Touch The Future: Create An Elegant Website With HTML 5 And CSS3 I’m sure that who chooses to work as web designer makes a choice of heart, a choice of love. He/she decides to bet any given day on his creativity and his ability of producing an idea and of making it tangible, visible and perceptible for all. These crazy men have my respect. But, also when the creative side is very important for a work, there exists a logical (and technical) part in all creative process. There are some moments and situations in which the creative mind needs an analytical method to achieve the objective, that is, for us, the creation of a well-done website. In his article on Design Informer titled “Web Design Iterations And Algorithm,” Adit Gupta explains how we can approach a web design work and how a website project can be processed in a number of iterations following a main algorithm. Five macro-steps to build an effective website using brain, pencil, paper, Photoshop, HTML and CSS. How HTML 5 And CSS3 Can Change Web Design Quick Overview On HTML 5 Sketch Your Ideas <!
How to Solve a Rubik's Cube for BEGINNERS - With Animations! Web Creme | Web design inspiration How we end up marrying the wrong people | Philosophers' Mail Anyone we could marry would, of course, be a little wrong for us. It is wise to be appropriately pessimistic here. Perfection is not on the cards. Unhappiness is a constant. Nevertheless, one encounters some couples of such primal, grinding mismatch, such deep-seated incompatibility, that one has to conclude that something else is at play beyond the normal disappointments and tensions of every long-term relationship: some people simply shouldn’t be together. How do the errors happen? It’s all the sadder because in truth, the reasons why people make the wrong choices are easy to lay out and unsurprising in their structure. One: We don’t understand ourselves When first looking out for a partner, the requirements we come up with are coloured by a beautiful non-specific sentimental vagueness: we’ll say we really want to find someone who is ‘kind’ or ‘fun to be with’, ‘attractive’ or ‘up for adventure…’ All of us are crazy in very particular ways. Two: We don’t understand other people
MIT Invents A Shapeshifting Display You Can Reach Through And Touch We live in an age of touch-screen interfaces, but what will the UIs of the future look like? Will they continue to be made up of ghostly pixels, or will they be made of atoms that you can reach out and touch? At the MIT Media Lab, the Tangible Media Group believes the future of computing is tactile. Unveiled today, the inFORM is MIT's new scrying pool for imagining the interfaces of tomorrow. Almost like a table of living clay, the inFORM is a surface that three-dimensionally changes shape, allowing users to not only interact with digital content in meatspace, but even hold hands with a person hundreds of miles away. Created by Daniel Leithinger and Sean Follmer and overseen by Professor Hiroshi Ishii, the technology behind the inFORM isn't that hard to understand. To put it in the simplest terms, the inFORM is a self-aware computer monitor that doesn't just display light, but shape as well. But what really interests the Tangible Media Group is the transformable UIs of the future.
Choosing the Right Metrics for User Experience By Pamela Pavliscak Published: June 2, 2014 “Metrics are the signals that show whether your UX strategy is working. Using metrics is key to tracking changes over time….” Metrics are the signals that show whether your UX strategy is working. Using metrics is key to tracking changes over time, benchmarking against iterations of your own site or application or those of competitors, and setting targets. Although most organizations are tracking metrics like conversion rate or engagement time, often they do not tie these metrics back to design decisions. UX strategists need to take charge of the metrics for online experiences. The Signal Problem “The data that is available from off-the-shelf analytics, A/B tests, and even follow-up surveys does not always result in insights that inform the user experience.” There is so much data available on sites and applications that it seems amazing insights would be sure to surface, yet that does not happen without smart decisions. The (U)X Factor Usability
Open Culture digs up a 1954 animated adaptation of... Coursekit is now Lore. What’s the Story? Culture & SocietyHistory & LiteratureMedia & Communication Open Culture digs up a 1954 animated adaptation of Orwell’s Animal Farm, funded by the CIA – the best thing since Ralph Steadman’s brilliant illustrations for it. Read the story here. #Animal Farm#George Orwell#lit#animation#film 69 notes
The 50 Coolest Book Covers Ever - Entertainment Title: American Psycho Author: Bret Easton Ellis Artist: Marshall Arisman Artist George Corsillo, who designed the cover art for Bret Easton Ellis' first two books turned down the chance to design the artwork for American Psycho, stating "I was disgusted with myself for reading it". Kierkegaard on Anxiety & Creativity by Maria Popova “Because it is possible to create — creating one’s self, willing to be one’s self… — one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever.” “Anxiety is love’s greatest killer,” Anaïs Nin famously wrote. But what, exactly, is anxiety, that pervasive affliction the nature of which remains as drowning yet as elusive as the substance of a shadow? Anxiety is a qualification of dreaming spirit, and as such it has its place in psychology. He captures the invariable acuteness of anxiety’s varied expressions: Anxiety can just as well express itself by muteness as by a scream. Kierkegaard argues that, to paraphrase Henry Miller, on how we orient ourselves to anxiety depends the failure or fruitfulness of life: In actuality, no one ever sank so deep that he could not sink deeper, and there may be one or many who sank deeper. Donating = Loving Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. Share on Tumblr
BlueCopter - Arduino Quadcopter Hey, I spent the summer working with a new hobby of mine, Quadcopters =D! The quadcopter board is homemade (atmega32u4). Because my board has the same pinout as a leonardo, I decided to go with the multiwii firmware. So I etched a shield for my board containing headers for the receiver, motors and the IMU (cheap chinese found on ebay, ADXL345, L3G4200D, HMC5883 and BMP085). I was happy with the quadcopter, it flew very nicely (after some PID changes of course).. Three days later, I got a working code.. Anyhow I'm not going to bore you out with my story. If there is a big demand for a code explanation/theory about quadcopters and how everything works, shout out here, and I'll come up with something for you... Here is the code: See attachment for pinout.. And here is the video: Edit: I've updated the code.. //Basel
Beginner Quadcopter Kit Buying Guide - Hovership I frequently get asked how much it costs to build a quadcopter or other multi-rotor helicopter. I usually try to add together a number real quick based on equipment I own. Which could come close to $1000. I decided to look closer at the real cost for a basic complete setup to get started flying (if you own zero RC gear). Below is a buying guide that includes everything needed to put a quadcopter in the air. PLEASE NOTE: I picked these items based on their low cost yet good reviews. UPDATE: 02-23-2014 HobbyKing now sells a very similar ready-to-fly kit, just add batteries and a charger. The Frame – $14 Hobbyking X525 V3 Glass Fiber Quadcopter Frame This frame is based on a tried and true frame design for multirotors. Purchase the frame at HobbyKing.com »Purchase replacement parts at HobbyKing.com » Frame option #2 -$8 Since writing this post, it has been pointed out that the above frame might be a bit heavy for the motors/props I am about to suggest. Purchase the frame at HobbyKing.com »
Affordances The concept of an affordance was coined by the perceptual psychologist James J. Gibson in his seminal book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. The concept was introduced to the HCI community by Donald Norman in his book The Psychology of Everyday Things from 1988. Norman's use of the term According to Norman (1988) an affordance is the design aspect of an object which suggest how the object should be used; a visual clue to its function and use. "...the term affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used. [...] Norman thus defines an affordance as something of both actual and perceived properties. Gibson's use of the term An affordance according to Gibson exists relative to the action capabilities of particular actors. Figure 1: Comparison of affordances as defined by Gibson and Norman (McGrenere and Ho, 2000). Want to learn more about affordances? Open Access 1.
Designers & Books | Book lists and commentary from esteemed designers and architects 21 examples of user experience innovation in ecommerce I’ve been keeping a close eye on innovation in the ecommerce sector for more than a decade now, and it seems to me that we're living in exciting times. We have hit some kind of purple patch. Why is this? Well, ecommerce has massively matured. As such I wanted to raise a toast to innovation by highlighting a bunch of - hopefully inspiring - examples to you. But first, a massive caveat: I would severely and mercilessly beat a few of these sites with a big best practice stick. Secondly, for ecommerce sites, it is all about the data. All of that aside, the ecommerce teams that take chances and push the boundaries of are to be applauded. So let's take a look at some ecommerce websites (and one mobile app) that are trying new things, and that are noteworthy for their approach to the user experience. Jack Jones Clustering is one of the hotter trends in ecommerce. Folks Bonarium Two Socks For starters, take a look at the gorgeous presentation in the feature filtering area. Robstep Yet more bundling.