While I have no doubt that the people creating digital magazines now have a mindset that print is of a higher quality, I have to think some of the current design of these apps comes down to a few more practical points: They don’t know yet what’s going to become of digital magazines and whether [...]

If I were able to start again, this is what I’d do. The puzzle of vast amounts of data combined with the beauty of design in order to convey an understandable and meaningful message.

This is clever, but I still think the real solution is to have the airlines change the way the seat works so that if a person reclines it lessens the recliner’s legroom, not the person behind them. As long as it’s not an issue for the recliner, there’s nothing slowing them from making the choice.

My last three years in Philadelphia, I (mostly) walked to work, since home and work were both downtown and right around two miles apart. (For two years of that, I worked across the street from Independence Hall, which was awesome until Sept. 11.) On days that I wanted to move fast while going to work, [...]

“We have too much ground floor area seeking too much retail space from too few retailers, who seek to sell too many non-essential goods to too few customers, who increasingly have too little money to buy them and too little space in which to store them.” The above quote by PSU professor William Macht is [...]

Dwell had an article recently trying to define what makes up good design (I’d link it but they don’t seem to have their articles online). Turns out Dieter Rams had already defined it back in the 1980s. This was mainly for himself, but it certainly captures everything I was thinking about, especially Good design makes [...]

Great talk by John Gruber (of Daring Fireball) titled “The Auteur Theory of Design”. He starts off wondering why some groups are able to create great things (art, movies, software programs) and other, seemingly equally strong groups produce, well, crap. Borrowing from the Auteur Theory, and using Hitchcock as an example, his main premise for [...]

Great entry on Hayao Miyazaki at Lines and Colors. Includes links to movies (via Amazon) as well as Studio Ghibli (unfortunately only in Japanese) and a few image sites.

I have trouble with String Theory. I’m certainly not a physicist, and I really don’t understand it, but it all just seems a little too pat for me.Despite that, the idea of different dimensions is interesting, though mind-boggling. Here’s a great flash presentation describing dimensions one through ten, and how the definition of the tenth dimension is such that there can’t be any others.It’s also interesting from a information presentation point of view.

via Cool ToolsThese things are supposed to make easy work of joins, so that making (possibly ugly but quick and versatile) tables and shelves.