Wow I think Smashing Magazine definitely gets the favourite blog of the month award - a great post here all about retro and vintage design (I particularly love James White’s “retro cosmic” stuff!)

I really enjoyed the Future of Web Design conference today, most of the talks were really interesting. I particularly enjoyed Andy Budd (Clearleft) talking about the ‘user experience design curve’, Paul Farnell (Litmus) talking about unconventional ways of promoting sites, Daniel Burka (Digg) on iterative and adaptive design and a great presentation from Steve Pearce from Poke (pictured below) all about user experience vs brand experience.

Another thing that struck me about the day was virtually everyone there was a pasty, skinny, white guy with thick glasses! … Concerning!

Picture by jkleske

I watched this the other week - the Family Guy episode “Blue Harvest” which is essentially a big parody of the original Star Wars film. However this is easily my favourite clip - who knew that the whole story kicked off because of bad user interface design?! Watch on YouTube

There’s nothing better that a good bit of typography (particularly when it’s drawn by hand), and Smashing magazine has done a smashing post on some nice examples of caligraphy, lettering, and experiments with type - check it out here

Following on from that last post, I quite like these from Japanese design firm D-Barcode which specialises in sprucing up barcodes to make them easier to incorporate into an overall package design.

Web design, good CSS practice and search engine optimisation - all to a pretty fly beat! Watch here

“design done, congratulations but it’s time to start construction
follow these instructions when you move into production

your photoshop functions then slice that design
do your layout with divs make sure that it’s aligned

please don’t use tables even though they work fine
when it come to indexing they give searches a hard time”

… is on, you can’t go wrong for $9 each?

Here’s are the ones I ordered:

What would have happened if design legend Saul Bass had made the titles for Star Wars - Ace! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z25t-PQDn5A

So it seems BBC Three have gone for a bit of a rebrand, along with a new multiplatform vision which will include becoming the first channel to be broadcast live across the internet as well as on tv (though if you missed your weekly hit of “Can Fat Teens Hunt” on either platforms then don’t worry as you can always catch up with it on iPlayer too!)

I quite like the new logo, though it does seem mighty similar to the Heart FM one?

Although I missed it last year I’m gonna try and get work to pay for me to go on this, it’s in London on April the 17th and 18th. Looks like there’s gonna be some good speakers, also alot about usability/user centered design - rather than just how to make shiny buttons!:

http://www.futureofwebdesign.com/

I was gonna do a post about the new Macbook Air, which is undoubtedly very cool, however I thought this was quite interesting - article in Gizmodo comparing Jonathan Ive’s work at Apple to the product designer Dieter Rams who worked at Braun during the 50’s and 60’s:

When you look at the Braun products by Dieter Rams—many of them at New York’s MoMA—and compare them to Ive’s work at Apple, you can clearly see the similarities in their philosophies way beyond the sparse use of color, the selection of materials and how the products are shaped around the function with no artificial design, keeping the design “honest.”

This passion for “simplicity” and “honest design” that is always declared by Ive whenever he’s interviewed or appears in a promo video, is at the core of Dieter Rams’ 10 principles for good design:

• Good design is innovative.
• Good design makes a product useful.
• Good design is aesthetic
• Good design helps us to understand a product.
• Good design is unobtrusive.
• Good design is honest.
• Good design is durable.
• Good design is consequent to the last detail.
• Good design is concerned with the environment.
• Good design is as little design as possible.

Right, new year, time to get back into the ol’ blog posting again … the last couple of weeks have been pretty busy as I’ve been leading the design team on the next version of iPlayer, however I’d like to try and get back into the habit of doing one post per day - thought I’d kick off with a new threadless sub, this was actually an idea I started doing for work, however when it got scrapped I thought I’d develop it a bit more and see if I could get a good tee design out of it!

Please vote or comment on it here:
http://www.threadless.com/submission/147491/Radio_Evolution

My new tee’s from threadless got delivered yesterday, this is my favourite one of the bunch by Glenn Jones - there’s some brilliant illustration work on his website

Some graphic design students at Salford uni have produced these wicked Christmas card designs, go check ‘em out: http://cardboardsu.blogspot.com/

Ha! There’s a great post on Noisy Decent Graphics all about meaningless copy. A great example is in this advertisement for Vicks which finishes with the strapline “We start with solutions, not problems” … At first it sounds like a clever line until you start to wonder how exactly that’s possible?!