What does a recession look like? Well, here’s one view, as seen through retail sales. The theoretical mall maps below show 27 companies with stores or restaurants in malls across America. (In some cases, these companies own more than one chain of stores.) In the bottom map, the change in the size of the stores is determined by sales in the first quarter of 2009 as compared to the same quarter in the previous year. Color in the bottom map is meant to indicate the depth of the drop — or the height of the rise — in sales. The deeper the red, the steeper the loss.
I’ve been waiting almost a year now to tell you about all the cool Flash work that is featured in the new Star Trek movie. OOOii, which was formally named BlackBox Digital, is a live visual effects company run by Kent Demaine and is located in the heart of Hollywood. They design a lot of the amazing interfaces that you see on computer screens and other surfaces in feature films. Their credits include Enemy of the State, Minority Report, and The Island.
For the past decade when Hollywood directors like STEVEN SPIELBERG, JJ ABRAMS, MICHAEL BAY, and TONY SCOTT have dreamed of the future, they have turned to us to build it. From the gesture based interfaces in Minority Report to the immersive technologies in The Island, from the power walls of Déjà Vu to the 360 projections in the much anticipated Star Trek, we bring custom large-scale immersive environments to life.
Digital technologies are blurring the boundaries between the passive and interactive experience of visual art, entertainment, environmental design and the built environment. For all those engaged in the creative process of world-building and storytelling in narrative media, 5D: The Immersive Design Conference is the platform for exploring the present and future of immersive design, and its impact on all aspects of the creative media space.
Our goal is to unite a vital community of designers and image-makers and to serve as a catalyst for innovation.
It's about 1994. Part of you is pursuing a new line of research at the MIT Media Laboratory, trying to make information more literally spatial. Your feeling is that, ten years in, the GUI that's taken over the world's idea of interface isn't getting at everything there is. Substantial swaths of human brain are dedicated to understanding space, understanding geometry, understanding physical structure. A cartoon of a messy desk surface doesn't much tax these swaths. The swaths can work harder, ought to be made to. You propose that informaton — and maybe especially the newly-blooming internet — has a topology but not yet a topography.
Instruction about technology should all be this easy. I absolutely love animated infographics. My new personal mission in life is to bring this level or higher of engaging instruction to an Adobe welcome screen near you.
Thinking like a designer can transform the way you develop products, services, processes—and even strategy.
Thomas Edison created the electric lightbulb and then wrapped an entire industry around it. The lightbulb is most often thought of as his signature invention, but Edison understood that the bulb was little more than a parlor trick without a system of electric power generation and transmission to make it truly useful. So he created that, too.
UX Management Materials
Links to materials assembled by Margaret Gould Stewart (Design Manager at Google) for a seminar she taught at this years MX (Managing Experience) conference.
The term “user experience strategy” gets thrown around an awful lot in design circles, but few people have offered an explanation as to what it means or how to achieve it. Here’s a look at the Miskeeto approach.
Fascinating article in the NYTimes about new city suburbs redesigned for life without car. It’s called “smart planning” and involves living in passively heated buildings, riding the bike everywhere, and little german kids playing all over the place.
The new NY Times Reader was released recently. It’s the second version of the Reader and, to be quite blunt, it’s head and shoulders better than the first version. The latest issue of INSPIRE, the Adobe XD team’s web magazine, is focused on the Times Reader project. If you are interested in gaining a behind the scenes view into the design and development of the Reader, I suggest you check out the following articles:
Ahead of the Times: Building a Next-Gen News Reader in Air
A video interview featuring Jeremy Clark (XD Design Manager) and Daniel Wabyick (Sr. Experience Developer) that delves deep into the collaboration between Adobe’s XD team and the NYTimes design team.
Designing for Print, Onscreen
Andy Day channels Justin Van Slembrouck, the primary XD Designer on the Times Reader project.
End-user satisfaction and quality of experience need to be the fundamental pillars of any worthy company's value system. Hence organizations must be structured in a way that tilts the odds in favor of achieving these goals. Good intentions are a start, but they are not sufficient. Appropriate tools and skills at the highest professional standards, applied according to best practice, are what's needed.
Horizonless Projection in Manhattan
Imagine a person standing at a street corner. The projection begins with a three-dimensional representation of the immediate environment. Close buildings are represented normally, and the viewer himself is shown in the third person, exactly where she stands.
As the model bends from sideways to top-down in a smooth join, more distant parts of the city are revealed in plan view. The projection connects the viewer's local environment to remote destinations normally out of sight.
Jacqueline S. Casey, a graphic designer internationally recognized for her "elegant posters" for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, died Monday, May 18, at her home in Brookline after a long struggle with cancer.
The Art of Penguin Science Fiction
A massive collection of covers from Penguin's Sci-Fi collection over the ages. A great showcase into the progression of Penguin's cover style.
What is Grid Calculator?
Grid Calculator is a powerful standalone software application that helps you create a perfect grid for any design project. It is ideal for projects such as book and magazine design, and many more projects. This tool is great when working with layout, especially editorial layouts! A grid is used to divide space and create better design.
Emblematic of modernity, the grid gives form to everything from skyscrapers and office cubicles to Mondrian paintings and bits of computer code. And yet, as Hannah Higgins makes clear in this wide-ranging and revelatory book, the grid has a history that long predates modernity; it is the most prominent visual structure in Western culture. In The Grid Book, Higgins examines the history of ten grids that changed the world: the brick, the tablet, the gridiron city plan, the map, musical notation, the ledger, the screen, moveable type, the manufactured box, and the net. Charting the evolution of each grid, from the Paleolithic brick of ancient Mesopotamia through the virtual connections of the Internet, Higgins demonstrates that once a grid is invented, it may bend, crumble, or shatter, but its organizing principle never disappears.
Ethan Eismann is an Experience Design Manager at Adobe Systems. This blog is about Flash, Flex, AIR, Flash Catalyst, RIAs, design management, and design writ large.
