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Bill Moggridge at National Design Museum recently wrote an article about what bad and good design is, and to illustrate his point, he used the often confusing TV remote control as the bad example, and the iPhone 4 as the good example.
Well, I beg to differ.
The latest show at the House of Yes in Brooklyn, “The Wonderneath”, is now showing! The early Modern day fairy tale summarizes the journey of Hailey down to the secret underground of New York City in the 1910’s, with wonderful musical numbers and spectacular circus acts.
I’m doing part of the set design for the show, so please come and check it out!
I am working on some spanking new set design for the newest show at House of Yes in Brooklyn called “The Wonderneath”! Design cues come from art nouveau movement a hundred years ago.
Here is a work in progress for the rotunda platform… More to come. Stay tuned!
I love NYC Subway signage so much I even based part of my architecture thesis project on it. The signage system is not one man’s effort, but a collaboration of designers and workers (and committee members) over time.
I was at the lecture last night, on “Unimark International and the New York Subway System”, which talked about the signage system and how it came along.
Today’s blog blitz came as a surprise to me as I have not even completed the Harlequin Project yet, but it’s all over the news already. I do see the appeal of working with dual screens, and the potential UIs that can be productive and futuristic, though I didn’t realize the urge is this great. As a UX designer, I’m still trying to sort this out.
Microsoft nailed the idea with Courier, and I hope they do come out with something soon, or people like me or other companies will start ‘borrowing’ it for their own.
As a record for myself, here’s a list of blogs that mentioned the project:
I had been working hard on the House of Yes Christmas Spectacular for the past few weeks, so I haven’t worked much on the tablet, except I took apart everything even more. It’s time to go back to the lab more!
Thanks a lot again, Internet!
On another note, I just won a Woot! Bag of Crap.
Massimo Vignelli seems to have an unusually high optimism for the Modern age, as he thinks that change is inevitable every 10 years. Nevertheless, this is an interesting analysis showing the progressions or cycles in styles in design (or mostly graphic design). Since Vignelli had already filled in 60’s to 80’s, so let’s fill in 90’s and 2000’s!
This concept was done a while ago, but I was too lazy to blog about it. It’s a little too late since voting has already ended… but anyway, since you are reading this page, you wouldn’t mind seeing something new, right?
I had been designing user interfaces for various software for a long time. Most of my work is realized in Trillian Astra, of course. Though I had already reserved all my ideas related to chat and social messaging to Trillian, there are still plenty of stray ideas left on the cutting table. I figured it will be nice to contribute some to the future of the web, like this particular contest from Mozilla Labs Concept Series. The challenge of the Summer contest is to design a replacement for tabs in a web browser.
The concept here I had designed is called “Browspace”. The general idea is to create usable tabs by employing web page rendering technologies we had discovered in developing mobile browsers into the desktop.
I have to take back my criticisms a couple weeks ago on these fine music folks.
Marvelous Flickr photoset of tonight by zimbablade
I first saw the Decemberists by recommendation with a group of friends. I did not know any of their songs but still managed to have a great time, because their frontman, Colin Meloy, is an expert in interacting with the crowd. Besides talking a lot (really a lot) between songs, he has lots of stage antics that sets the band apart from the rest. For example, he would divide the crowd in half, and conduct them to sing along in an extended chorus, or invite people from the floor to replace the guitarists for a fake jam, and so on. I enjoyed the show a lot, and soon the songs were catchy enough they ended up in my record collection.
They did none of that tonight.
At least before encore. Instead of going for their usual stunts, they went for the extraordinary: The gutsy band dared to play their new album in its entirety. Their new album, "The Hazards of Love", does not sound exactly outstanding on record and received mixed reviews, but that is because we will not understand it until we see it performed live in its entirety: It is really meant to be a rock opera.
A non-stop, intense ride of music telling a tragic love story with precise and pristine musical sensibility, the show is a blend of genres from the last whole century: folk, bluegrass, metal and rock all melt into one album. And unlike most records, the album is arranged to be playable live, thus the lack of strange sound samples or hooks. Despite the fact, they still manage to create great aural textures with a combination of many instruments, from chime to mandolin, a harpischord as well as a grand bass viola.
Colin Meloy does not exactly have the best voice (he sometimes cannot hit certain pitches), but that’s ok, he has great energy and emotion. Meanwhile, the female vocals were also highlight tonight. I love the commanding voice of Sarah Worden from My Brightest Diamond especially. I might check out their albums in the mean time.
Here is one of the highlights, “The Rake’s Song” (plus free download), a twisted wicked tale of a mass murderer who killed all of his sons and daughters, featuring 4 sets of drums playing simultaneously! Amazing! Enjoy!
As discussed with my circus friends, there are four types of circus, c, q, k and x:
I watched quite a few this year. I played in one. Here are my short reviews.
My current (temporary) table is composed of two sawhorses and an Ikea PRONOMEN countertop, 8 feet long and 3 feet deep.
In response to the question on Unplgged:
Survey: Is Bigger Always Better?
It has to do with how often you want to return things back to their original place.
There is a sweet spot where it is neither too redundant to clean all the time, nor too much a burden to clean a lot of things at once, and that largely depends on your work. A writer who only uses a computer may still need a whole table of reference materials to map the brain, while an apparel designer will need a large table to lay all the fabric as well.
While I’m in a flow, returning tools, books or paper back to their drawers and shelves interrupts the workflow, thus counterproductive.
When I’m done with a project, I’ll return (and sometimes clean) the materials back to their position and state. Everything starts with a clean slate again.
But if I forget to do this step, that is where clutter begins: objects lost their original position and were placed arbitrarily on the desk. The key is to always find where these objects should belong… which unfortunately always ended up in the Miscellaneous box.
I find that there is nothing wrong to be embarrassed about a table with many many open files. It shows that I’m working, and not a neat freak that spends half my work time cleaning. I find people with clean tables all the time are a little OCD! 
Sawdust & Glitter is a collection of ramblings and creations by
Pak-Kei Mak, the chief designer of Trillian by Cerulean Studios, and among other things, a vocalist, a crazy artist, a burner and a unicorn bunny. I’m currently living in Brooklyn, NY and Connecticut.