“Artists are visionaries. We routinely practice a form of faith, seeing clearly and moving toward a creative goal that shimmers in the distance—often visible to us, but invisible to those around us.”
Julia Cameron
Kirschener Brazil
Visual direction, branding and product design for the Brazilian cycling brand Kirschener created by Made By Six.
“When launching a new [digital] product, let’s focus more on discussing its PURPOSE and less UI details and features.”
Literal Augmented Reality Sandbox
This sandbox created by UC Davis is equipped with an Xbox Kinect camera and projector to create hands on museum exhibits as an education tool for freshwater lake and watershed science.
Soon screens will no longer be trapped by a device, where we can manipulate projections in front of us, like some display on a science-fiction starship. A time when we’ll design for data rather than devices. In a way, we’re halfway there — designing for four corners, no matter the size and not for any specific device. The future is creeping around the corner, it’ll be interesting to see how we meet it.
Data Visualization Tools
A selection of tools, libraries, and APIs for creating interactive and dynamic data visualizations.
Studio Type Project
It’s in the subtle details, thoughtful tweening and “whoopass” audio by Box of Toys where the magic happens in this just-for-fun project by weare17.
Batelco Directory
Cleaver ad and beautifully executed art direction for Bahrain’s equivalent of the Yellow Pages. Created by Supparat Thepparat. See the Behance project for more process images and full credits .
Citrus - Make It Fresh
Created with a pallet of illustrations and graphics, Moscow event agency Citrus’ new dynamic identity system comes across as both fresh and playful. Created by Roma Erohnovich.
The only critique I have with the animated version is that the tweening could use a bit of love.
Timothy J. Reynolds
The latest Desktop Wallpaper Project submission on The Fox is Black features one of the geometric landscapes created by Timothy J. Reynolds. Check out more of his rendered landscapes on Dribbble.
“The quality of your UX shows how much your respect or disrespect your customers”
Alexis Ohanian - co-founder of Reddit, Hipmunk and Breadpig
Letterboxd
Congrats to Matthew Buchanan, Mike Harding and team on launching Letterboxd to the public!
Letterboxd is a social site for sharing your taste in film. Use it as a diary to record your opinion about films as you watch them, or just to keep track of films you’ve seen in the past. Rate, review and tag films as you add them. Find and follow your friends to see what they’re enjoying. Keep a watchlist of films you’d like to see, and make lists about any aspect of film, for example: favorite heist films. Import historic data from several popular apps, and add films to your US Netflix instant queue directly from the site.
To top it all of the design and user interaction is beyond beautiful.
Hillman Curtis | 1961-2012
Hillman Curtis was one of my strongest sources of inspiration early on in my career as a ‘new media designer’, and as he reinvented himself from a web designer to film maker it was encouragement for me to take huge risks in my career.
“It’s one of those things that I should always remember, to try and take the courageous route.”
—Hillman Curtis: On Reinvention and Taking the Courageous Path
Life is far too short to not take the courageous route.
Story Centered Design
Once you’re dealing with an app that has a dozen screens and hundreds of states, you can’t hold the whole product in your head like a poster. I noticed that our team was emailing around individual screens, talking about individual screens, and naming all the screens just to keep track. But we weren’t paying any attention to how the screens and features fit together.
We were thinking of the product as a set of screens. But there’s a problem with working this way: it’s not at all how people experience the product in real life. People use products in little flows that last anywhere from 30 seconds to a few minutes. […]
A product is not a set of screens — it’s the stories those screens enable.
Don’t let your homepage or primary view of your app be like a great opening chapter to a novel followed by disconnected and boring rubbish. I think it’s time to look at my own process again and see what can be improved.
On a side note the Design Staff blog is a gold mine of a blog for designers, entrepreneurs and researchers.
Heavenly Vaults
Full of overwhelming craftsmanship and detail, photographer David Stephenson captures the vaults and ceilings of European architecture from Romanesque to Gothic.
Fantasy Interactive Case Studies
Fi’s case studies are clearly in a league of their own to show off their client work. As a potential client you gain insight to their entire process and strategy, but as a designer the case studies are valuable tools in learning how to communicate design strategy with a client.
If you are a designer or a small design studio, this is the level of detail that you need to pour into every project to move beyond your tired hourly-based billing into the promise land of value based pricing. Charging by the hour is for chumps.
See the whole Broadway.com iPad App case study as well as Redbull TV, HTC Global, and History Channel’s Civil War 150.
