Albert Speer

This is the second part in the series Visions of Space that I saw. This is a look at how the works of three remarkable architects of the 20th century shaped our modern world. It examines how each one of them used space to express our response, respectively, to the power of the corporation (Meiss van der Rohe), the power of the State (Albert Speer), and religion (Antoni Gaudi).

The second part is about Albert Speer and is called Size Matters.

Firefox is the browser of choice for a huge number of web designers and developers because it is open source and extensible. It is possible to write extensions which enables the user to create features that are not available by default. For those who cannot write these extensions, there is a rich pool of free ready made extensions already available. Some of these extensions enable us to do a fair amount of web design and development without the use of IDEs, without leaving the browser.

Here, I present a simple checklist to help you configure Firefox for Web Development. I am sure that most web developers and designers out there use most of these extensions already. This serves a checklist for me to quickly configure a machine which is not set up the way I want it, when I have to work on it. I hope it will be useful to others as well.

Meiss van der Rohe

Visions of Space is a riveting BBC documentary series exploring the life and works of three remarkable architects whose vision and work has reshaped the modern world. The powerful, direct, and provocative presentation by the eloquent Robert Hughes makes this a gripping and informative watch. He hobbles around with his walking stick slowly, thoughtfully, majestically and suddenly bursts out into an eloquence which is energetic, passionate, and opinionated.

The first part of this series is called Mies van der Rohe: Less is more

Kai's Power Tools 3

In 1997, if you were fiddling around with Photoshop 3.0, considering upgrading to Photoshop 4.0 for its new and improved features of adjustment layers and editable type, you might have run into a curious family of software called Kai’s Power Tools (KPT) created by a company named HSC (Happy Software Company!) which helped apply filters to images in a new and exciting way.

It was quite apparent that there were not many uses in conventional design for these filters, but they had a totally different interface than the existing filter dialog boxes.

That meant hours of fun while appearing to be working!