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For those that really miss typewriters but can’t live without modern technology.
Posts from the ‘Design’ Category
Aug 22
The History And Artistic De-Evolution of Patent Drawings
Fascinating look at the evolution of patent drawings.
“There’s such a focus on cost-cutting in so many industries now — pride of your work goes out the window for the benefit of reducing costs. There’s a lot of emphasis on, ‘Let’s save money on the drawings,’” Kevin Prince, author of The Art of the Patent and a registered patent agent, told Wired. “It’s probably just a cultural change. Back then, getting a patent was really like, ‘Wow.’ You wanted it to represent you and represent you very well. You had to be an artist to do the patent drawings back then, undoubtedly.”
The History And Artistic De-Evolution of Patent Drawings | Gadget Lab | Wired.com.
Mijn palet van Kampen (My palette of Kampen)
A very nice video of paintings mixing in with the Dutch landscape.
Clients From Hell Video
Freelancers the world over, whether you are a web designer or not, this video is all too familiar.
Lines On A Solo Cup Explained
I can’t say I have given this this a lot of thought before, but it’s interesting to know what those lines are on Solo cups. They are THE cups of parties the world over, including at my office. While they explain lines for beer, wine and liquor, they don’t quite explain the upper three lines.
A Look At The Future (1961)
I love looking back in hindsight at supposed “peaks” into the future and seeing how right or wrong they would turn out to be. Not everyone could be Arthur C. Clark in terms of accuracy. Here’s a movie from Bell Labs in 1961 and the technology they were working on at the time.
MIT Creates Amazing UI From Levitating Orbs
They say this could be the future of user interface. Either way, it’s pretty darn cool.
MIT Creates Amazing UI From Levitating Orbs | Co.Design: business + innovation + design.
Parking & Horrid Urban Planning
There are few things I hate in life more than parking. It brings out our primal instinct. Some people fight for a parking space more fiercely than lions for a piece of red meat. But besides that, parking is a huge waste of space and a clear example of bad urban planning in most cases.
Here is an example of how bad it’s become in today’s Wall Street Journal:
Along the way, cities developed zoning formulas to determine the number of parking spaces needed—typically, between six and 10 spaces per 1,000 square feet of floor space. Mr. Ben-Joseph argues—as did Donald Shoup in “The High Cost of Free Parking” (2005)—that these ratios created an enormous oversupply of parking, designed to accommodate only two or three days of maximum use per year, like Black Friday. This seemingly minor miscalculation has had a dramatic effect on urban environments. In some U.S. cities, such as Little Rock, Ark., surface lots cover nearly a third of the land area. Mr. Ben-Joseph estimates that there are 500 million surface-lot parking spaces in the U.S., covering more than 3,590 square miles, a landmass larger than Puerto Rico.
The issue of parking has become a bit of a meme lately and I welcome it. Hopefully it awakens cities to reconsider how they develop their urban centers.
via Book Review: Rethinking a Lot – WSJ.com.
More reading:
- Paved, but Still Alive (New York Times)
- Text to Driver: That’s My Space (New York Times)
New York City’s Hidden Subway Station
You often hear people say “they don’t make ‘em like they used to”. While it may be cliche to say, it is sometimes true since it “feels” that there was once upon a time when people made things with more care and thought given for aesthetics. The
Birth of a Book
A nice little film on the process of creating of books. With all the trouble printed media has had over the past 10 years, I still believe that the book will endure somehow. After all, Captain Picard himself reads books in the 24th century.
