arts

Zadie Smith, writer extraordinaire, reads a selection from an extraordinary poet.

If you’d like to follow along in print (which always helps me) you can do so here.

[from Coudal]

I really love the idea behind this book, surfaced on design sponge, and can hardly believe that it’s over 100 years old. The concept goes something like this:

• get your friends to sign their name on a page of the book with a thick, inky pen
• fold the paper down the middle of the signature
• admire the symmetrical artistry of a smooshed name

[from design sponge]

I’m presently much more interested in barns, sheds, and cabins than normal now that I’m looking at furnishing my new mountain property. I’m exploring all options on getting the most bang for my buck while maintaining a sense of modern style and fitting into the rustic terrain. That’s why I find this remodeled stable so enticing. While my property has no existing structures like this one, I like some of the natural finishes such as the use of stone in the interior walls, the slate porch; the rustic beams contrast nicely with some of the more modern wood interior finishes and windows.

Is that actually a slate roof as well? Crazy. Notice the uphill block wall which I presume is to protect against avalanches. I wonder what the long piece of timber is that extends right where you’d expect the gutter to be?

Beautiful downstairs interior light from the dining room with a wonderful view. It appears that most of the downstairs is sunken with the only windows being the ones in this photo. I wonder if this is the main entrance to the cabin?

This shows the rest of the downstairs as it links into the kitchen and a door to what appears to be the bathroom.

High ceilings with sizable windows in the bedroom. It appears the door on the right side of the bed is covered over by small sticks to maintain the rougher feel from the outside.

This looks to be the other wall of the bedroom with flush accordion closets.

Related links:

• devanthéry and lamunière architectes

[Via materialicious and Bauweltkartei]

Kind of fun. I grabbed a text file of “A Tale of Two Cities” and put it into Wordle to generate a Word Usage Cloud of the top 75 words.

Jason Fried decided to part with the “Getting Real” presentations he’s been giving for a while and focused on why the details matter and how 37signals thinks about the details of their products. His talk was sprinkled with tons of application demonstrations and interface development experience.

Fried started with a high level discussion on the building Seed 3 was being held in, S. R. Crown Hall, by Mies van der Rohe. This building is a great example of how paying attention to details yields a product beyond the base components. You can feel the details before you even see them. For instance, one of the things that Crown Hall is most well known for is its floating ceiling, something you don’t necessarily catch when you walk through the door - it’s too subtle for that. It’s only upon deeper reflection and analysis that you see the thought behind the design; you notice the gap between the edges of the ceiling and the windows running the entire perimeter of the building. Van der Rohe really wanted a feeling of floating to permeate the space and it does. Light changes moment to moment, altering the entire mood of the interior. The roof is suspended from the building frame above. None of the interior walls or posts are structural.

Also noteworthy, in Crown Hall, is the alignment of all the building materials - the roof tiles line up with the floor tiles, which line up with the building frame and windows. Everything is perfect. Even smaller things, like the sprinkler system, are made to fit within the overall design concept, they’re not afterthoughts.

These observations are what led Fried into discussing the development of software. One of the nice benefits to working in software, rather than building masterworks of architecture, is that you can build and tweak iteratively and quickly at very low cost. For Fried’s software, “building IS designing.”

37signals tends to use pretty low resolution designs. In fact, if it can’t be drawn with a sharpie, they feel there is too much detail. It’s only by building in this way that you end up focusing on actual user experiences with your applications rather than thinking in terms of artsy screens. The products 37signals builds try to think through people actually using them for repetitive workflows. For instance, task entry using Ta-Da Lists is as simple as title -> return -> task -> return -> task …

Writing copy

At 37signals, they consider copy to be part of the design and not just a means of explaining their product. When you write copy, “it has to make sense to read out loud,” says Fried. Explain your features in ways that your audience will understand, not in techno-babble.

“If you wouldn’t say something in conversation, don’t say it in your app.” - Jason Fried, 37signals

Make your app have “photographic memory”

One of the other UI concepts expressed in Fried’s talk was about remembering what your users are doing so that you can make it easier for them to repeat it. User preferences are a horrible way of doing this. It’s much better to look at what your users are doing and have the application be smart enough to guess it the next time.

An example of this in action would be adding tasks to a to-do list. If you have multiple to-do lists, it’s not a good idea to have a default list and then require customers to always move items from that list to other lists. Instead, have the application be mart enough to know which list a task was added to and remember that to suggest the next time the user adds a task. Chances are good that your users are repeating tasks if they’re using your application - they’re in a particular mode and it’s best not to break their concentration.

Time is the new vector of interface design

How you time activities that occur on your site and in your application has an enormous impact on how responsive and intuitive your application feels to users. If a user deletes an item from a list and the object just disappears or the page refreshes the page, this time without the item, it might be difficult for the user to figure out what happened. If you instead, show the deleted item fading out over the course of a quarter second and then the items below it sliding up the list to replace it, you’ve done something more visually intuitive and noteworthy while making the user more comfortable the action they just completed.

Other Jason Fried:

• BusinessPOV Video from June 2008: Jason Fried explaining how his work is like that of a museum curator or a chef with a request to add bananas to his lasagna.
• BusinessPOV Video from April 2007: Jason explains how 37signals builds software with tiny decisions.

[Disclaimer: What you have read in this post is my recollection and my notes from the event. I make no claims to 100% transcription accuracy and if I botched something, I'm happy to fix it - just drop me a comment.]

I’ve always loved this poem and now I’ll have a beat to drop to it.

[via The Elegant Variation]

[click to continue...]

I went to the Seed 3 Conference in Chicago. This is the first in a series of posts about the presentations I saw there.

Carlos Segura is the founder of Chicago-based Segura Inc and runs a whole host of websites and commercial interests centering around his design expertise and passions. At Seed 3, Carlos took the crowd through a history of his businesses and explained the importance of respecting your audience, picking your clients, and doing work you can be proud of.

On seeing things differently

Carlos started out his talk by showing off some pictures of sewer covers. In New York City, he pointed out that the manhole covers are made in China and India. In Los Angeles, he noticed that they also came from India. In Chicago, they were produced in Mexico. These are the sorts of things he believes are important to notice, the details that slip past casual view.

“Communication that doesn’t take a chance, doesn’t stand a chance.” - Carlos Segura

The Segura Inc. businesses

Carlos is involved in a lot of sites/businesses:

• t26 - a type foundry. On t26, font designers showcase and sell their wares. The site was designed to market the type as well as the designer and early on in its history, they used to create music videos to go along with each font, a nifty idea that helped people understand the attitude and feeling that the write fonts could convey.
• 5inch.com - a site dedicated to CD packaging and printing.
  

  “Delivers the delivery vehicle for CDs.” - Carlos Segura

• CarType - a site for collecting design details (logos, emblems, typography, industrial art) of cars
• Segura Inc. - This is the overarching company and contract design firm. Carlos walked the crowd through various design projects such as working with fashion retailers on tags that live beyond purchase, comic book covers that didn’t look like comics, creating topographical pamphlets and brand identity for Rockshox, and working with Corbis to use their photos to tell stories through imaginative croppings and side by side presentation.

Words to work by: What I took away from this presenter

• “Respect for the audience is what will get you work from clients.” Nobody wants to work with a firm that’s “too cool” for their customers. Treat the customers as special and with respect.
• Similarly, “talk to the audience, not the client.” If the client has an issue, tell them “I’m not designing for you.”
• “Build relationships with clients that choose to listen to you.” Life is far too short to work with people that waste your time or make work feel unrewarding.
• “Be unique with what you’re asked to do.” When clients request your work, give them something more than what they were expecting.
• Only produce things that you can be proud of.
• “We create what we think the client needs (not just what they’re asking for).”
• “Cause and effect. The one choice we have the power to make - what we do with our time - is the choice we fail at most frequently. You have to be willing to accept the byproduct of being fired.”

Additional Stuff:

• BusinessPOV video interview of Carlos Segura out in front of the conference

[Disclaimer: What you have read in this post is my recollection and my notes from the event. I make no claims to 100% transcription accuracy and if I botched something, I'm happy to fix it - just drop me a comment.]

A cute short from Hillman Curtis about two friends and an exercise to bring them closer. Does it work?

[Via Coudal Partners]

Imagine standing in a completely vacant Shibuya Station admiring the lines: up, down, left, right. Beautiful. An opportunity that doesn’t exist in the everyday. It has the atmosphere of one of those hidden spaces accessed through Haruki Murakami’s fiction.

Does anyone have an idea of how to take a screenshot of a flash tour like this? I really love some of the frames I’ve been able to create by exploring and I’d like to take a hack at drawing a few later but I don’t know how to capture the image.

Two outstanding pieces of Chilean architecture with some striking similarities.

• Spa Las palmas de Leyda / Cristobal Valenzuela Haeussler - A beautiful Chilean Spa retreat. Natural slatted wood exterior outside of the windows provides privacy while still allowing light. Straight lines, clean, floor to ceiling windows.

  

• House on the road to Farellones / Max Nuñez & Bernardo Valdes - Another Chilean beauty, this one a house. Concrete and glass captures a scenic view of Santiago. I absolutely love this one.