New News

Tue 26 Mar 200208:29 PM

More newspaper stuff: Ad Age recounts the rumors around the top-secret redesign of the Wall Street Journal. Set to launch on 09 Apr, this will be the first major overhaul of the print edition since 1941. Wow. One week later, New York gets a new daily in the form of The New York Sun.

Which Way Is Up

Mon 25 Mar 200208:57 PM

The New York Times has an article about Chinese-language newspapers changing their reading orientation from vertical to horizontal. It’s a fascinating design issue involving fundamentals of legibility, culture, and politics.

Q&A UI

Fri 22 Mar 200207:17 PM

De-construct, a UK Web design shop that rose from the ashes of Deepend UK, has an ingenious Web site that plays on the firm’s name in a super-smart way: rather than explicitly cataloging the site’s contents in the form of a navigation (which is what 99% of sites do), they offer a dead-simple Q&A prompt. With each keystroke, the interface auto-completes your typing with possible terms inside its “library.” Totally brilliant. It makes me a little jealous too that they have such a great site — looking at their story, I realized that they began life at the same time as Behavior.

Game Face

Sat 16 Mar 200210:23 AM

Macromedia Flash-based applications are the next wave, the closest realization of Java’s “write once, run anywhere” promise we’ll see before George W. Bush finishes his one-term presidency. Ultimate Flash Face, a playful toolkit of facial parts, is an impressive feat and it bowled me over, but it’s still just the tip of the iceberg of what we’ll soon see with the release of Flash MX.

Grab Bag of Links

Wed 13 Mar 200210:20 PM

Thrillustrations

Mon 11 Mar 200209:34 PM

Penney Wise, Pound Stylish

Thu 7 Mar 200210:14 PM

Wow, terrific way-back zone over at ExcitementMachine.org, where they’ve scanned in an entire J.C. Penney catalog from 1980.

See the World

Sat 23 Feb 200206:32 PM

David Levine: “This is a virtual online gallery I’ve created to display and share the best items in my collection of 1920s and 1930s travel-related ephemera.” There’s some really beautiful stuff available here, including terrific pieces from masters such as Herbert Matter and Piet Zwart. This one is probably my favorite.

Life Revisited

Wed 13 Feb 200207:58 PM

This is really nice: all the Life Magazine covers from 1936 through 1972, databased and searchable. I wish every magazine would use the Web in this way with its archives.