Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
Last week I attended my first CC Salon. Had a great time but the highlight of the night was the discussion started or hosted by Paula LeDieu. I filmed most of the round table discussion which I thought was great. Its quite long and the audio is sometimes quite low but generally its audiable.
Part one is here and Part two follows a couple of minutes afterwards.
I forgot to mention I've updated the non-exist geekdinner logo. These were changed before the Girl geekdinners but I never actually blogged about them. This is the old logo per-say
and heres the new logo.
All the logos are on flickr under a Attribution Creative Commons licence.
The thinking behind the logo is to combine the current greyscale block on the site with a logo which says London. I thought it would be cool to use the same logo for Manchester, Yorkshire, LA, New York, etc but with different skylines. Comments are welcome…
If you want prove design can make a huge difference, check out trustedplaces.com's new web 2.0 design. Its something very beautiful and ever so sweet to use. Also very clever putting the survey in after you login. My drink selection says it all. Good work guys, now I feel so much happier logging in and using the site.
I shot this video with Molly earlier in the week, which I shared with Backstage but I received a great comment which I thought was good enough to quote here.
Interesting interview, thanks.
It's interesting to hear Molly's views on how it can be technologists versus the business with regards to standards. I think this has been true of everywhere I have worked, and it's understandable. I think the points about businesses understanding the ROI from standards is also valid, they are waking up to this, however the biggest set back seems to be legacy issues and timescales. Often there are old systems that are difficult to replace, but also a great many of the contemporary tools that offer faster creation
do so at a cost to the code quality. Can we please get some good standards compliant .Net components?Also the mention of uneducated educators. This is so true for a great many areas of IT still it is shocking, even university level courses are behind the times, especially where IT is not the primary focus. I remember how quickly as a class at uni we knew more than the lecturer about Photoshop. The problem is made worse when the teacher is too proud or arrogant to acknowledge their lack of ignorance. Which gets me onto a whole seperate rant about the quality of teaching staff and the under appreciated nature
of the job. It should be a desired occupation (like being a doctor) where the rewards are high, but you are held to account harshly for not being up to the task.I haven't really seen the use of divs as table cell replacements, but it has been along time since I made the transistion from table based layout to CSS driven layout. I can easily believe it though, they are such different ways of working and require you to think so differently about you build a website. I've been made aware of this transistion again recently when learning Flex and WPF, where although some principles carry across, there are different rules and what you thought was the best way of doing it isn't
necessarily the case.Thanks for the interview though, I hope Molly can engage the business guys at Microsoft
Elsa from Elsa
I have finally finished the logos for BarCampLondon2. It took a combination of Inkscape and Gimpshop (which crashed a lot – reminder to actually install it).
Here is the source files if you want to play with them. I've released them under a creative commons licence, which even Dave will agree with.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.
At long last SVG has got an identity which it can be proud of. This was winner in the SVG logo contest. Although I have to say some of the others I did also like.
Basic Components Of Logo Design
My logo in its basic form represents 8 nodes connected by 4 lines rotated about a central point. This is a simple representation of key elements used in all vector graphics.
Dimensional Scalability
The motif remains strong and distinct at any size down to 17px square.
Colour Information Scalability
The motif keeps its integrity as its colour range is reduced. This is primarily down to the tonal strength of the motif. I designed all the buttons first in greyscale and then introduced colour only once the compositions were dynamic yet clear. The black and white T-shirt is a good example of the strength of the motif even when reduced to two colours. The addition of a colour can be used to associate the logo with a particular version or profile.
Conceptual Scalability
The motif in all its variations can be seen as a conceptual representation of scalability as it can be augmented indefinitely through a simple logic derived from its own parts. Two of the eight nodes on a motif can be geometrically interlocked with two nodes from another motif allowing motifs to be increased in complexity to suit different applications. In all its different forms it retains its essential character and is clearly recognisable as the SVG logo.
The other noticeable designs include, Chris Heath who got to 4th place with a very simple design which I thought was very adaptable design. Santy was beautiful but yes very complex for a logo.
I spent some time experiencing Volume today. I took 256meg of pictures and almost 2gig of video (which I'm uploading now). The video is in 720p but medium quality High Definition Mpeg4. If you really want to get a feel for Volume, do check out the non-flash versions which are as smooth as it really gets online. And of course do actually go and experience it yourself. Here's some of best shots with my new
Camera. Its great having a Digital SLR with 12x zoom!
Technorati Tags: art, bargraphs, dusk, grid, installation, interact, interaction, light, london, movement, music, uva, v&a, visual, volume
Molly is simply awesome. She recently asked Bill Gates about his Commitment to webstandards and didn't let him play it off.
Molly: On behalf of the constituents that I represent . . . standards-oriented developers and Web standards supporters around the world, I think they see a tremendous leap forward in IE7 and the work that has been done as well as the evangelism, the outreach. What would you say to the people that remain skeptical about Microsoft’s agenda in terms of committing to the implementation of standards for the browser and other development tools instead of this paranoia that seems to be out there that Microsoft
wants to own the Web. What would you tell the skeptics out there regarding your commitment to the implementation of open Web Standards in your products?Bill: I don’t know what it would mean to own the Web. It sounds attractive! [group laughter]. We’re a software company, and we write software tools that let people do productivity, content, write applications. You know, we have our track record. I don’t know what date you want to start in. 1993, when we started IE 1.0, or 1995 when we shipped Windows 95, or when we shipped IE 4.0? We have our track record.
Molly: Well that’s the irony. You [Microsoft] were always ahead of the curve until the IE6 issue occurred, and this . . . five year gap really caused some issues for the development world, and that’s continued.
Bill: No, no. Come on! There’s stuff in IE 4.0 that people are starting to take advantage of. I mean . . . script has been there!
Molly: Scripting, yes.
Bill: Well? Now people are finally using it.
Molly: Well, how about CSS support specifically? It comes down to CSS implementation . . .
Bill: Well, okay. That is up to Dean . . .
Molly: [amidst laughter] Oh, I see, passing the buck, Bill?
Bill: No, no, there’s two things. There’s what we expect we’re trying to do; and the state of implementation of the things we’re trying to do. We’ve done the Mea Culpa . . . that yes, we should have kept the browser innovation curve to be a more continuous curve. Believe me, we wish that we’d done that differently. Dean’s group is getting more resources, and so you’ll actually see us not only going back to the state of what we were innovating before but actually innovating at faster speeds than we were before.
A lot of that has to do with implementing standards. It also has to do with doing user interface things that make our browser a cool browser and ultimately preferable for people to use.Molly: But the question wasn’t answered, which is: What is the commitment?
Bill: Who has done more implementation of Web standards than Microsoft? I mean . . .
Molly: I’m not arguing you. I’m asking a question . . .
Bill: No, no but eventually a question has to be answerable. What did we do in 1995? What did we do in 1996? What did we do in 1997 . . . you can skip like three years and say we did nothing. We didn’t do anything proprietary, either! That’s criticizing not our intent, our strategy, that’s criticizing our execution and we fully accept that. But every year for 13, 14 years now we’ve not just followed and implemented standards, we’ve contributed. This WS stuff, . . . we contributed more Web standards than anyone!
We have our smartest people who go and work on that stuff . . . we just did the OpenOffice . . . our office XML formats we contributed to them . . . we’ve got XML at the core of all our products. Back in 1996 it was us and a few small companies that proposed XML in the first place. At some point you just have to say hey, look at our track record and if somebody’s track record doesn’t prove something you, then I’ll probably never convince you of something. What is it that we’re not doing? You know if you name
some obscure thing and say hey, Microsoft ought to do more on that I’ll probably just send Dean mail and say hey, she said that such and such a thing we should go and do and we’ll go and do it . . .Molly: That’s absolutely what’s happened, and I’m acknowledging you for that and Microsoft for that. I’m just saying there are a lot of skeptics still out there.
Bill: How can they be skeptical? I guess if your job is to be skeptical, you’d hate to be out of a job!
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Technorati Tags: billgates, browsers, ie, ie4, ie7, microsoft, molly, standard, standards, webstandards, w3c, wasp
Volume looks like something I dreamed about when I was clubbing in the early 90's. A club with bar graphs through-out the dance floor which react the music in real time. I know it didn't make sense practially but nor did a 6 walls of lasers completely covering the dance floor. I'm going to have to check this out to see what its like in person. Its on at the V&A till Jan 28th 2007. So make sure you don't miss it. I hope to do some recordings in HD and hey get some good snaps with my new camera. The website for UVA is
very heavy on javascript but the pictures are worth looking at. So who's up for going?
Found via We make money not art
Right click here and select ‘Save Target As’ to download video directly.
V&A and Playstation® present ‘Volume’, created by United Visual Artists and onepointsix as part of the Playstation®season. Photographs by John Adrian.
A luminous interactive installation has transformed the V&A’s John Madejski Garden this winter. Volume is a sculpture of light and sound, an array of light columns positioned dramatically in the centre of the garden.
Volume responds spectacularly to human movement, creating a series of audio-visual experiences. Step inside and see your actions at play with the energy fields throughout the space, triggering a brilliant display of light and sound.
Technorati Tags: art, av, dance, energy, experience, interaction, light, music, interactivity, volume
I love the sound of these candles, shame there about 20 pounds a pop. And I don't understand what happens when you burn it down to nothing one end. Is the battery protected or have to be removed first?
With The Design Can’s clever new Self-Destructo Candle, you can literally burn your candle at both ends. The Self-Destructo is a traditional paraffin pillar candle with an embedded LED light. If you replace the battery occasionally, the LED “candle” will last forever. However, if you ever get tired of it – you don’t need to worry about sending yet another gadget
to landfill. Instead, just flip the candle over, cut the wick, light it, and watch it slowly melt away.
Technorati Tags: candles, design, destruction, self-destruction, led
