I am … unhindered by talent

We’ve ordered a couple of boxes of advance copies our book (a privilege of being the authors). They look really nice, and we’re quite excited about the grand unveiling on Wednesday at EuroGP! For those of you coming to Naples, definitely stop by our table at the poster session that night — you’ll be able to check out printed copies and maybe even score a postcard featuring that wonderful cover :-).

Whether you’re coming to EuroGP or not, we’ll be “turning on” the Lulu site Wednesday, so people can buy printed copies and download the PDF for free. As a teaser, the poster above contains the entire book — just really, really small! If you click on it you can see it a little bigger, but I still recommend waiting a few days for the Real Deal.

Thanks to Riccardo for using some of his major LaTeX mojo to create the mosaic of all the pages, and to Jess and WeatherGirl for their suggestions regarding the design.

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Yup, crazy as it sounds. Eyetrack has collected some nice user data, which they summarize in “What We Saw When We Looked Through Their Eyes”, which is then reorganized in “Scientific Web Design: 23 Actionable Lessons from Eye-Tracking Studies” over at VirtualHosting.com.

At some point I should go through these with some care and think about how they apply here. I tend to generate pretty cluttered designs - I keep trying cram in the information, and I end up with more Redmond than Google, I’m afraid. Maybe I should rethink that a bit.

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This is hilarious. They walk you through the stepwise changes if Redmond had designed GMail. Thanks to John Naughton for the pointer.

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Paul Rand is responsible for a number of iconic pieces of graphic design (e.g., the classic IBM logo), and this is a nice short film combining examples of his work with short snippets that I assume came from interviews with him. Some great quotes include

A work of art is realized
when form and content are indistinguishable.
When form predominates, meaning is blunted,
but when content predominates, interest lags.
But the genius comes in when both of these things fuse.

and

Don’t try to be original, just try to be good. That might sound naive, but it’s true.

There’s a neat bit where he goes over the “language of form”, listing important concepts like texture, shape, balance, and tension. It would be fun to sift through my photographs and look for a good examples of each of these. And probably revealing as well, since I strongly suspect some of his terms would be much better represented in my images than others.

Tip o’ the cap to Panopticist for the pointer via 37Signals.

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