Meiko - Leave The Lights On (animated video)

Meiko enlisted artist Stephen Tolfrey to create the haunting cartoon version of “Leave the Lights On.” 

Click here for all music I've posted.. 

InstaCube Puts Instagram Pics on Your Nightstand

InstaCube Puts Instagram Pics on Your Nightstand
"We’ve uncovered a number of creative ways to display Instagram photos, but none is perhaps as ideal as Instacube, an Internet-connected digital device that displays your Instagram photos at 3x their smartphone screen size..."  Read more >

QuickBites Wed Aug 22, 2012

Space >> 

NASA Mohawk Guy Bobak Ferdowsi on Sci-Fi, Legos and Becoming a Meme
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Design >>

"Forget Wired. We Want to Work at Shwood"

DIY business in Portland 

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Fun >>
5 reasons to play D&D

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Movies >>
A Sneak Peek of The Disney Pixar Animated Short Partysaurus Rex
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QuickBites 1 - Tuesday

Cool! >>

This Super Dog’s Parkour Skills are Off the Charts

The video above, uploaded last month, is a remix of his insane tricks. Or as Gawker put it in a headline, it demonstrates how “this dog is better at park our than most humans are at anything.”

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Space >>
5 reasons to be excited about Curiosity

NASA’s newest adventure to Mars has begun! The Mars Science Laboratory mission delivered the Curiosity rover to Gale Crater..
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Design >>

So You Want To Be A Designer: Top 5 List

Called an interface guru by publications like Wired and Fast Company, Aza is the co-founder of Massive Health, and was until recently Creative Lead for Firefox. Previously, he was a founding member of Mozilla Labs.

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How-To >>

Learn to Love Annoying People

Unfriendly people... Bad drivers... Incompetent customer service reps... These are a few of my least favorite things. In fact, they’re downright annoying.
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Super Furry Animals - It's Not The End of the World? (music video)

Saw this video while attending the big computer graphics conference SIGGRAPH. Enjoy.



Click here for all music I've posted.. 

Elevator Usability FAIL

After months of construction the downstairs lobby in my office building is done. They've gone with a slick minimalist style, marble and glass. First day it's open I go to use the elevators, there’s four of them. I hit "up", another person hits "down". An elevator shows up, dings, and we are confronted with this:

 It appears the light is saying "Hi, I'm here", but refuses to tell us which way it's going. The stranger and I look at each other with quizzical looks on our faces. We both decide to take a chance and get on. Elevator starts going up, the stranger sighs. A few days later, several people are waiting for the elevator, the elevator shows up, it dings, and then it looks like this:

Ah.. a red light and a white light. So, red is down (hell?) and white is up (heaven?). A person would have to use the elevators more than once for it to be blatantly obvious what was going on. Luckily on my second use, the red light appeared. So, in their effort to be slick and minimalist they violated simple usability rules. They haven't followed the convention of arrows, something that people are used to. You have to use the elevator more than once for it to dawn on you that white means up and red means down. The first time you see the light, there's no context. I've been observing people's reactions to this high use bank of elevators and as expected there's a ton of confusion and people getting on the wrong elevators. With an elevator there should be zero learning curve.

"You've gotta be willing to make a whole lot of crap"

Had a conversation with a very talented, successful musician/composer on the west coast once. He wrote scores for movies and TV shows. Played live with other musicians. Was able to comfortably support a large family. This is not an easy feat, usually with music it's feast or famine, poor or famous. I asked him how he did it. He said "you've gotta be willing to make a whole lot of crap first. I'm talking years and years of terrible stuff. It's not easy, you have to be pretty courageous to put a lot of bad material out there. You can't get good just sitting around thinking and planning things, you have to do it. You can't be too 'precious' about your work." This is particularly hard for the perfectionists out there. We want to make a 'Star Wars' right out of the gate. As a person who often get's stricken by paralysis by analysis, I can definitely relate. Think about how creative kids are. When we're kids we're kind of fearless. We don't care about producing crap or what people think of us. As we get older we start picking up all of this baggage and all of these fears.. what if I fail? I'll feel so bad. what will people think? This inhibits our natural creativity. Kids don't think like that, they create with reckless abandon. In order to be creative we have to reclaim our childlike nature.

5 Sketching Secrets of Leonardo Da Vinci

You can improve your sketching and paper prototyping by adopting some of the methods used by Leonardo da Vinci in his sketch books.

Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Kitchen Nightmare”

The strange tale of Leonardo’s “Kitchen Nightmare” plays out like a Shakespearean “comedy of errors” where a visionary designer’s experiments all work perfectly to extremely disastrous results. Brian Sullivan of Boxes and Arrows writes how Leonardo's story offers three lessons for designers.