Simian Design

These are my delicious links for June 30th through July 1st:

• Ceiling Porn - These are just some stunning photos of some amazing ceilings. Yup, ceilings.
• Bursting Soap Bubbles. - Amazing photos of bubbles being popped, mid-pop. Fantastic timing and speed on these photos.

These are my delicious links for June 30th:

• Get the Hint Stickies - Fantastic sticky notes. Helpful packs of themed adhesive notes, with 5 different pads in each pack.

These are my delicious links for June 27th:

• Sex Issue: Type Tart Cards - Tart cards are the means by which many London prostitutes advertise their services. Step into almost any central London phone box and you can contemplate up to 80 cards inviting you to be tied, teased, spanked or massaged.

  n conjunction with St Bride Library and Type, we asked designers – from students to superstars – to find the tart hiding in every type and create their own graphic numbers. Along with a selection in the magazine, all 450 cards can be viewed here.

These are my delicious links for June 24th through June 26th:

• Touched by an Angel - The story of how the Farah Fawcett poster came to be.

  "…t may be the most famous pinup poster of all time. Farrah Fawcett's smile is a row of impossibly white teeth so perfectly aligned they look machine-made, her hair a windblown blond tangle that swallows her slender hand.
  Then there is her nipple: a salacious nub straining against the nylon of her red one-piece. Its appearance marked the advent of "nippling." Whenever a model applies ice to her breast before a photo shoot, she's paying homage to Farrah….."

• The Bug, the Worm and the Death Star - As professionals, we prefer logo, logotype, mark, symbol, wordmark, icon, visual identity or signature. With this many choices it is no wonder others have settled on the irreverent bug. Incidentally, a long-time friend in Mumbai told me of some of the general names for logo in India include pintu (pint sized), chintu (tiny), dabboo (fat) and kaka (small one). (But depending on the specific region, language and even community in India, kaka also can mean poo-poo, as elsewhere. I guess context is everything, when calling a logo kaka in India.)

  But whether we designed it, manage it, or just live with it, having a name for the logo appears to fulfill some human need. Some companies provide a formal name, such as The Monogram (GE). Here are a few logos and their officially sanctioned names:

• How many colors? Wrong. - Richard Wiseman comes one of the best color optical illusions I have ever seen.
• Fun with a spray-gun, a field and perspective. - Nice project, doing POV Perspective on a field, the photos are quite nice.
• Volcano from Space; or how I would kill a man to stay in the ISS for a bit. - A chance recording by astronauts on the International Space Station has captured the moment a volcano explosively erupted, sending massive shockwaves through the atmosphere.
• 10 Ways to Instantly Increase Your jQuery Performance - Nettuts+ -

These are my delicious links for June 23rd through June 24th:

• Soviet Russian Album Covers - Amazing Hair Metal Records from the USSR. Fantastic stuff here.
• 10 Most Fascinating Mazes - The only real maze I've ever gone through is the one at Luray Caverns, and it was easy, yet I still got lost. I can't imagine the fun of a real large, actually hard maze. That'd be a fun afternoon.
• The Most Terrifying Mountain Bike Trail On Earth - The Emerald Isle’s legendary Cliffs of Mohan are just insane. INSANE. And these guys rode their bikes on them.
• Pentagram takes on Cigarette Marketing. - …"Marlboro filtered cigarettes can cause lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema, and may complicate pregnancy. Quitting smoking now greatly reduces serious health risks. Smoking by pregnant women may result in fetal injury, premature birth. Cigarette smoke contains carbon monoxide…BUT WHO CARES.
• The Creation of a Russian Terminator. - Brilliant series of shots showing how the Russians are creating an army of Arnold Terminators. Just brilliant.
• Visual Decision Making - Another body of web user experience research shows that website users are powerfully influenced by aesthetics, and that positive perceptions of order, beauty, novelty, and creativity increase the user’s confidence in a site’s trustworthiness and usability. Recent design writing and interface research illustrate how visual design and user research can work together to create better user experiences on the web: experiences that balance the practicalities of navigation with aesthetic interfaces that delight the eye and brain.

  In short: there’s lots of evidence that beauty enhances usability.

These are my delicious links for June 22nd:

• Extraordinarily Weird But Beautiful Flowers | Scienceray - The world is full of weird and wonderful flowers that sometimes look so strange that we find it difficult to imagine them actually growing in the wild. Some of these are unbelievably odd.

  My personal favorite here is the Bolivian Fuschia.

These are my delicious links for June 18th through June 19th:

• Beck's Record Club. Beck covers an entire album in a day… - Beck ropes in various musician friends to record an entire album in a day. For the purposes of scrappy immediacy, nobody will rehearse or arrange anything beforehand.

  After that day of furious recording, Beck will slowly let the record out into the world via his website (as well as the websites of the other musicians involved), uploading a new song once a week. He'll kick this party off with The Velvet Underground and Nico.

• YUI 3 - The YUI JavaScript Library is going to version 3 (beta) hopefully this week. In an effort to make the library as flexible as possible, YUI 3 introduces an all new plugin architecture that allows you to add your own functionality to nodes and widgets.
• All the Small Icons You'll Ever Need - A large collection of small icons that should fit most of your design needs.

These are my delicious links for June 17th:

• TomTom, portable GPS car navigation systems - Original Homer Simpson voice - Wow. brilliant for TomTom, have Homer be your guide. I want a TomTom now.

These are my delicious links for June 16th:

• Microbe Wakes Up After 120,000 Years - Forgetting the lessons of Jurrasic Park, scientists have "awaken" a strain of bacteria called Hermeniimonas glacei from a 120,000-year slumber trapped beneath a block of ice. What could go wrong?

  "We don't know what state they were in," said study team member Jean Brenchley of Pennsylvania State University. "They could've been dormant, or they could've been slowly metabolizing, but we don't know for sure."

• The Treepe; a tent, a castle, a trampoline, a swing. - The Treepee® is an exciting new product that combines the timeless appeal of a tree house with the excitement of aerial suspension and a trampoline to create a whole world of possibilities.

  Zipped safely inside, standing Treepee® riders, once they get their balance, can experience a surfing/snowboarding sensation without any worries of falling. The less adventurous can simply ‘hang out’ with their friends in their own private space away from mum and dad.

These are my delicious links for June 10th:

• Ames Window - Fantastic optical illusion. It really messed with my head.