Category: User Experience Design
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Get Info
I found this on the inside of a 1950’s recording of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, and thought it looked a lot like the iTunes “Get Info” UI. It struck me that metadata, and the graphic design thereof, has a vast history in print that is probably worth exploring very deeply when we design metadata displays for…
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Circular UIs are Fun
A few years ago I was invited by the Whitney Museum to contribute an artwork to their Artport site, their showcase of interactive artists. My contribution was “Concentric Empathy”, a work about the various sorts of non-human emergent intelligences we might have to confront in the coming century. I am showing it again here because…
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Challenge: If You Can’t Say Something Nice about OLPC…
The One Laptop Per Child is now appearing in people’s mailboxes. But I’m a little sour about all the unquestioning praise for the user interface design, which to me looks like a complete disaster. So I have a challenge for UX pundits and professionals who are also proud new owners of the XO: Say something…
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The 1/2-inch Headphone Cord (iPhone Ready!)
With winter’s cold coming, I wanted to figure out a way to use an extra pair of over-the-ear headphones with my iPhone without losing the ability to use the iPhone’s wonderful on-cord control doohickey (which allows you to pause, play, or skip tracks, as well as being a hands-free microphone and call controller). So I…
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Kindle Review in the Form of a Photo Collage
‘m not going to say much about Kindle — as an iPhone owner, I find both the device and the service colossally dumb. But the breathless excitement over the supposed “death of the book” is even more preposterous, especially to book lovers like my wife and me. For us, books, periodicals, and printed matter of…
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In Defense of Graphic Design on the Web
At the Speak Up graphic design blog, Armin Vit laments the lack of “landmark” or canonical web designs. After giving several examples of iconic designs that are truly landmarks in the history of graphic design, from Paul Rand’s IBM logo in the 1950s to Paula Scher’s Public Theater posters in the 1990s, he writes: Myself,…
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Scrubbing the iPhone Scrubber
Apple discarded the iPod’s signature feature, the scroll wheel, in the iPhone and iPod touch. But the new scrubber bar is almost useless — it’s impossible to move the playhead any less than a few minutes per hop. So I thought I’d fix it.
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Design Rules to Live By
On the IxDA list this week, Lisa deBettencourt asks: What are your fundamental tenets of design; those little bulleted phrases on the Design Vision slide of your Powerpoint, the signatures on your email footer, the philosophies you work by as you design? A simple but interesting question. You can see all the answers here, but…
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Georges Seurat Dot Com
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It’s hard to understate the pride I felt on behalf of my colleagues at Behavior when I read these words in Friday’s New York Times: “The Museum of Modern Art’s elegantly plain exhibition of Georges Seurat’s drawings begins with an unexpectedly extraordinary moment of computerized art viewing. Seurat’s four surviving notebooks have been converted to…
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Lying with (Advertising) Statistics
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A running theme here at graphpaper.com is the debunking of shoddy research methodologies and junk science used to lend authority to and help guide decisions in the design professions. I want to encourage my readers, and the industry as a whole, to (a) stop being so gullible about the research they hear about in the…