Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Design's New School of Thought

Interesting article in Business Week. David Kelley (of IDEO) is starting a new "D-school" at Stanford University. It's been up and running for three years now, teaching a new kind of design thinking, allowing students to go out and follow users and businesses around, observing their needs before they even touch a pencil to paper.

Read the article here: Design's New School of Thought

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Color Blindess Test Tool

Color Filter (http://colorfilter.wickline.org/) is a handy little tool you can use to see if your site can be viewed by people who are colorblind.


How a person without Colorblindess sees the Studio UX site



How a person with Deutan Colorblindess sees the Studio UX site



How a person with Protan Colorblindess sees the Studio UX site



How a person with Tritan Colorblindess sees the Studio UX site

Friday, August 12, 2005

Make: Technology on your Time



Make Volume 03


I stumbled across this ‘zine last weekend in Oregon, and felt like it warranted a little online research once I got back.

For anyone who is already a Ready Made fan (like me!), Make (www.makezine.com) has a similar D.I.Y. projects theme, although instead How Tos for home and garden projects, Make, “the first magazine devoted to digital projects, hardware hacks, and DIY inspiration,” is being touted as a Popular Mechanics for the Modern Age.

Perusing their website gives you a taste of what this ‘zine is all about. Their current issue, “Mod your Rod,” contains projects and articles such as “Making a Macswagen: adding a Mac Mini to a VW,” “VCR Cat Feeder (self-explanatory),” “Cheap Shot: Turn a $10 single-use camera into a $20 reusable digital camera.” You get the idea.

It looks like each volume is plenty hefty (Volume 3 is at least 200 pages) and will keep readers busy and interested. There’s even an accompanying blog where people post often and are highlighting their versions of Make projects, or projects they’ve dreamed up all on their own. Some of these include “Do It Yourself Wi Fi Antennas," "Use a Hot Air Popcorn Popper to Roast Coffee," or "How to Replace your I-Pod’s Battery."



DIY Wi Fi Antenna


In this age where electronics are becoming obsolete as soon as they hit the shelves, Make offers a little inspiration and hope that in the future, these items may be brought back to life in some way.

Monday, August 08, 2005

Another search engine?!


Jookster.com is like a community search engine based on Ask Jeeves search technology. Users download a toolbar that allows you to "jook" a site and adds it to a searchable library of pages picked by Jookster users. The founder, Kapenda Thomas, was a software architect at Loudeye. Thomas believes that traditional search returns too many results and as many search companies are trying to filter relevant items to the top, Jookster lets the users highlight what they deem relavent. Not sure if I would stop using Google for Jookster yet, but it's intersting to see how technology companies are putting more emphasis on the community.

Friday, August 05, 2005

Need some color inspiration?

If you’re like me, you find that the step of choosing a color palette for a design you’re working on can take awhile and can leave you stranded in the design process. Often you don’t have the time or luxury of finding inspiration by perusing books, magazines, websites, life, nature. This more organic process is not always realistic.

I’ve compiled some of my favorite resources for color inspiration.

Colour Lovers
http://colourlovers.com/
“Colour Lovers” is very robust resource. They describe their site as “a place to view, rate, and review some lovely colours & palettes.” You can browse top colors and palettes (rated by members on a scale of 1-8), search for colors based on names, numbers, and pantone numbers. There is also a random color & palette generator, in case you want the system to choose a color for you.

Colour Lovers




Color Match
http://www.colormatch.dk/
ColorMatch 5k is a little utility that lets you select any color that you want, and a matching 6-color palette is automatically displayed for you. This handy widget also gives you the HEX colors immediately.





Color Blender
http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/tools/color-blend/
The Color Blender lets you choose two colors from their palette. You can display format values by HEX, RGB, or RGB percentage. After you choose your two colors, you select the number of midpoints (between 1 and 10) you want and a palette is generated blending one color to the other.





Feel free to comment any other favorite color resources you might have!