Simian Design

These are my delicious links for December 7th:

• RCA student radically improves the UK plug – Brilliant industrial design example here.

These are my delicious links for December 2nd:

• Decandence, Sleaze and Excess; all in one shoe. – the Jeffery-West shoe collection—the work of childhood friends Mark Jeffery and Guy West—fall somewhere between a swanky gentlemen's club and Sweeney Todd's closet. Blood-red leather linings and handmade soles, inscribed with "Decadence, Sleaze and Excess,“ ooze with the kind of luxe horror that arguably only Brits can successfully pull off.
• The Unearthly Beauty of Antelope Canyon – The Navajo call it ‘the place where water runs through rocks’ and that is literally true. One of the most unearthly places on the planet, take a look at the astounding Antelope Canyon.
  The peculiar formation of a slot canyon can make for an eerie experience and certainly the Antelope Canyon, on the lands of the LeChee people of the Navajo Nation is one of the stranger places you might choose to visit if your budget doesn’t quite run to a space shuttle. The shuttle, though, never lands on alien planets – you can get the experience for very little here on the third rock from the sun. And it is the sun that makes this canyon extra special.
• Sietch Nevada – I like this. MATSYS took the idea of a Sietch from Dune, and created this project, Sietch Nevada, that projects waterbanking as the fundamental factor in future urban infrastructure in the American Southwest. Sietch Nevada is an urban prototype that makes the storage, use, and collection of water essential to the form and performance of urban life. Inverting the stereotypical Southwest urban patterns of dispersed programs open to the sky, the Sietch is a dense, underground community.
• Spiral Staircases are cool. – I love spiral staircases. They easily are the focal point of a room, presenting graceful lines to the inside of a house. And they make a room feel ultra-important. Here are a collection of famous and fantastic staircases.

These are my delicious links for August 4th:

• Flip Flop Fly Ball – Some amazing infographics on Baseball.
• 10 Amazing Cold War Propaganda Posters – The Cold War lasted from the end of World War II right up to the early 1990s, although the Soviet Union and the USA never actually engaged in direct battle. Instead, the Cold War was expressed through weapons development (the nuclear arms race), technological development (the space race), espionage and propaganda.

  Western democratic states churned out huge amounts of propaganda material throughout the First and Second World Wars, but practically decommissioned their propaganda machines post 1945. This is why most of the posters that we explore below have emerged from the Soviet Union or independent political activist groups, and not the West.

• Design Observer – The Design Observer redesigns. Nice, clean, much larger scope now. Crisp and 'newspapery'.

These are my delicious links for July 29th through July 31st:

• Feral Homes – James Griffioen has a haunting collection of photos of homes and buildings being overtaken by vegetation in Detroit. I can't imagine walking the streets with these buildings, must be surreal.
• Photos of Chicago from the top of a Crane. – Ken Derry, crane operator for McHugh, has taken some amazing pictures of the Trump Tower during its construction.
• 202 Star Wars T-Shirts – A grand list of 202 Star Wars Shirts. Not ranked, just a missive listing.
• I'm pretty sure I stopped growing up in my teens and have been faking ever since. – One of the best XKCD's I've seen in a while.

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

• Rhonda Forever 2003-2009 – The hands on the screen belong to James Paterson. He is using "Rhonda", a 3D drawing tool developed by Amit Pitaru circa 2003.

  The first half of the video shows James doing a drawing start to finish. In the second part James is cycling through various previous drawings, created between 2004 and 2005.

  For the last several years Rhonda has been shown in galleries, museums, festivals and conferences. We are excited to finally release this video online (about time!).

• Illustrations of characters from The Wire –
• Everest revealed from above in British balloonist's breathtaking … – This awe-inspiring photograph captures the majesty of Mount Everest as you've never seen it before – from more than a mile above.
  The spectacular panorama shows the breathtaking landscape of the Himalayas from six miles above sea level.
  It was shot by an intrepid British photographer wearing breathing apparatus in -56C temperatures 36,000 feet up.
  It is believed to be the highest panoramic picture taken by hand from a balloon, and was described by mountaineer Reinhold Messner as the 'best snap on earth'.

  Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1201090/Everest-revealed-British-balloonists-breathtaking-panoramic-shot-worlds-highest-peaks.html#ixzz0MBRd2DU7

• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error

These are my delicious links for July 13th through July 15th:

• 101 Muppets of Sesame Street – A giant illustration of 101 Muppets. Mouse over them to learn more about some of the lesser-known ones. Done in celebration of their 40th anniversary.
• Ways to trick your brain. –
• light-test.com – When a Photographer wants to test the lighting, often an assistant will step in. These are those shots.
• Digg digs into IE6 usage. – Basically, IE6 users are forced to use IE6 at work. Giving them a message saying, “Hey! Upgrade!” in this case is not only pointless; it’s sadistic.

These are my delicious links for July 8th:

• SlickMap CSS – SlickMap CSS is a simple stylesheet for displaying finished sitemaps directly from HTML unordered list navigation. It’s suitable for most web sites – accommodating up to three levels of page navigation and additional utility links – and can easily be customized to meet your own individual needs, branding, or style preferences.

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.