This Is Locomotion - Design, Code, and News

Via: A Continuous Lean

This week I traveled to London to take in one of the oldest and most historic cities in Europe. Already I feel as though London has significantly broadened my design sensibilities through the visual appreciation of both art and architecture. Seeing good design on such a scale has changed my perception on how design can be applied to every day life and sadly, in North America is often missed. Later this week I plan to investigate the Design Museum which, has a fabulous exhibit titled Less is More — The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams.

As lead designer at Braun, the German consumer electronics manufacturer, Dieter Rams emerged as one of the most influential industrial designers of the late 20th century by defining an elegant, legible, yet rigorous visual language for its products. During his tenure at Braun he defined design principles that have become their mantra and have been appreciated by designers around the world in every medium.

Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles of good design:
Good design is innovative.
Good design makes a product useful.
Good design is aesthetic.
Good design makes a product understandable.
Good design is unobtrusive.
Good design is honest.
Good design is long-lasting.
Good design is thorough down to the last detail.
Good design is environmentally friendly.
Good design is as little design as possible.

The following is a excerpt from a conversation between Deyan Sudjic, Director of the Design Museum in London and Dieter Rams.

Dieter Rams in conversation with Deyan Sudjic.

A collection of photographic work I did in the UK last week.

Stuart Bowness heading out into the surf. Photo by Al Belote – User Experience Designer

This month is about to bring some interesting changes at Simple Station as I am heading to London for the month of November, followed by an extended business trip to Boston and possibly New York until the middle of January. Before leaving I took one last opportunity to grab my surfboard and head out to Jordan River. The waves were beautiful and I will miss the west-coast, but opportunities in London and on the east-coast beckon. New frontiers await.

Our client work will continue as normal as the rest of the Simple Station team remains in Victoria and I will still be working and accessible via email / skype / gchat / twitter.

love this drop-cap from Jessica Hische who recently started a blog that features a different drop cap every day. While I can’t say I would use every single one of them I do have my favorites and the letter “I” is certainly one of them. Her decorative style of typography and illustration is very refreshing and I can’t wait to see the entire series in full.

It has now been almost exactly a full month since my last blog post and the truth of the matter is simply that the gears have been majorly turning at Simple Station. We have been preparing a new open source product that is now nearing the final stages of completion and we have been buried in preparing the marketing, documentation, legalese, and branding for the product. The good news is that the project is scheduled (finally) for completion around the middle of November, but has experience delays because… well… we have never launched an open source project this big and we want to make sure we’ve crossed all our T’s and dotter our I’s.

The process of getting a project ready for prime time and an open-source launch has been an interesting one as there are so many factors involved in an initial release I just had not considered. Take for example the question of licensing. When you are considering to launch an open source product you have to choose a license, but the question is which one to choose. Do you choose the GPL, the LGPL, MIT, or BSD license? Or perhaps do you try to do something where you might retain a little more control? Reading through everything and getting a thorough grasp of what the terms of each license would mean for a project is a fairly major task as it has long reaching implications. Outside of licensing there is of course developer documentation (which is HUGE), installation instructions, screencasts, marketing copy, branding & design, public promotion, search engine optimization, creating community support forums, setting up public GIT repositories, and project hosting to name but a few. Through this process I have gained so much respect and admiration for open-source projects like WordPress or Drupal as it certainly takes a huge amount of dedicated effort on behalf of the maintainers to even get to lift-off… let alone maintain and guide a community.

19 or so more days till launch…

Novel typography for a children’s book where every beastie is crafted in type. Fantastic!

This weekend I sat down with a good friend to watch Signatures by Sweetgrass Productions which has just been released this week. The film features a beautiful series of tantalizing visuals of skiing and snowboarding in remote regions of Japan that just left me in awe of Japan’s natural beauty. While viewing this cinematic original I discovered noboarding and snow surfing which are two sports that were previously unknown to me. What got me excited about both of these sports was just how much they likened themselves to surfing and took the experience of snow sports back to its more rustic roots by freeing the artist (the snowboarder) to be more in harmony with the medium (the snow) by doing away with the bindings that normally keep the experience constrained. Also, by shaping the board to carve the way a surfboard does the athlete is then left to rely supremely on balance and positioning which, inevitably bring him closer to Mother Nature.

Any surfer recognizes the value in a well carved board and although beginners may start on boards that are designed at factories most surfers worth their salt turn to hand crafted boards as they recognize the value in having a board perfectly customized for their height, weight and style. From a design perspective I’ve become completely ecstatic whenever I see a move in any industry away from mass produced design and towards a more handcrafted approach. Watching the artisans at work in this movie as they perfect the lines of their boards is as evocative as watching the snowboarders they equip aesthetically carve powder on the wintery slopes of Japan.

I just came across one of the best critiques I’ve ever read on how visual design, messaging and focus affect website usability. The article takes an in depth look at the usability issues surrounding Apple’s and Microsoft’s websites and highlights the importance of focusing a company in one direction especially when there are many departments contributing to content, marketing and product development. A great read cover to cover.

Thom Yorke, “Harrowdown Hill” from Bent Image Lab.

Dubbed Smallgantics, the technique in the video above takes footage of large objects (rivers, factories, city skylines) and makes them appear as though they are actually miniatures. In “Harrowdown Hill,” the videographer used aerial footage from the pacific north west to be miniaturized using Smallgantics.

The process involves splitting the footage up into several vertical planes that move back over the perceived z-axis, or into the image along its perceived depth. These planes are then affected with varying degrees of blur to simulate a shallow depth of field. If done right, the amount of blur increases smoothly as it moves along the planes of the image. Next, these levels of blur are animated to simulate a change in focus or to compensate for the forward movement of the camera.