Icons of Susan Kare

The Paint Bucket icon for the fill tool and the Lasso icon for the freehand selection tool are now part of everyday computing for millions of people worldwide. Their designer, Susan Kare , according to the Museum of  Modern Art, in New York, is “a pioneering and influential computer iconographer. Since 1983, Kare has designed thousands of icons for the world’s leading software companies. Utilizing a minimalist grid of pixels and constructed with mosaic-like precision, her icons communicate their function immediately and memorably, with wit and style.”

A collection of font and typography related jokes

Dreamspaces

Dreamspaces was a brilliant BBC documentary series with high production quality and visually stunning stories. Sadly, the series was of only 12 episodes. It covers great buildings from New York, Helsinki, Puerto Rico, Chicago, Romania, Brazil, Israel and many more international destinations looking at various aspects of design and architecture and their relationship with contemporary living. It is part travel show and part architecture appreciation with emphasis on the appreciation.

Antoni Gaudi

This is the third 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 use space to express our response to the power of the corporation (Meiss van der Rohe), the power of the State (Albert Speer), and religion (Antoni Gaudi).

The third part is called God’s Architect.

Aldus Manutius

The late 1400s must have been very similar to current times. This was the tumultuous time when the printed word was changing the fabric of society, much like the digital revolution of the early 21st century. The transition from the bibles of Gutenberg to the widely available paperback type books which created a huge reading class of people sowing the seeds of public participation and democratic ways was a time of confusion and struggle as existing structures came tumbling down.

In the middle of this was Aldus Manutius, venetian printer, publisher and inventor. His legacy lives on today five centuries after him.

This is not a pipe.

1968
by René Magritte

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!