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.

They Didn’t Just Want to Build a Housing Shelter. They Wanted to Shift Public Perception:

Changing the way the public perceives shelters informed the design. From the nearby highway, the first glimpse you get of the structure includes an impressive mural by Australian artist Guido van Helten stretched across its 3,000-square-foot facade. A passerby might think this is an art museum, a shop, or possibly a school.

Why The Tokyo Metro Plays Bird Whistles.

In Loving Memory of Square Checkbox.

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

I think that if you want to know how something is made, you should look for the grids. They are the ever-present, behind-the-scenes structure of our cities, our machines, our homes, and our lives. You’ll find the grid in the artist’s studio, in the patterns of the textile weaver’s pattern book, in the architect’s floor plan sketches, in the engineer’s CAD software; even the monospaced fonts that programmers use fit to the grid.

Source: GRID WORLD by Alexander Miller