stacey Ransom create highly detailed and visually lush portraits and scenarios by combining their talents with elaborate costumes, hair and make-up, props, hand-painted backdrops and set design. Then they add their own unique style of digital illustration and 3D computer generation.
...Woah.
What do you get when you give someone a Sharpie pen and a Nissan Skyline GTR? Probably a bunch of ugly scribbles on a perfectly nice car...unless you're this woman, who has such an amazing artistic talent that when her boyfriend equipped her with a Sharpie, she created a masterpiece out of his car.
It first started as a small project to cover up the dents and scratches on the bumper, but when she revealed her design, they both decided that she should cover the entire car in her doodles. It took her roughly 100 hours of work to finish this masterpiece! Check out her amazing work; it's obvious those 100 hours were very well worth it....
The 10 best designs of the year include a soccer cleat, a campaign to end gun violence, and much more.Fast Company hosted its annual Innovation By Design Awards and Conference in downtown New York today.
It culminated this evening at our awards celebration, where we revealed the 10 best designs of the year.It was long road getting here. We received 1,587 submissions from around the world. From that, we pared entries down to 53 finalists. And from there, our esteemed panel of judges fiercely debated, voted, stalemated, and debated again to reach a consensus on the top 10 designs of the year....
The key to a gadget’s ubiquity is balancing both function and design, so the device can enhance someone’s lifestyle without requiring them to change their behavior…too much.
I was lucky enough to spend 17 years of my career at HP, mostly with the PC and printer business, at a time when we were creating new businesses and taking new ideas to market at a breakneck pace Some of the basic rules
I learned back then became extremely relevant when I joined Livescribe. Right away, we shifted our product design to embrace smartphones and tablets given the ubiquity and power of modern mobile devices....
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“Home,” Maya Angelou wrote in her magnificent meditation on belonging and (not) growing up, “is that youthful region where a child is the only real living inhabitant.”
Indeed, it seems that only for children, with their purity of feeling and their ability to“mediate the ideal and the real,” does the Venn diagram of home and house integrate into one fully overlapping circle. In adulthood, the circles drift further and further apart as we begin to project our conflicted dream-home ideals onto our real houses.In the impossibly wonderful Home (public library), illustrator and children’s book author Carson Ellis presents an imaginative taxonomy of houses and a celebration of the wildly different kinds of people who call them home...
Your Facebook page cover photo is a small but powerful tool when it comes to promoting yourself, your services or your business. It’s the first thing seen by anybody who visits your Facebook page and you have the power to decide whether they just scroll past it or stop and have a proper look. Have a look at these creative examples to see how you can make the most out of your Facebook cover!...
Amsterdam-based graphic designer José Bernabé has created a fascinating new type called Chemical Cloud.
By playing around with brushes in Photoshop, Bernabé successfully fuses a cloud-like pattern with a gradient of color, together with a sans-serif font as the backbone. The result is unexpectedly stunning.
In September 2009, type designer Jessica Hische started what would become a wildly popular personal project: Daily Drop Caps, in which she intricately illustrated a decorative letter every day and uploaded it to her blog. Her lettering style modernizes an age-old typographic tradition: a drop cap is the single large letter that starts a book chapter, often seen in sacred texts or early editions of classic literature. The artform dates back to 2,000-year-old illuminated manuscripts.
Jessica Hische will debate the merits of algorithmic design at the 2014 Innovation by Design Conference, Wednesday, October 15, at the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York. Sign up today!
In collaboration with Penguin art director Paul Buckley, Hische has applied her colorful, ornate drop cap lettering to 26 book covers for classic works of literature and poetry--one for each letter of the alphabet. The Penguin Drop Caps series features bright jewels of book covers, each with an illustration of the first letter of the author’s last name, starting with Austen, Bronte, and Cather. The last batch of letters--X, Y, and Z for Xinran, Yeats, and Zafron--has just been released....
Designing a home for a slopeside site alongside the main ski lift at Aspen Highlands presented architect Rob Sinclair with a variety of challenges.Chief among them was a logistical challenge: fit a 10,000-square-foot, four-story home on a steep quarter-acre lot, while considering city and county setback zoning restrictions and the additional constraints imposed by the presence of a ski lift just a stone’s throw away....
The modern family is always in flux. That's why this house--with flexible walls, sliding cabinets, and moveable outlets--is easily reconfigured to meet the changing needs of our lives.
Americans spend around $300 billion each year on home renovations, adding to the construction industry's giant carbon footprint. But what if houses could reshape themselves as needed, so people could add a room or change the size of a kitchen without bringing in bulldozers or building new walls?
The Adaptable House, part of a new development in Denmark, is designed to change over time. If a family has kids and wants to add a room or make a living room bigger, the house can expand. If a grandparent moves in, the family can slide walls around to add another room. The house is even designed to split in two in the case of divorce....
Why is the Apple Watch a bit, well, boring?
Because the next set of problems Apple has to solve is so much less fun than the last....
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By studying underserved communities, the tech giant hopes to improve the user experience for everyone. This is a really inspiring story about technology and design. It has generated new respect for Microsoft for me and I truly applaud them for this radical redesign thinking. Great read! 10/10