I didn’t get to go to the SXSW conference, but many of my favorite designers were there, including Jason Santa Maria, who did a great post-conference round-up on his site.
One of the more interesting panels he was on was Holistic Web Design, for which you can find in overview here, along with the PDF of the slides, and the podcast. Interesting stuff. I have a lot to dig through.
Professional web designers probably read the highly popular first edition of Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability when it came out in 2000, but the second edition is worth a re-read, because author Steve Krug has honed his craft to a fine point, and everyone can use a refresher on the basic principles of usability and user testing.
Amateur designers may not have heard of “Don’t Make Me Think” — and if so, they should grab a copy right away. The book, like its subject matter, is light, minimal and to the point — a slim volume designed “to be read on a plane” (in the authors words) but covering some of the major problems that make websites difficult to use.
According to today’s IndyStar, the newly merged IPD has arrived at a badge design, but is still deciding on what color their new uniforms will be.
Members of a merger subcommittee endorsed a proposed patch design Friday and indicated they are close to agreeing on a new badge for the combined Indianapolis Police and Marion County Sheriff’s departments. Whether the new uniforms will be blue or black, however, is still undecided. The color issue remains a hot topic.
“Officers look at this uniform as a symbol of what they once dreamed of wearing one day,” said Sheriff’s Department Col. John Layton, the subcommittee’s chairman. “They tested and trained for that right all while knowing that they could, if necessary, pay for that right with their lives.”
More drama than even gay men engage in while picking out their wardrobes. I’m sure no matter what color they pick, they’ll look just fabulous.
[/my_design_work/prototypes/commonplacebook/homepage.gif] Here’s what I’ve been working on all weekend. It’s quite rough, still, and needs a lot of refinement. I haven’t picked the correct font for my new logo, and there’s a lot missing and lots of little stuff that still needs cleaned up. But you get the general idea of where I’m headed.
[/my_design_work/prototypes/commonplacebook/homepage.gif]
span class=”hilightyellow”>2019 update: No clue where this design is or if I would still be willing to show it.
Eric Miller’s right-wing anti-LGBTQ+ hate group “Advance America” used to be called “Citizens Concerned for the Constitution.” This group has spent years lobbying in the Indiana State legislature on anti-LGBTQ+ legal issues intended to marginalize and eliminate LGBTQ+ folks from Indiana’s population. These are the folks that introduced legislation in the 1990s to get LGBTQ+ people rounded up and “quarantined” in containment facilities as a proposed solution to the AIDS crisis. They also proposed legislation making it illegal for lesbians to get artificial insemination from sperm banks.
Citizens Concerned for the Constitution used to have this Art Deco-Type logo that was reminiscent of Nazi propaganda posters. When I saw it, I immediately realized how easy it would be to parody, and so I did. I created this PARODY logo, making the macho man in the middle into a gay male couple, and adding a nice well-muscled woman into the group for lesbian interest.
When I put the image on posters at a lobbying event that took place at the Statehouse, people from the organization were really not happy.
A bunch of goofy banner ads I created a long time ago.
Japanese Aesthetic principle: Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is the beauty of things modest and humble. It is the beauty of things unconventional. Material characteristics of wabi-sabi: suggestion of natural process, irregular, intimate, unpretentious, earthy,simple.
According to Japanese legend, in the sixteenth century Sen no Rikyu sought to learn the Way of Tea. He went to tea-master Takeeno Joo, who tested the younger man by asking him to tend to his garden. Rikyu cleaned up debris and raked the ground until it was perfect, then scrutinized the immaculate garden. Before presenting his work to the master, he shook a cherry tree, causing a few flowers to spill randomly onto the ground.
Later, when he had become one of Japan’s most revered tea-masters, Rikyu served under Toyotomi Hikeyoshi, a warrior known for his ostentatious taste. One day the ruler went to visit Rikyu’s famed morning glory garden and was shocked to find it in shambles, all the flowers uprooted. He entered Rikyu’s humble teahouse to find the master sitting in front of an alcove, where he had placed one perfect morning glory in a clay pot.
To this day, the Japanese revere Rikyu as one who understood to his very core an elusive cultural thread known as wabi-sabi. Emerging in the fifteenth-century as a reaction to the prevailing aesthetic of lavishness, ornamentation, and rich materials, wabi-sabi is the art of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in earthiness, of revering authenticity above all. In Japan, the concept is now so deeply ingrained that it’s difficult to explain to Westerners; no direct translation exists.
Broadly, wabi-sabi is everything that today’s sleek, mass-produced, technology saturated culture isn’t. It’s flea markets, not department stores; aged wood, not Pergo; rice paper, not glass; one single morning glory, not a dozen red roses. Wabi-sabi understands the tender, raw beauty of a Decembral landscape devoid of color and life, the aching elegance of an abandoned hut on a wintry shore. It celebrates cracks and crevices and rot and all the other marks that time and weather and use leave behind. To discover wabi-sabi is to spend time finding the singular beauty in something that may present itself as decrepit and ugly.
Wabi-sabi reminds us that we are all but transient beings on this planet–that our bodies, as well as the material world around us, are in the process of returning to the dust from which we came. Nature’s cycles of growth, decay, and erosion are embodied in liver spots, rust, frayed edges. Through wabi-sabi, we learn to embrace both the glory and the impersonal sadness of these blemishes, and the march of time they represent.
Cool sites I’d love to redesign, if they’d only let me [and if I had the time]: Fark.com and roadsideamerica.com. Both of them have site designs that are on the unpolished side…
Wow. Sometimes you’ll find a website that just blows you away.
