In my last seminar devoted to the topic of future interfaces, I asked students to analyse current developments of Interface Culture and interpolate them in the the close future. iAchiever by Kay Schefferski offers a glimpse at the future where well known achievement systems of today are brought to a new level. Nowadays our gaming [...]
Category Archives: Design
Bliss Again
I always wanted to stand on the meadow of the famous XP wallpaper. Thanks to Microsoft’s self-reference to their their own iconic XP wallpaper in XBox Live avatar icons I now can. I decided to let my avatar sing. P.S. Ignore the hinted mountain in the back. For me it is still Bliss.
Device-Inspired Product Design
Besides Interface-Inspired Print Design there also is Device-Inspired Product Design as it seems. At Platoon Kunsthalle in Seoul I discovered chairs that looked as if greatly influenced by the iPhone. On the photo it seems as if a gigantic iPhone (without the built-in ear-piece) was leaning against the table. I repute this to be not [...]
Also posted in General, Real life Tagged chairs, iPhone, Platoon Kunsthalle, Product Design Leave a comment
Drop Shadows = Streamlining?
“Streamlining” was a design style which emerged during the 1930s, especially in architecture and product design. The style was applied to electric clocks, sewing machines, small radio receivers and vacuum cleaners, for example. Though manufacturing required new developments in materials, the functionality of the re-designed product was hardly changed. During the Drop Shadow Seminar at BTK [...]
Interface-Inspired Print Design, Pt. 3
In mobile devices’ current striving for more significance (and readers) a vivid and sometimes funny exchange of visual styles takes place. For example the photorealistic references to paper are quite numerous on the interface of the quite paperless iPad, iPhone applications like Notes and icon for YouTube remediate their counterparts in older media forms almost [...]
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 [...]
Also posted in Howto Tagged Arial, Frutiger Next, Helvetica, Microsoft Office 2007, Ribbons, Segoe UI Leave a comment
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, [...]