I’m a sucker for shiny things and mechanical contraptions. So I spent quite a while poring over Roger Woods wonderful creations at klockwerks.
Greg Brotherton is another sculptor who recycles junk into cool. His forté is turning retro-futuristic vacuum cleaners and other industrial detritus into breathtakingly cool, highly polished rayguns and robots. The movie advertising Brotron products is a masterpiece.
With the popularity of case modding, Wired have a round-up of some more extreme mods; from a V8 engine to a shiny Aluminium box
Edward Tufte is professor emeritus of political science, computer science and statistics and graphic design at Yale. He’s also no big fan of PowerPoint, likening it to a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to make us beautiful but didn’t. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: It induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time, and degraded the quality and credibility of communication.
The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint — pointed out by sbszine — illustrates the absurdities of PowerPoint beautifully.
Need combine your love of fish with your love of computers? The aquarium case mod may be the thing for you. But if you have a history of killing your goldfish, maybe Thinkgeek’s plastic fishie kit may be more appropriate. Or you could go for an ant farm
The morale boosting purchase of a talking Bob the Builder toy inspired a team of geeks to perform some exploratory surgery and endow Bob with some enhanced equipment… meet Evil Bob
I’ve been doing alot of repetitive copying and pasting coding type shit today, and my wrists are pleading with me to stretch them out of their claw-like form. So I’m going write this new blog entry.
Our project managers at work have been away for the past two days and it’s been absolute bliss without them! Or about as blissful as work can get I think. It means that I can work uninterrupted and email the client directly with any questions, image requests, etc I need, instead of having to explain it to a project manager, making sure they understand it before they email another project manager who probably has to communicate this to someone else… and you get the idea.
Actually the above is only part of the reason. The particular project manager I’ve been attempting to work with on a large-ish rollercoaster ride of a project, (see the right blue that isn’t orange), is well… fucking annoying to work with. She’s moody and doesn’t communicate important info such as deadlines, and new parts/phases being added to me, the designer and html coder.
‘Nough said about her I think. I’m sure there people out there who have had to, or do deal with these types of managers. The only thing these people can manage
is pissing off colleagues, causing stress and other unproductive behaviour.
Any how two days working in a quiet and relaxed environment has influenced the type of music I decided to iPod into of late. On high rotation over these past two days have been Bjork‘s gorgeously ecclectic blend of strings and ambient electronicy like sounds, Dirty Three‘s beautifully melancholic instrumental string sagas (also good for yoga), Something for Kate’s Beautiful Sharks album, and the delightfully poppy type 80s rock of The Cure (Standing on a Beach — the singles).
Enjoy the weekend, because Monday the project managers are back.
Sigh! I’m currently working on a site redesign for company that shall remain nameless. A hand-full of people who are representing said company from the UK are over in our offices working with
me / us on the redesign. We’d previously set up an area where the client could view mockups on the web, but the distance and time difference was proving to be a hassle. They find it far more convienient to sit with me / over my shoulder, watching me change colours in photoshop while they um and ah over differing shades of blue, aqua and orange. I pushed for purple but apparently purple has expensive
connotations — or so I’m told.
I don’t think I need to explain how annoying and constrictive I find working in this way — I’ve done it before but only for say about ten minutes and with one other person, and once I’ve had to code html with the client and their programmers watching me. However these experiences failed to prepare me for about 4-5 hours straight of this without my morning coffee and in the presence of three other people, with another manager dropping in and out from time to time. The only coping strategy I could muster up was going into auto pilot mode, not caring about the stupid colour ideas being thrown around, you know like ones I know won’t work at all without going through the pain of mocking it up, or ones I had already come up with but were never shown to the client beacuse the project manager on my end decided that’s not what client-x wants
.
This project seems to be developing into a series of battles, I know that as this coporate design there are going to be comprimises — but this one seems to be a series of battles. So far I’ve won the icon battle with very little comprimise. All I had to do was knock back some shading and draw a bed. Done all happy now. But everything else seems up for grabs, (see colour scheme saga in previous paragraphs).
Of course all of the subsequent changes being made this week are subject to opinions of other stake holders back in the UK. Fucking brilliant isn’t it.
The colour battle continues tomorrow, and if I’m not as jaded as I am now about my job / chosen profession of the moment, I’ll right a funny entry for you all as a treat.
Daring Fireball is running an interesting article linking men’s wigs and web design, the problem being that the client can’t understand the concept of less is more
The last production line for the original Volkswagen Beetle is to close in Puebla, Mexico
CSIRO has just released a guide for the growing band of enthusiasts who are building homes of straw bales construction
So what does a Canadian cabinet maker who’s a closet techie do during those long winter months? You modify a 17″ monitor case to house your computer and call it the iMike
Why can’t client’s say what they mean or want done? I spent the majority of wednesday coming up with a temporary design solution for a client, only to be emailed a crude jpeged mock up the next day of what they really meant by see what you can come up with for this
. Where the fuck was this in the first place? Needless to say the project manager and myself were pretty pissed off as we spent so much time on this, and like I said, this is going to change in the coming months as their whole site is going to be redesigned.
What have we learnt from this: clients always have an idea of how they want something done. Do not take the see what you can come up with for this
statement too literally, it really means see if you can guess what I’m thinking for this!
.
Yes the days of the GIF are numbered, or at least they should be. The PNG (Portable Network Graphic), is a far superior format over gif for reasons such as: it produces smaller file sizes while retaining higher quality and alpha channel transparency support. For more info on PNG files visit the W3C. Then head on over here and sign the Proper PNG Support in Internet Explorer for Windows petition.
Go forth! Your web graphics needs you!
The inventor of the Dyson vacuum cleaner is apparently a big fan of MC Escher. His entry in the Chelsea Flower Show has a water feature that flows upwards…
I guess Mac owners like their boxes how they are — until they break. Daniele Procida converted an old Apple by modding the machine with Lego
British designer, Michael Gill, has made what he says is the world’s first inflatable church — a grey plastic building with a blow-up organ, pulpit, altar, Gothic arches and fake stained-glass windows
Antoni Gaudí, the Barcelona visionary who was the greatest Spanish exponent of the Art Nouveau style, has had his luscious 1908 design for a New York hotel submitted for the World Trade Centre site
If you’re tired of your television set looking like a lump of black plastic, then Predicta have the telly for you. Or maybe a Hellraiser puzzle box PC is more to your liking
RSS – Posts