From the category archives:

Design

Salmagundi for Friday, November 7th, 2008

November 7, 2008

Interview with Chris Slemp, MSDN

Here’s another video interview featuring Yours Truly at the PDC: it’s with Chris Slemp, Program Manager for the Server and Tools Online group at Microsoft. In the interview, we talk about MSDN and its new social bookmarking feature.
Click here to watch the video.
“Grim Fandango’s” Puzzle Document

If you’re looking to [...]

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Herman Miller’s “Embody” Chair: Aeron++?

November 4, 2008

Gizmodo has a photo gallery of Herman Miller’s follow-up to the popular (and very comfortable) Aeron chair: the Embody chair, which was designed by Aeron co-designer Bill Stumpf. They declare that it’s “The Best Chair We’ve Ever Sat On”:

This is supposed to be an extremely comfy chair. Its backrest is described as “a matrix of [...]

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Pair Programming Chairs

August 28, 2008

The development tool company Cenqua have a cute gag ad for a pair programming chair called the “PairOn” — an Aeron built for two:

They list the PairOn’s “key features” as:

Fully unit-tested in our ego-free ergonomics lab
Essential office furniture for any eXtreme XP Pair (XXPP)
Fully adjustable via individual or pair control
Can be levered to standup-meeting height
40-hour-week [...]

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Great Showdowns (of the 8-bit Era)

August 17, 2008

Can you identify the ’80s-era games depicted in Scott Campbell’s piece, Great Showdowns (of the 8-bit Era)?

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3 CSS Image Tricks

June 16, 2008

Instant Fundas has an article featuring 3 useful image CSS tricks: 1. Make it so your images can’t be saved using the “save image” option in the context menu, 2. Label images with hovering text and 3. Making a background image clickable.

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Great Free Fonts via Smashing Magazine: Anivers, Fresco and Gentium

June 16, 2008

Smashing Magazine’s “Free Fonts of the Month” for this particular month arereally, really, really, good. Grab ‘em while they’re still up!

Here’s a sample of Anivers, a font created for Smashing Magazine’s first anniversary. It’s been updated for “extended language support, improved glyph shapes and improved metrics and kerning.” Note that only Anivers Regular is free:

Here’s Fresco Semi Bold, “just one member of a large and flexible type family by Dutch design legend Fred Smeijers:”

And finally, Gentium, designed by Victor Gaultney:

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Gamasutra’s on Lessons from Atari Games

June 9, 2008

Game Design Essentials: 20 Atari Games is a long (23 pages!), thorough but incredibly fascinating look at games from the time when Atari mattered as a videogame company. Back when they were something, they weren’t afraid to bust out of the genres of the time, take chances and come up with some innovative, experimental [...]

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What Hath OLPC Wrought

June 6, 2008

According to the Economist, “The $100 laptop has been a success—just not, so far, in the way its makers intended.” The success is that OLPC inspired the development of machines that are expected to be bigger successes, such as the Asus EEE PC and the Classmate.

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All HTML Form Control Elements Require Labels

June 6, 2008

UX Rule #1 – All HTML Form Control Elements Require Labels, and this rule is illustrated by showing the differences between Facebook’s and GMail’s login forms.

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Promo for “Guitar Hero” Nintendo DS: Really Bad or Ironically Bad? I Can’t Tell.

May 29, 2008

Take a look at this promo ad that walks you through the gameplay of Guitar Hero: On Tour, the version for the Nintendo DS handheld game system.

My question is: is it…

An intentionally bad promo that parodies 1980s ads for game systems like the Atari 2600, Intellivision and Colecovision?
An unintentionally bad ad created by a game company that bought the rights to the Guitar Hero name (the original Guitar Hero team now works on Rock Band) and whose best days are behind it?

I like the attachable fret buttons-and-pick idea; I’m less sure about yelling “Rock out!” into the microphone to activate Star Power, and not at all thrilled about the silly “put out the fire on your guitar by blowing into the microphone” concept.

What do you think?

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The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet

April 30, 2008

The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet distills the best tips for improving your site’s findability by search engines down to two sides of a letter-sized sheet in PDF format. Download it, print it, design your sites by it!

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GTA IV Grab Bag #1

April 29, 2008

Here’s a first in a series of regular updates on the just-released and much-awaited Grand Theft Auto IV. In this installment, there’s a hint about how to get all that Serbian translated into English, a video featuring ten more minutes of gameplay, and some thought on “sandbox” games done right.

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Assassin’s Creed, I Wish I Could Quit You

April 28, 2008

I’ve played Assassin’s Creed only on XBox 360 and I don’t recall the procedure to quit the game being as byzantine as it is on the PC version, shown below:

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Roadside Signage Fonts

March 30, 2008

If you’re working on an app like the Church Sign Generator or Photoshopping your own roadside signs, you might want to take a look at these fonts, “Signage Standard” and “Signage Modern”, which are designed to look like the black letters on clear plastic that you see on roadside signs all across North America.

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ASCII Curtains

March 19, 2008

Here’s something for people with both nerdy and interior design tendencies: ASCII curtains!

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