brightly colored food

I’m no hardcore type geek. I mean, I love my humanist sans serifs (Syntax, Scala Sans, you make my heart go pitter-patter), but like most designers for web and software, my daily world rarely extends beyond a few universally-installed regulars. But I thoroughly enjoyed Typographica’s Our Favorite Fonts of 2004. It’s a concise summary of what’s interesting and contemporary without having to slog through the snarky typography forums for interesting bits.

Random request: if you know any good typography classes in the Bay Area, drop me a note. I’m more interested in the page layout side of things than actual construction of typefaces, but I’ve looked and haven’t seen anything with much promise.

Last weekend I got coffee with a businessperson who was looking to move into interaction design. Shocking, I know, but also a good sign.

He asked for a good resources to get started. In the past I’ve given people an extensive list of books, articles, websites, etc. This time I tried to go simple — a couple of articles that give good advice:

So You Want to Be An Interaction Designer (cooper.com)

Notes for job seekers in UI Design and Computer Science (uiweb.com)

Both the Cooper archive and UIWeb archive have a fairly comprehensive set of articles. Along with Boxes and Arrows, that’s a solid set to start with.

As far as a collection of resources go, I’m really impressed by Dey Alexander’s collection. If I could only recommend one list, this is that list.

I loved seeing this in the sidebar of someone’s weblog. Sure, it definitely has elements of a popularity contest, but it also contributes to that sense of mutual awareness that’s so lacking in weblogs. I have a vague sense of readership by going to the trouble of looking at site logs, but the audience can’t turn around and say “damn, this is a bigger audience than I thought”.

Working on my thesis last year, I considered how presence, impression management, feedback, and common ground all contribute and characterize the general feeling of connectedness (for lack of a better term) created in one-to-many systems like weblogs. Here’s a little one-page pdf showing related examples and design themes. As a framework, I feel like it’s a little fast and loose, but I’ve found it helpful on a lot of stuff I’ve designed since.

Microsoft just launched a new recruiting site focused on hiring designers of all stripes. It’s well done: informative, looks good, and plays up Microsoft as a company where designers are well-regarded and design is a core part of the product development process. Case studies, interviews, community news - it’s more substative and engaging than any recruiting effort I’ve seen.

Passed along from Kenneth, Usability Specialist at Macromedia and lover of Navarro Vineyards’ grape juice.

Pictoplasma.

Quite an extensive list of videos that demonstrate ubiquitous computing interfaces - both the crazy stuff from sci-fi movies as well as UX classics like Apple’s Knowledge Navigator and Sun’s Starfire project. The range of concepts is broad enough that they probably should have included the mother of all demos, if only as a tribute.

Several of these were shown at the “Video Visions of the Future” panel at CHI, which included Hugh Dubberly, Bruce Tognazzini, and a guest appearance by Bill Buxton, who had some great rants on the importance of time-based “sketching” of interface concepts using video.

I couldn’t find anything that Buxton had written about on using video as a design tool on his website, but there’s a ton of other interesting articles, all online. Random aside: I met him at DUX last year when he sat down with a bunch of us grad students all having breakfast before the sessions and for about fifteen glorious minutes held forth with his visions of the future of computing. It was one of those moments that makes overpriced conferences like DUX worth it.

Elizabeth points to a collection of work and teaching from Erik Sandelin and Magnus Torstensson, two crazy Scandanavian interaction designers.

Seeing stuff like this makes me wish we were occasionally a little less pragmatic here in Iron City.

I wasn’t able to take any of Golan Levin’s classes this semester, as I’d originally hoped, but Jesse is. He points out the website for the class, which has a nice listing of information visualization projects. Jesse’s project sounds illuminating in a They Rule sort of way.

Sociable Thinking is the new weblog from the crew in the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. My friend Scott pointed me to it. I worked with Scott as well as Fernanda this summer, and they were gracious enough to let me attend their summer reading group - quite stimulating, so I look forward to reading more of their thoughts.

This is one of the first public weblogs I’ve seen for an academic/research group - any I’m missing?

Congrats to Molly on her launch of The Hub, which looks to be an excellent weblog and design resource guide!

The weblog has some nice coverage of the conference right now, and it looks like Anne, Fabio, and Molly have all been posting to the weblog. There’s also several others who haven’t yet posted, including Matt, Adam, and Andrew. Could be quite good. Just one question: where’s the RSS feed for the weblog?

From Dan via email.