September 2005

This is just too good.

Spent a big part of today messing with Buzztracker quarterly cleaning.

The databases usually fill up within 3 months time. I always put it off until the last minute because it's such a slow, tedious process -- this cleaning up of old data, archiving, and making sure everything comes out squeaky clean.

Recently I ran into two pseudo misunderstandings (or, perhaps retrofittings) of American brands brought to Japan:

The Guardian redesigns and Design Observer has a nice write-up. I'm also impressed with the depth of information the editor's blog goes into. And finally, there's a short but interesting video with Mark Porter discussing his rationale for design and format choices.

Onlife is a very cool, simple little OS X app that tracks how you use applications and what you spend your time doing in those apps. It's still in its infancy so here's to hoping that they expand the applications supported in the near future (currently only Safari, Textedit, Mail, iChat, iTunes and FireFox are supported). Which is a shame because I use Camino and VooDooPad for most of my browsing and writing.
(via information aesthetics)

If the next book project I work on requires only a couple of copies, has insanely weighty content, and isn't on a tight schedule then I'm calling up someone from The Society of Bookbinders. This is some breathtaking bookmaking.

Akiko Ita is Japanese.

Pierre Javelle is French.

Together they make some fun, surreal, beautiful photographs.

Square format. Shallow depths of field. People on pastries. Mmm.

(Nice clean flash site too.)

Some impressive and clean architectural specimens By William Carpenter over at Lightroom.

Wired has a great article on Steven Sacks, the guy spearheading digital art as sellable and gallery safe. He heads up Bitforms, a great NYC based gallery you should check out if you are into this sort of media. Now, if only they had some of their archived prints (i.e., Casey Reas) on display too.

Colleen at Bookslut gives Chin Music Press, Kuhaku and Buzztracker one heck of a writeup. Go check it out along with the rest of their great articles.

The Design Observer has an absolutely amazing listing of both general and design related relief efforts going on for the Katrina victims. It also looks like they're offering a spot in their design studio, Winterhouse, for a young displaced designer.

For the first time to my knowledge, Buzztracker was podcasted. A calm and collected David Warlick shares his kind thoughts on Buzztracker and the implications for teaching using these sorts of tools. Thanks David!

(The Buzztracker bit is towards the end of the Podcast).

A fairly surreal video showing that good design -- camouflage, big gooey arms -- can be useful in the most unlikely ways.

The forums over at Edward Tufte's site are impressive not only because of the seriousness of discussion but also because of the sheer length these discussions go on for.

As Buzztracker is now (I think more accurately) showing -- things are not good in New Orleans. A radio interview with the Mayor.

Making some changes to the way US news stories are incorperated into Buzztracker results. This should hopefully account for the bizarre lack of international news regarding the recent and ongoing New Orleans events.

The New York Times has a nice interactive piece putting into perspective the levee system, the location of the Mississippi river, Lake Pontchartrain and what parts of the city are actually flooded.