The London 2012 Olympic Committee logo. Released last week to critical acclaim (lighter on the ‘acclaim’, heavier on the ‘critical’), so far it’s been variously described as ‘a dodgy set of legwarmers‘, ‘a pink day-glo pig’s abortion of a logo‘ and ‘Lisa Simpson performing an obscene act‘. Doesn’t the blogosphere love a good furore?

My personal theory is it will gradually break down and recombine into the Iron Maiden logo. I can’t prove anything yet, but I think we know who’ll be playing that opening ceremony.

So, what do you think? Maybe you’re thinking to yourself ‘It’s rubbish,.. I could do better in 15 minutes!̵

There’s been much hoo-hah regarding the font rendering in Apple’s beta release of Safari for Windows. I decided to install the beta myself and see what all the fuss is about.

Here’s why I think Apple gets it right and why Microsoft could learn some lessons from them:

Apple’s font renderer more accurately maintains the intended look of the font. It does this by smoothing the edges and corners of characters where appropriate which can sometimes lead to small letters looking a little blurry. Microsoft’s ClearType technology attempts to make fonts sharper and more readable by jamming characters into pixels in a miscellaneous and sometimes unpleasant fashion.

I’m not a designer, but I own a few typography books and have a strong appreciation for the topic. Which

I wrote most of this piece for the Design View, but the graphics took some time, so I figure it’s worthwhile posting it here too.

Obviously the main reason you upgrade any application is to be able to do new stuff. I’ve been working with Fireworks CS3 and it’s betas since last year so I’d going to concentrate on the features I’ve actually been using every day.

You can then make your own call on how valuable they might be to the way you work.

1) The Pages Panel

Pages, a brand new panel in Fireworks CS3, lives happily alongside your Layers, Frames, and History panels.

As you might infer from by the title, Fireworks’ new Pages functionality is essentially a design templating system.

Currently, I suspect most professional web designers mimic this function — regardles

Ted Leung is a Senior Engineer at OSAF, and blogs at Ted Leung On The Air

Mimi Yin is a UI Designer at OSAF

(Disclaimer: I work at OSAF on the Web UI for Chandler Server.) This talk centered on the open design process used by OSAF in developing both the Chandler Desktop client, and the Chandler Server Web UI, and how open design differs from open development.

Open design is participatory, but mediated — i.e., decisions are made within the context of community discussion and participation, but with a specific responsible party for decisions to avoid devolving into design-by-committee.

Specific topics included:

• The thought processes of developers versus designers — developers think in terms of features and specs, designers think more holistically.
• How to do design in a distributed, participatory environment — use of tools such as wiki and ma
  
  
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  Are your icons working for you?
  at 2007-08-12 11:35:49
  

  Icons and infographics are so integral to all GUIs (OS’s and online) that, like the street signs outside your window, we hardly notice them, even when we’re using them. That’s exactly the way it really should be. The first time we see one it should help explain a concept behind a menu item, button or link — perhaps with a shopping cart silhouette next to a purchase option or a disk next to the save option. After that, we tend to use them as flags or markers to move around interfaces we are familiar with.

  However, sometimes that imagery can work against what you’re trying to achieve. Sometimes that can be as simple as emphasizing the wrong part of an interaction. In an online shopping situation, do you mark the ‘BUY’ button with money — emphasizing what the user is losing — or the shopping cart that puts the emphasis on what the user is gaining. We don’t have to bug the Amazon board room to know the answer to that one
  
  

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