Why Stylesheet Abstraction Matters (just realized that I didn’t post a link to the previous quote by Chris Eppstein) – interesting information for those who design and develop with CSS.
“CSS is the weakest link in the web developers toolbox. The problem goes deeper than CSS’s lack of variables. Unlike the “function” in programming, CSS has no fundamental building block.”
Chris Eppstein, the author of Compass writes up a solid argument for the need of abstraction in stylesheets. I’ve been toying around with Compass and the Sass language over the past few weeks and things look very promising.
“The content that sits inside of our design framework is often the final arbiter of success, yet we sometimes diminish its importance and separate ourselves from it. The more we separate our design activities from content development, the greater the risk of design failure.”
Christopher Detzi writes about The Content Conundrum, a very nice and well thought out article covering a problem every web designer must face
The Human Centered Design Toolkit was created by IDEO and the Gates foundation as a free open-source toolkit to assist organizations providing services for communities in need.
The Dexo UX design conference survey might help you get an idea of what that conference you plan on attending will be about. I can’t verify the accuracy of the data, but it looks like it has potential to be an interesting and potentially helpful resource.
“No good book or good thing of any kind shows it best face at first. No, the most common quality in a true work of art that has excellence and depth, is that at first sight it produces a certain disappointment.”
If we can all agree that we like things that are beautiful, we should also agree that we should try to make things beautiful. But what does that even mean?
An interesting post from PK at BibliOdyssey with pictures from Stammbücher or “Friend’s Books.” An interesting custom from the 17th century where a person would carry a book with them containing sentimental inscriptions, quotes, and memories from one’s friends. PK calls it: Facebook in the 1750’s
The Crisis of Credit by Johnathon Jarvis describes the source of our economic situation with a great use of audio, animation, and a clever voice over script.
The article skimmer interface from NTY is a great example of an alternative way to browse a newspaper. All I’ve ever done is “skim” the newspaper, so this seems like the NYT edition for me. (via Daring Fireball)
Andy puts together another article on the gestalt design principles. In this one, he takes on similarity, proposing that while similar, all types of similarity are not equal.
The Art Law Blog may provide some interesting background reading to help understand the legal complexities of copyright infringement, along with precedent, case studies, and current issues.
A few days ago, Cameron posted an interesting quote and poster about stealing inspiration from anywhere you can find it.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out for Shepard Fairey, the street artist whose fantastic Russian constructivist inspired poster design became the iconic symbol of Obam’s historic 2008 candidacy for president. Fairey admits that he found the source image on a Google image search, but never revealed or received permission to use the image. It looks like the source image has been found , and it is a copyrighted Associated Press photo taken by Mannie Garcia where Obama was having lunch with actor George Clooney.
Who knows how this will play out, perhaps the AP will grant him retroactive permissions, or there may be copyright infringement issues and money at stake (especially considering how Fairey may have profited considerably off this image).
At first this might not seem like a big deal, everyone’s done a Google images search for some inspiration. It is however, the responsibility of the artist to credit and obtain permission when the source is identifiable and potential legal issues may ensue.
Don’t stop looking for inspiration, but don ‘t steal, it’s not hard to ask permission and even easier to give credit where credit is due.
I came across this set of articles through a twitter post by Patrick King
Update: I missed this the first time—the photographer’s web site now states that he was contacted by the Fairey’s gallery a few days ago (Jan 21, 2009) who acknowledged that the photo was the basis for the poster design.
