My friends from barcoo are not only great customers; they also have developed the best 1D barcode scanning application for mobile phones. Because barcoo aims to give transparency to consumers, we agreed on a corporate style that hardly uses any 2.0 and pseudo 3D effects like gloss or drop shadows—an approach we felt to imply [...]
Author Archives: johannes
This Thursday: Drop Shadow Talk by Jay Bolter
On January 21, Jay Bolter will give the next and for now last Drop Shadow Talk of my lecture series @ Berliner Technische Kunsthochschule. As usual the talk will start at 7 pm in room J/K. Jay Bolter is author of several influential books on new media theory. For example he has co-written “Remediation” and [...]
New Versions
This is funny: as it seems, currently everybody who wants to run Windows 7 properly on a Mac has to buy not only Microsoft’s new operating system, but also the new update from Cupertino. When I installed 7 over the turn of the year, all hardware of my Mac was detected as generic. It was [...]
Drop Shadow Workshop @ Merz Aka
I knew there would be a lot to document after my Drop Shadow Workshop at Merz Akademie in Stuttgart. Again all of my students there made very nice projects. This time we collaborated on a Tumblr-Blog. I came to love Tumblr’s simplicity during the seminar. Its standard theme (which we used, slightly modified) is a [...]
Drop Shadow Decade
It is not easy to admit: this week I regard Focus to have its finger closer on the pulse of time than DER SPIEGEL. The makers of the latter one remind their readers that the years after 9/11 were “wasted” and the world has to learn from the almost-decade of brainlessness. Focus calls it a [...]
Microsoft to Democratize Drop Shadows?
The “democratization” of cultural technologies has been a side effect of the biggest software company’s quest for power ever since. This becomes visible with the fonts Arial and Segoe UI, for example. Being screen adaptations of the Swiss typographic legends Helvetica and Frutiger Next, the transfer to the screen by Microsoft and Monotype has never [...]
Posted in Design, Howto Tagged Arial, Frutiger Next, Helvetica, Microsoft Office 2007, Ribbons, Segoe UI Leave a comment
Patron Survives Google Pin Incident
Recently my patron of the arts Tobias Müller from Erlangen almost got struck by a Google Maps pin falling from the sky. Contemplating about the calm atmosphere at N 49° 35.4561 E 11° 0.3963 and up to no mischief, he decided to set a bookmark pin on the Google Maps application of his iPhone (screenshot). [...]
Windows Bio
I am looking at the new package design of Windows 7 and I am contemplating. What is it supposed to tell me? It is green and in the upper left corner of the windows logo, there is a fir tree. In the upper right one, there is a shininess dazzling me. In the lower left [...]
Pioneering Swabian Automakers, Once Again
Yesterday Lars Harmsen from Magma Brand Design gave the first of the Drop Shadow Talks. At the beginning he spoke about the visual enrichment of corporate identities. As it seems, especially the German automobile industry uses enrichment effects a lot. BMW, Audi, Opel, Volkswagen, they all updated their logotypes and corporate styles with drop shadows, [...]