WCBS NYC TV News
CBS in NYC: wcbs TV in New York City: news, topstories,
with non-hideous website design.
October 11, 2006
September 10, 2006
Alt text mugshot
Alt text is great for web pages; but for e-mail,
better would be to default to plaintext.
Message from the nice International Mountain Bicycling Association (IMBA) Subaru VIP Program.
July 14, 2006
Shakespeare @ google: soliloquy search
Comedy, tradedy, romance. The elegant design
of Shakespeare's life work.
Not yet: Browse by or search for work's name Hamlet, character
name Ophelia or search for content text nunnery.
June 20, 2006
GraphPaper / Christopher Fahey
Graph Paper / Christopher Fahey.
Beautiful design, and observations about information architecuture.
Example: full-focus states.
June 9, 2006
Matte black on Autoblogging Friday
Matte black looks great on the new Honda Civic Type-R.
Analysis. Would look good on a new Bangled 5er or
Lexus IS, too, with their superflouos stealth
fighter curves.
Update 2006 Nov:
As show-stopping designs go, none proved more popular
with the paparazzi than a black 575-horsepower Mercedes
-Benz CLS55. This wicked witch was built by a noted
customizer, Matthew Figliola of Ai Design in Tuckahoe, N.Y.
The car’s buffed matte black paint looked like burnished
steel. Why did it work?
Because of the “flop”, said Mr. Foose, who is also host of a
customizing show, “Overhaulin’,” on the Learning Channel.
The flop is the break in light and dark shading across a vehicle’s
character lines.
“When you bring in a matte color, it may have a really beautiful
flop to it,” Mr. Foose explained. “You know, a light side and a dark
side, and your eye can focus on that surface. With all the polished
and reflected surfaces around it, it gives a quality texture.”
Mr. Foose uses matte or flat black surfaces to relieve the
“Christmas ball effect” that he says can overwhelm some of
today’s more extreme designs.
“When you have a full-polished surface, all you are looking at
are reflections,” he said. “When you open the hood of a car, and
you look at the beautiful reflective body forms, you are going
down to a chrome surface on the engine, and you’re looking
at a color right next to it that is all polished. It starts looking
like a Christmas ball next to another Christmas ball next to
another one.”
The danger of dull black finishes, Mr. Foose said, is that when
they are poorly executed “it doesn’t convey quality.”
“It’s kind of like, ‘O.K., we didn’t have enough money to finish
this car, so we just matte-finished it.’ ”
-- SEMA 2006.
April 26, 2006
xplane Visual thinking
Visual thinking and marketing by Xplane.
Charmingly illustrated technology and business process graphics
remind me of Richard Scary's Busyown.
April 24, 2006
Subtraction
Subtraction by NYT designerism and ia by Khoi Vinh.
December 15, 2005
Cool is when you aren't
Hips are about sexuality.
-- Joel Piaskowski, chief designer at the Hyundai Kia Design
and Technical Center in California.
Hips are also about hipness, or youth.
But these judgments are often made by designers and auto executives
who are no longer young. Something may seem hip to them because it
evokes their past; to young people, something may be cool because it
envisions their future.
-- PHIL PATTON, NYT.
December 9, 2005
Khoi Vinh an NYT
Khoi Vinh goes to the NYT.
December 6, 2005
Google maps mania
Google maps mania charts the
mash ups and applications.
November 26, 2005
I-64 exit 11 (MO)
A new exit from I-64 in Saint Charles County, MO.
Click on picture for full size photo pop-up.
GoogleMap of area.
I-64 westbound, Chesterfield, MO.
Missouri River bridge, from Saint Louis County northwest into Saint Charles County.
September 30, 2005
Housing Map
July 29, 2005
bad architecture in Beijing
An investigation of the not-so-subtle bad architecture in Beijing.
July 2, 2005
V&V: Verification, Validation
Verification: testing against specifications.
Validation: testing against operating goals.
June 30, 2005
Single point accountability
Bush believes in what is known in business as single-point
accountability. "He does not want to know that a committee or a
consortium is working together to coordinate a solution," Daniels
says. "He wants one organization, or one person, to have
responsibility; he wants to know who he can call. I can't tell you how
alien this is to the federal government, which is marvelous at evading
it."
To monitor the people or organizations responsible, Bush keeps track
of certain details—ideally, not so many that he becomes a
micro-manager, but enough to keep those he is managing alert. From
9/11 until January of 2002 many officials who had no direct connection
to the war on terror lost contact with Bush. When he began meeting
with them again, he had "a stream of informed questions about the
innards of their departments," Daniels recalls. "He makes it his
business to know a little bit about everything."
Bush knows that following through can require patience. This is new
for him: when he was with the Rangers, and in his father's White
House, he was just learning patience. Though he may still see the
fundamental issues in black and white, he can now wait to achieve his
goals. "He gives things time to work," Rice says. "He understands,
probably better than his advisers, that there is a rhythm to things."
May 22, 2005
dan bricklin
Dan Bricklin: a graybeard of personal computing annotates
conferences and ponders Open Source.
May 21, 2005
baddesigns
baddesigns captures some (what else ?) bad designs.
Mostly consumer products, evaluated more from a usability than
an esthetic perspective.
Example: one tube is shampoo, one is hand lotion. Which one
would you grab as you hurry off to the gym ?
