Category: Design
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Are Some People Just Visually Dull?
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Everywhere you go, you see 16:9 widescreen television screens playing regular 4:3 video programs stretched out to fit across the whole screen. You see these in airports, banks, bars, and offices. Maybe you even see this in your own home. Presumably, the owners of these TV screens can’t bear to see all those extra black…
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SXSW 2007: Class Dismissed, or How My Panel Went
My SXSW panel, High Class and Low Class Web Design, is over now, and I can now share a little bit of about how I and a few others think it went. Some bloggers who attended the panel have already published their own notes and reviews, too, so if you want to skip what I…
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More World Maps
Just thought I’d post a couple world maps to compare with my own drawing. First, let’s see what the big shots say over at Rand McNally: Not bad. Almost as accurate as mine. Let’s see how I compare to the 17th century cartographer Nicolas Visscher: I think I kicked his ass.
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Talking to Myself with SimulScribe
Illustration from a 1940’s Bell Labs project investigating human speech synthesis and recognition I recently signed up for SimulScribe, a new service which replaces your existing voicemail system with one that: Transcribes the voice message into text (using a speech-to-text (STT) engine)… wraps the voicemail message into a WAV file… and then emails the raw…
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Come to my Classy SXSW Panel
UPDATE, 3/11/07: My post-mortem on the panel, and links to many other people’s opinions on the panel, are now posted here. I am running a panel entitled High Class and Low Class Web Design at the 2007 South by South West Interactive conference. It will explore the same subjects I discussed in my series of…
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Aura of Inevitability (or: When a Technology’s Time has Come)
New technology products often take us by surprise. In 1992, for example, we couldn’t possibly have dreamed of how the Internet would transform the world by 1997, only 5 years later. The best innovations are things “you never knew you wanted but cannot live without” kind, inventions that come out of nowhere. YouTube, for example.…
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Performative Diagramming
The cover of Bill Moggridge’s excellent Designing Interactions features a sketch/diagram that looks intriguing at first glance. But then when you actually try to figure out what it means, you’re stumped. I tried, but I couldn’t even scratch the surface. Inside the book itself, we learn that the diagram is based on sketches that Bill…