Design

UPDATE: IDEO’s Method Cards, a terrific design tool that I mention in AWNM, are now available online apparently no longer available online. Just buy them, you cheapskate! (HT: Avi Solomon)

Here’s Obama’s speech today as a Wordle “word cloud,” which give greater prominence to words that appear frequently in a text.

(Via PSFK) 

David Airey at LogoDesignLove has a fascinating post about the Barack Obama campaign logos that didn’t make the final cut. (An example is below.) Airey also points to an interesting interview with graphic guru, Sol Sender, about how the winning logo came to be. 

Over at Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow (BTW, have you picked up his book, Little Brother? It’s the perfect gift for any smart, tech-savvy teen) points to the work of Berlin artist Andreas Nicholas Fischer, who has rendered financial charts as wooden sculptures.Below is a piece, fashioned from more than 150 laser-cut wood polygons, in which […]

Did we use an old Apple bag to brine our Thanksgiving turkey? Damn right we did.

In an impressively audacious statement, researchers at the University of Hertfordshire have announced that they have created “the world’s most relaxing room.” The space is bathed in green light, which apparently helps deliver those tantalizing bursts of dopamine to our brains. But taken as a whole, the room’s design elements seem to mimic the experience of, uh, […]

Joe Gebbia is a talented young designer and one of the founders of AirBed & Breakfast, an online marketplace for peer-to-peer traveling. (In short, you offer up a spare bed or room for travelers; travelers then pay you to lodge there. Think eBay for crashing.)Now Gebbia is involved in an adjacent venture: Customized breakfast cereals […]

Several people have told me recently about Visual Thinking Strategies, a non-profit that “uses art to foster kids’ capacities to observe, think, listen and communicate.” In fact, VTS was behind the Harvard Medical School art museum program I wrote about awhile back.  It sounds like they’re doing great work. Find out more about their research and principles here.

I love pie. And I love charts. So I really like pie charts — especially this one. (HT: Zoomdoggle via Flowing Data)