2012 Logo Trends We'll start this trends report—LogoLounge's 10th annual missive—with an admonishment that is repeated each year: If you're searching for how-to information, please stop reading now. In addition, if you anticipate your reaction to reviewing these trends is to dismiss every one of them as yesterday's news, you also may as well walk away right now. There's plenty to be learned here, but you need to be looking for the right thing. After a decade of studying logos from around the world—32,000 alone for this report—I can say with absolute confidence that the true benefit of studying logo design trends is that they invariably identify trajectories. Once you can see the path a trend starts to take, once you can see its arc and velocity, it's very possible for you to know where to take it next. You get to steer. How To Identify a Trend As I review logos that are entered onto the LogoLounge site, three distinct categories start to emerge. Another category is on the opposite side of the universe.
Truthy What is Truthy? Truthy is a research project that helps you understand how memes spread online. We collect tweets from Twitter and analyze them. The name Truthy comes from a term coined by Stephen Colbert, truthiness, which describes claims that feel like they ought to be true, but aren't necessarily. What is a meme? How do you pick the memes for the Election Coverage tool? For the 'Candidates' election coverage selection, we have chosen the top four memes (by tweet volume) that contain "obama" or "biden" to signify the left, and those that contain "romney" or "ryan" for the right. For the 'Politics' selection, we determined the memes based upon the following criteria: #p2: Most popular left-leaning meme #ows: Most popular co-occurring left-leaning meme #topprog: Second most popular co-occurring left-leaning meme #dems: Official hashtag for democrats Of course this is only an illustration of the activity we observe. What is a diffusion network? What is astroturfing?
Visible Map of Knowledge Sought This post was written by Jacob McNulty The New York Times recently published this map which shows data searches where users jumped from journal to journal as part of the knowledge they were seeking. What a great visual of knowledge networks in action… What would a map of your workforce look like as they went after the knowledge they needed to do their job? Many organizations are recognizing that the picture above resembles how work gets done in their workforce and leveraging tools such as social or organizational network analysis and value network analysis to create a strategy to support these knowledge networks as ways of transferring knowledge, improving performance and increasing innovation. ShareThis
Datavisualization.ch Selected Tools Startups, This Is How Design Works – by Wells Riley logTool: Revealing the Hidden Patterns of Online Surfing Behavior logTool [onformative.com] is a data visualization tool that displays your online activity, based on data from the powerful network packet sniffing tool Carnivore. By analyzing the different IP addresses and ports, the visualization is able to determine and represent what kind of application or service sends or receives the packets. Developed for the magazine Weave, logTool was used to digest the surfing behavior of several interaction designers, artists and developers. The time period of a whole day was split into 288 timeslots, 5 minutes each, represented by a radial bar graph. Both tool and source code can be freely downloaded. See also Nebul.us and EyeBrowse.
Design Thinking Barcelona Visualizing Device Utilization Device utilization is a key metric for performance analysis and capacity planning. In this post, I’ll illustrate different ways to visualize device utilization across multiple devices, and how that utilization is changing over time. As a system to study, I’ll examine a production cloud environment that contains over 5,000 virtual CPUs (over 600 physical processors). CPU utilization heat map Command Line Interface ToolsTabulated DataHighlighted Data3D Surface PlotAnimated DataInstantaneous ValuesBar GraphsVector GraphsLine GraphsTernary PlotsQuantized Heat Maps Device utilization can be defined as the time a device was busy processing work during an interval, so a device at 100% utilization is active doing work 100% of the time. For any given device type (CPUs, disks, network interfaces), and any number of devices (from a single device to a cloud of servers), we’d like to identify the following: Finally, we’d like to observe this all in realtime. These tools usually don’t handle scale. ).
The difference between a UX Designer and UI Developer « Melbourne, as in the city. I’ve recently found myself trying to explain the difference between the skills I bring to a project as a UX Designer and why I’m not able to cover the role of a dedicated UI Developer. There is of course a necessary overlap between the skills-sets in these roles, which is a good thing. And some individuals have a broader coverage of skills than others. However, people outside of these roles don’t always appreciate the specialist skills and focus that is required to work within them. This as simply as I can describe the different skills required for each role: User Experience (UX) Designer = Research + DesignUI Developer = Design + HTML/CSS/JSApplication Developer = Back-End coding + HTML/CSS/JS etc. As much as I’ve tried to avoid it, I just haven’t been able to prevent myself from creating a Venn diagram to visualise this. These different combinations of skills bring with them a different perspective and focus on what each person does. Breaking down Design further Like this: Like Loading...
Facebook Platlas: Social Media Atlas Reveals All User Actions Platlas - the Facebook Version [platlas.com] is not one of easiest interactive infographics around, as its attempts to provide a better understanding of the driving principles behind social media, and Facebook in particular. Branded as the "first ever social network ecosystem exploration tool", it starts from revealing the variety of actions users tend to take on the various social platforms available today. The center is the user profile, from which users interact with the icons present in the inner-most circle. Each icon represents a specific area on Facebook, such as Events, Photos, or Apps. The outer-most ring then shows the different features that can be performed, according to the inner-most area. More background information is available here.
Let's Be Frank I keep coming back to this notion that design, in its rawest form, has no boundaries. Thus, sequestering one’s thoughts and ideas to a narrow set of disciplines, such as interaction design or UX design, does a disservice to ideation and inspiration. Our history as a creative culture is vast, and the people I’m interested in are those who tinker with our world and challenge perception with theories and crazy ideas that often go against conventional wisdom of the day—those who sit on the fringe of possibilities to keep our businesses, communities, lives, world, and imaginations moving forward. Architect, designer, and living legend Ephraim Goldberg, better know as Frank Gehry, is one such individual. From the organic forms that rise like foreign landscapes above city streets to his unique furniture and product designs, Frank Gehry is known to break away from conventional thought and disrupt the very principles of form and function like no other. Three Principles of Being Frank 1. 2. 3. 1.
El Patrón de los Números Primos: Prime Number Patterns by Jason Davies. For each natural number n, we draw a periodic curve starting from the origin, intersecting the x-axis at n and its multiples. The prime numbers are those that have been intersected by only two curves: the prime number itself and one. Below the currently highlighted number, we also show its sum of divisors σ(n), and its aliquot sum s(n) = σ(n) - n, which indicate whether the number is prime, deficient, perfect or abundant. Based on Sobre el patrón de los números primos by Omar E.
Dieter Rams / Selector for 25/25 - Celebrating 25 Years of Design Dieter Rams Industrial Designer (1932-) Selector for 25/25 - Celebrating 25 Years of Design 29 March - 22 June 2007 As head of design at Braun, the German consumer electronics manufacturer, DIETER RAMS (1932-) emerged as one of the most influential industrial designers of the late 20th century by defining an elegant, legible, yet rigorous visual language for its products. Good design is innovative. These ten principles defined Dieter Rams’ approach to “good design?. Rams’ objective was to design useful products which would be easy to operate. Dieter Rams was born in Wiesbaden, Germany in 1932. Founded in Frankfurt in 1921 by the engineer Max Braun, the company had a sound reputation for engineering and for developing new products, including the first combined radio and record player. When he arrived at Braun, Rams applied his architectural skills to the design of exhibition sets and offices, but became increasingly interested in products. © Design Museum 1932 Born in Weisbaden, Germany.