design

Some Things, Week 6, 2025

something falling from the sky

Photo by Yama Bato.

You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism: “Trusted information networks have existed since long before the internet and mass media. These networks are in every town and city, and at their core are real relationships between neighbors—not their online, parasocial simulacra.”

Simulacrum: “a representation or imitation of a person or thing.”

90’s Hip-Hop: A 45 plus minutes mix of Golden Era Classics + Rarities.

Makara Peak Mountain Bike Park Wayfinding: Cool signs.

Ghimli Sans: A font with “a nice ol' boozer vibe.”

Marginalia Search: “Find lost old websites.”

Existential Kool-aid Man.

Dashboards

“every dashboard is a sunk cost / every dashboard is an answer to some long-forgotten question / every dashboard is an invitation to pattern-match the past instead of interrogate the present / every dashboard gives the illusion of correlation / every dashboard dampens your thinking”

Charity Majors

ui.land is a selection of websites, tools, engineers and designers to inspire, learn, and create. I can’t resist a good “list” site.

SUSA, the small conceptual electronic device can perform many of the functions of a smartphone, tablet or portable computer.” I’m dubious of all things AI, but the actual device is pretty neat. Shades of the Light Phone III.

Re-buttonization:

There seems to be this kind of richness of the tactile experience that’s afforded by pushing buttons. They’re not perfect for every situation, but I think increasingly, we’re realizing the merit that the interface offers.

Links for Week 45, 2024

IKEA Catalog from a Near Future

Some design fiction on the " …possible evolutions of home life, consumer trends and needs, and related topics in the categories of domestic life, food, urban life, travel, leisure, and entertainment."

Not Built For This is a 6-part series from 99% Invisible. It explores how climate change is laying bare the vulnerabilities in the American built environment and how communities across the country have been left to bootstrap their own survival.

“I like to describe my job in terms of “The Door Problem”. Are there doors in your game? Can the player open them? Can the player open every door in the game? Or are some doors for decoration? How does the player know the difference?”

The Door Problem /via barnsworthburning.net

airtraveldesign.guide

A resource for air travel designers, policy makers and enthusiasts, that describes the design of artifacts / spaces / systems that impact the passenger experience of air travel.

Some things for week 16 of 2024.

  • Anyone else enjoy looking at the tracking details of a package. Watching an item wend it’s way through a system of warehouses, trucks / trains, and multiple states. Maybe I’m the only shipping infrastructure nerd out here.

  • “And yet, making observations is a good starting point for giving feedback. The trouble arises when we assume that those observations are both the start and the end, that we’re walking along a very short track.” From What you see by Mandy Brown. Can I say how much I appreciate everything changes? Lot’s of thoughtful writing!

  • The website for the restaurant, Madeline’s is just so great. I was thinking the receipt concept would break down with deeper navigation, but nope!

  • Lake Superior should really be considered an inland sea that is “wild, masterful, and dreaded.”

  • Ok, I want this van.

A touchscreen, then, operates as a digital platform where features can be locked or unlocked by the company at will, depending on customers’ rent payments. Physical buttons, on the other hand, can’t be turned into rent. They only serve the customer, so they’re less attractive.

Source: Creative Good: Why car companies (still) ignore customers

Give it the Craigslist test. “If you’re designing a new product or service, give it the Craigslist test — start with low-fidelity options that see if people would love it even if it looked like Craigslist.”

Because red and green are complementary colors opposite one another on the color wheel, they’ve become the default colors for every designer who wants to represent opposites: true and false, high and low, stop and go. Inconveniently, these are also the two colors most likely to be mixed up by people with color vision deficiencies.

It me!

Source: Designing for colorblindness - The Verge