Corvus Consulting is now part of Denim & Steel Interactive. We help startups, product managers, marketing agencies & dev teams develop web and iOS products that are humane and business-smart.
Visit Denim & Steel to Learn MoreContinuing to make meaty blog posts out of design leftovers, we now arrive at something substantial: the information and interaction design for a Menuito site. Click on through for sumptuous wireframes, raw early designs and the plated finished work to see how it all unfolded.
I’d usually post this to the CorvusTweets twitter stream, but it’s notable enough to bring to a post. Cameron Lee of Vancouver’s LiFT Studios has a post that reminds us of the irreplaceable experience of hand-made items in a world of copied-and-pasted distractions:
Simple pencil, chalk and biro pen drawings are now common place in galleries around the world. These artists are taking ‘the basics’ to whole new heights. There are so many examples of amazing art made with the simplest of tools. here are just a few samples from some amazing artists that you should check out.
Quietly dropped at the end of the post, Cam includes his own hand-made gift to the digital world: the beautiful Sketch-Block font, free to download.
Also in the vein of hand-made and artful works, I recently spotted one of Rachel Ashe’s Altered Book pieces on @somisguided‘s desk in our office. I wasn’t aware of these before, and found it absorbing in a way that can’t be conveyed on a screen. Lest you believe that hand-made art is on the decline, Cam and Rachel are providing ample evidence to the contrary.
Joe Clark has a near-perfect short post that rejects the grandiose wailing of bloggers falling apart over the iPad. I’m tempted to quote the whole thing, but this is where he hits the bulls-eye:
…one’s inability to hack an iPad means precisely nothing. Nobody needs to program an iPad to enjoy using it, except those who have no capacity for enjoyment other than programming and complaining about same.
This was the weekend those of us with high standards lost their remaining residue of patience for ideologues who hyperbolize about open systems without actually creating something people want to use.
Amen. That treat was all the more enjoyable after finding it especially hard to read Cory Doctorow’s over the top rant against the iPad…
I knew it was coming for a couple weeks, but this tweet from @somisguided was one I’d been looking forward to:
Totally and utterly thrilled to launch the Namaste Publishing website: http://ow.ly/1kJDB
Seeing any work go live is a satisfying moment, and with the new Namaste Publishing site that is especially so for three reasons:
With all that going on, this project deserves a full writeup.
This year marks my seventh as an independent consultant, and to mark the milestone I first toasted with a fancy beer, and then commissioned an update to the site’s theme. I think every product should have a story, and since I see my site as a product (as well as a sandbox), looking back at how I got here seems appropriate.
Welcome, Daring Fireball readers. While you visit, be sure to give the Welcome link a tug to find out what I do and how I work. Love y’all!
The proverbial ‘they’ are often heard to say that a hallmark of good design is that it’s obvious.
It’s hard to argue that understanding what something does should not be as immediate and easy as possible. There are exceptions, such as in games where exploration and challenge happen in part by decrypting the utility and purpose of the unfamiliar.
Embracing that maxim, however, can lead us to dismiss the reasoning behind a design choice when the need itself isn’t immediately obvious. I learned just that by taking a close look at the recent update to the Apple Remote and its puzzling addition of a Play/Pause button.
If email were an animal it would have to be a shark: it’s been around almost forever in internet time, its basic design all but unchanged by time and circumstance. Email’s success is impressive: it’s an almost universally understood concept; it was the nascent internet’s first killer app; it’s an underpinning of identity in (some) new and legacy web applications.
Yet when we talk about email we often focus on the the shortcomings and misuses. Given the misunderstandings, misdirections and scamming that goes on in email, it’s no surprise that email gets a bad rap that it doesn’t necessarily deserve. Just like the shark.
