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Dieter Rams Less and More
August 31st, 2009“Good design is as little design as possible.”
Damn right. Words to live by.
Dieter Rams is one of the most influential industrial designers of this past century. Jonathan Ive, Senior Vice President of Industrial Design at Apple, is heavily influenced by Rams’ work. You can see huge similarities between Apple and classic Braun products in their simplicity, beauty and function.
From November 18 – March 14, The Design Museum in London is having an exhibition titled “Dieter Rams Less and More”. The exhibition will showcase Rams’ inspiring designs for Braun and Vitsœ. I might have to head to London just to see this.
To satisfy your fix, here’s a short documentary of Rams, a Dieter Rams Flickr group and a Braun Flickr group showcasing the classic Braun designs.
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Grid Calculator 1.3
August 27th, 2009A new version (1.3) of the excellent Grid Calculator has been released for the Mac. The main feature of this upgrade is the ability to calculate grids for web design. It’s the only stand-alone app that I know of that supports both print and web. Pretty sweet. I’ve been told that the PC version is coming soon.
Here are some more new features:
• Inches and Points support.
• More paper sizes (DIN, ANSI and Arch).
• Great new time-saving feature “Copy Settings” introduced — NO more back and forth!
• Modified “Quick conversion” section.
• Web designer friendly, use Points in 72 ppi resolution and calculate your grid.
Get Grid Calculator 1.3 for Mac OS X
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Introducing LegiStyles™
February 2nd, 2009As some of you already know, I use NetNewsWire for all my feed reading duties. It’s an amazing desktop applications that offers a ton of great features including synchronization. One of the great advantages of using NNW is that you can use custom CSS styles on your feeds.
There are a bunch of styles out there that are good but they all kind of look the same and most of them don’t focus on typography and readability. I’m trying to fill this void with what I like to call LegiStyles™, a series of custom NNW styles I’ve created that focus on design and typography. Best of all they’re free.
As of now I have 4 styles available but I plan to add more over time. If you don’t use NNW, I highly recommend it. If you do, head over to the site and download a style or two.
I’ve setup an RSS feed as a way to keep informed on news and updates. For all you Twitter users, follow LegiStyles for updates and also reply with any feedback using @legistyles.
Enjoy.
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FontShop Releases FontShuffle
December 5th, 2008Today FontShop Berlin announced the release of FontShuffle, a type specimen catalog for your iPhone or iPod Touch. When I read this I jumped out of my chair. I’ve been waiting for an app like this since like forever dude! But after downloading it and playing around with it this morning, I’m a little disappointed. First I’ll start off with some of the good things about this app and then I’ll get into the stuff that makes this app fall flat on its face.
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NetNewsWire Style 2.5
November 2nd, 2008Version 2.5 of my NetNewsWire style is now available. The design is simple and clean with a great deal of focus on typography and legibility. In this new version I’ve made some improvements that will enhance the reading experience.
Another enhancement that I was hoping to implement was a consistent vertical baseline. But because of inconsistencies within RSS feeds it was very difficult to accomplish, probably even impossible. For example in certain feeds blocks of copy are not wrapped in the paragraph tag, instead just use the break tag. For this reason it’s hard to control the text and elements like images.
Anyhow, I’m very exited about the features I was able to add.
New Features in Version 2.5
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Widows
Prevention of typographic widows in titles and body copy via jQWidon’t. -
Capitalization
All words in title are capitalized. -
Image Resize
Images wider than 600px are resized to fit the fixed width of the style.
Special thanks to Oliver Boermans for helping me with some bugs.
To install just double click the file.
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Sun Silo
August 23rd, 2008I used to be obsessed with photography, so much so that I was about to leave my career in graphic design to pursue a career in fashion photography. It didn’t end up that way and I’m glad, but I still have a great love for it. I use to have a nice pro camera and would snap tons of photos a day, but now I have a basic point & shoot that I use for family pics and I haven’t shot a nice photo in a while.
Recently I’ve been messing around with the camera in my iPhone and in certain situations I’ve been somewhat impressed. For instance this shot I took today of the NYC skyline. The light was amazing and it was the perfect time of day where the sun was creating some amazing silhouettes. So I launched the camera app and snapped away and got some excellent results. The resolution of the camera isn’t great at all but this photo is pretty much straight from the iPhone with some slight tweaking in Photoshop. You can see a couple of more photos from this series including a nice panoramic shot I stitched together in Photoshop.
On a side note, a lot of photographers frown upon the use of Photoshop to enhance photos. I think that’s a load of rubbish. I started shooting before the digital crazy and I love film but in the digital age, using Photoshop to adjust an image is the same as using a darkroom to adjust an image. Photoshop is the digital darkroom of today. Just how photographers keep the film soaking in the chemicals longer for different results, I adjust the levels, curves, color balance, saturation, etc. in Photoshop to achieve my results. In the end it’s all the same but just using a different tool.
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The Time Has Finally Come
July 11th, 2008I’m upgraded to this bad boy today. Last night I installed an unofficially version of the 2.0 software so I can play around with all the new apps and I must say this new phase of the iPhone is going to be revolutionary, not that the first phase wasn’t. The third party applications and games are mind blowing. Nothing you’ve ever seen on a mobile device.
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iPhone 3G
June 9th, 2008Apple has just announced the iPhone 3G that will be available July 11th. The phone will support 3G (obviously), GPS mapping, enterprise support as well as some new cosmetic changes like a full black or white back and metal buttons. The price is pretty amazing as well, $199 for the 8GB and $299 for the 16GB. Also available around the same time will be version 2.0 of the iPhone software which includes the App Store that allows you to download third-party applications.
I can’t wait!
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iPhone Web Clip Icons
January 17th, 2008With the introduction of Web Clips in the iPhone 1.1.3 a new craze as been born for Web Clip icons. You can create custom icons for sites you own, sites in subdirectories and sites to which you have no server access to, like The New York Times. Very exciting indeed! Hopefully soon everyone will get on the bandwagon and create their own icons, but in the meantime I’ve gone ahead and created some for popular sites. I’ve created icons for Flickr, FFFFound, Media Temple, Bank of America, Fandango, IMDB and The New York Times. You can download a zip file which includes all of these icons. I’ve also set up an icon for AisleOne so when you create a Web Clip to this site, it will automatically use it.
Here’s a little tip if you want to create some on your own: The default size seems to be 57x57 but it was later discovered that a 60x60 image creates a much shaper icon.
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Miggidy Macworld
January 15th, 2008For all you Apple fans out there, today is the big deal. What revolutionary, life altering gadget will Jobs release today? There’s a ton of rumors floating around on what might be announced like the MacBook Air and iTunes Movie Rentals but personally, I’m hoping there’s a lot of new iPhone announcements. Specifically new applications and an upgrade to the OS. Since the release, Apple hasn’t added anything BIG to the iPhone and I think today is going to be the day. We’ll see.
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Apple, It’s Time For An iPhone Update
November 8th, 2007Apple, it’s time for an iPhone update
I love my iPhone. It’s the greatest device I’ve ever used and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. It has increased my daily productivity and efficiency like no other. It’s beautiful and it just freakin’ works. The software itself is worth the price tag but it’s been almost 5 months since it’s release and we still haven’t seen a “real” software upgrade for it. Sure we got a nice little upgrade last month that added some minor features but it’s time for Apple to add the “standard” features that almost every cell phone has as well as some of the more logical features that should be there but aren’t.
Here is my list of features that I think is time for Apple to add.
1. Send images via text message (MMS).
2. Send one message to multiple people.
3. Add word to dictionary.
4. Search contacts.
5. Search email.
6. Mark all emails as read.
7. Delete all emails.
8. Show all inboxes together like in Mail.
9. Select, copy and paste text.
10. Add attachments.
11. Save attachments.
12. Video.
13. Flash player in Safari.
I’m sure I have more but this cold is giving me a brain fart. I would also like to see another new app or two.
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Apple is Building a Tablet PC.
November 7th, 2007Seems like one of Apple’s contracted manufacturers that builds the PowerBooks and MacBooks has leaked to CNET that they’re building an Apple tablet as we speak. If it features multi-touch that’s in the iPhone then this is going to be something big. All you illustrators out there should love this. I know my buddy Brian will.