Scott McCloud is a pioneer in his field - the field of comics. (I had previously posted about him here). I just discovered (via Presentation Zen & Matt Koehler) a TED talk he had given back in 2005. It is a wonderful introduction to McCloud the man and his ideas....
Posts related to: Good | Bad Design
Of hernias and hiccups, the evolutionary story
Interesting article in Scientific American about how flaws in our biology reveal our evolutionary history. Steven Gould talked about it in his famous essay on The Panda's Thumb. This is a wonderful argument for Darwinian evolution since it points not to perfection...
A different vision of the web
T. H. Nelson coined the word "hypertext" and more than anyone else, and much earlier than anyone else, truly understood how computing technology would change the text and print. One of my most treasured possession is a copy of his double-book ("Computer Lib: You Can...
Technology, creativity & illusion
Marco Tempest is magician who loves technology, or a techno-geek who happens to be a good magician. He brings an unique amalgam of high-tech and magic to his shows (see this article for details), but that is not what is most impressive about his work. What is...
Best of SkyMall
I love browsing through the SkyMall catalog when I am flying. I never cease to be amazed by human ingenuity - the range of things we have built, irrespective of how useful (or useless they may be). Anyway, someone has now listed the 10 best (or worst, depending on...
Visualizing feeds
Sean Nash of Nashworld (recognizing a fellow data visualization junkie in me) had sent me this link a while ago ... but I just got around to it today. Check out FeedVis. So what does FeedVis do - think of it as a tag-cloud generator on steroids. Lots of fun there -...
Contruction (sic)
Check out this page of examples of bad design. Some of these look too crazy to be true - but who knows... stranger things have happened. Interestingly enough the title of the page is "Award winning contructions!" I wonder if that is deliberate. Site worth sharing with...
The “O” in Obama
Steven Heller continues his series on political typography and branding with an interview with the design team that developed the now iconic symbol for the Obama campaign. Check out The "O" in Obama. Previous postings on this theme can be found here and here.
Microblogging in the classroom II
I had blogged earlier about my attempts at using micro-blogging in my face to face classroom. As I had said after the experiment At the end of the class, upon being quizzed, the students seemed to feel that this experiment had been a success and would like to do it...
Death & Taxes
I am always on the lookout for new and interesting visual representations of complex data and just discovered Death & Taxes, 2009: "is a representational poster of the federal discretionary budget; the amount of money that is spent at the discretion of your elected...
Analyzing political debate
Political debates are heavily analyzed - by pundits and laypeople alike. I had my own minor visual contribution to this discourse through this WordMap/Cloud of the third and final debate between McCain and Obama . Such wordmaps are fun to create and see but are not...
Tweaking the design
I have been blogging pretty seriously now for 10 months now and am quite enjoying it. I have made some changes to the design of the site that may be worth explaining. As I have blogged over the past few months, I have come to realize that I typically make three kinds...
Jared Diamond on creativity, innovation and wealth
Jared Diamond has an article on edge.org, somewhat provocatively titled: How to get rich? The question his after is simply, "what is the best way to organize human groups and human organizations and businesses so as to maximize productivity, creativity, innovation,...
London Underground Map
One of my favorite pieces of design is the London Underground Map. It has been replicated all over the world - from Mumbai to Tokyo. Leigh Wolf just sent me a link to a BBC 4 video made in 1987 about this map. Check it out here Here is a link to the Wikipedia page...
Representing the election
How does one best represent all the voting information that we now collect as a part of the electoral process? Here are a few websites that really stood out for me. Send me any more that you have and I can add them to the list. The first is a series of cartograms...
Nerdview or being stuck in our worldview
I recently received a note from a graduate student as an unnamed university. This student wrote to me after having assigned the TPACK handbook chapter (co-authored with Matt Koehler) to a bunch of pre-service teachers, and suggested that the chapter was hard to read,...
On designing the body
Corpus 2.0 by Marcia Nolte is a set of seven portraits illustrating how the human body could adjust itself to the design of products, including a hole in the lips for smokers and an extended shoulder for holding a phone. Very strange and very interesting, check it out
Representing me
Sharon Guan with the Instructional Design & Development Group at DePaul University has invited me to present at a faculty conference next April. I will be speaking about the manner in which new technologies are pushing us to blur the lines between the professional and...
Ads in Video Games
A couple of people have emailed me about the Obama campaign inserting advertisements into video games. Check out this Flickr set with screenshots of these advertisements. Most of the press is reporting that these ads show up in just racing games but as these...
Students video premiere on aftered.tv
This just in. Leigh Wolf just informed me that a video created by three of her students this past summer accepted by AfterEd - a web-based video channel produced by EdLab at Teachers College, Columbia University. New content is published weekly, including news,...
Avani Amol Pavangadkar…
... was born on the 7th of October, to Amol and Kanchan. [Amol was my partner in crime in the making of Hari Puttar!] We went to visit her yesterday and I took some pictures. Enjoy. View all the pictures
David Jiles plagiarism issue, update
An update on the ongoing saga of David Jiles, Ph.D. For context see this. (Please note the David Jiles referred to in these posts is NOT Professor David Jiles of Iowa State University and Cardiff University.) I have heard back from some of the websites that had...
Plagiarism, note to Root-Bernstein’s and Creativity Portal
Here are some emails (for the record) that I have sent recently to the Root-Bernstein's (the authors of Sparks of Genius) letting them know of how their intellectual property has been stolen by David Jiles, Ph.D. Details in my original posting: David Jiles, Ph.D.,...
Emailing a plagiarist
I am sending the following email to David Jiles, Ph.D. whose plagiarism I have documented in this posting: David Jiles, Ph.D., Creativity Expert, Plagiarist. The email is as follows: Dear Dr. Jiles -- I have some questions and concerns about your book "Creativity and...
David Jiles, Ph.D., Creativity Expert, Plagiarist!
I do not know who David Jiles, Ph.D. is. I do know that he is a plagiarist, an intellectual crook and a thief of the highest order! I do not write these words lightly. I was first informed of this by Mike Deschryver and have over the past few days attempted to look...
GeoGreeting!
I often do an assignment with my students where they go looking for letterforms in nature. Leigh Wolf just sent me this link to GeoGreeting.com which takes the same idea - but conceptualizes it on a global scale. Check out this example.
100 greatest mathematical theorems
Title says it all... check it out.
The commodification of ugly
Noah, one of the students in my design doctoral seminar sent me this video by Ze Frank. Check it out.
Brilliant advertisement
I don't want to give anything away... watch it once and then once more... [Youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQbl1c63Ofo]
The KISS principle & weather
Keep It Simple Stupid is one of those adages you hear lots of times, but here is a website that has truly taken it to heart. See how an online weather related website can be taken to its logical, simplest extreme. Check out Umbrella Today?