kuler, from Adobe Labs “helps you explore, create and share color themes for your web pages, design projects and other creative work.” You can use the app on-line or download themes to be imported into CS2 applications. This looks like a very useful too and a promising distraction!
Design
Software Development's Evolution towards Product Design
From Lost Garden comes Software Development’s Evolution towards Product Design a great explanation of how software development should flow, with an excellent, tongue-in-cheek illustration of the entire process.
With a great flourish, I whip out my gold nibbed pen and draw a little diagram on a napkin that explains concisely how modern software development works. In the grand finale, I circle one of the little scribbles buried deep in the entire convoluted process and proudly proclaim “And that is what I do!”.
Naked & Angry
The ugliness that is World Cup design
Erik Spiekermann, (author of Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works) takes to task the designer’s and executives involved in branding this year’s World Cup, criticizing the mascot and logo and in general beautifully stating the problems with design by committee: “It’s like designing a joke, and you can’t design a joke. I think the original design assignment must have been all over the place. With all the things that had to be avoided and then all the things they wanted included, it was impossible to come up with something good.”
Mr. Spiekermann provides some interesting illumination concerning Germany’s internal view of its external image, and how it likely played a huge part in many of the choices.
Instead of harnessing this tremendous opportunity to shine on the world stage, Deutschland stumbled into mediocrity. Thus we are presented with a boring lion and a silly logo.
MagicTracer Upgrade
Sywan, one of the two folks working on MagicTracer just dropped me a note that they have a new version out. It looks like a great tool, made even better with this 1.5 release. Coincidentally, Sarah and I were talking the other day about the availability of software that will take a raster image and automagically convert it to vector/paths for Illustrator. Sadly it isn’t available on OS X, so neither of us will be able to use it. Sigh.
It still looks neat though.