iconolith

Graphic Design History: Backfill

In graphic design, as with all other creative professions, it is just as important to know what came before you as it is to have a vision for where you are going. Surfing around this afternoon, I came across The Design Encyclopedia - an effort to make design history available using a wiki platform. What caught my eye was the wiki theme and the care that was taken to make it appear unwiki-like.

The Design Encyclopedia, part of the underconsideration network

Come to think of it, there are a few other historical graphic links I have stashed away for reference and inspiration:

DesignMuseum.org
Mid-century Illustrated group on Flickr
Swiss Graphic Design History
Graphic Design in Russia
Chinese Propaganda Posters
International Posters (Vintage)

xFruits - Doing More With Feeds

From the web site xFruits is described as:

“…a free online service offering to every user the possibility of:

• Enriching your home
• Enlarging your blog’s functionalities
• Creating, generally, your information system from the RSS feed

XFruits makes possible the Mashup RSS creation in a very simple way thanks to the Composer. You can assemble the bricks together so as to build your own feed-based service. “xFruiter” service’s users are referenced.

xFruits has been thought of as from its origin to be upgradeable and modular, and thus, to allow a developer’s community to take part in the project. Our ambition is to create dozens of new bricks!”

It can aggregate many feeds into a single feed, convert RSS to email for an email alert of new posts (and vice versa - a feed for unread email in your inbox), RSS to voice to turn blog posts into podcasts (some restrictions here - more at vocalfruits.com), create an OPML list of your RSS feeds that can be converted to web for mobile, convert RSS to PDF, convert RSS to a web page, and combinations thereof.

[Spotted on the SL Educators List]

Hurry Up and Wait

The Museum of Modern Beta Betas - Most Anticipated is a list of web apps ranked by popularity by how many are waiting for it. Data is being pulled from del.icio.us and updated every Saturday to keep the list current.

It is a strange thing to see the pre-hype traffic for something that isn’t yet released. There also seems to be many more private betas than I remember seeing before. It is almost as if there is a sadistic mix of Web 2.0 “Lemming Syndrome” mixed with the “hurry up and wait” attitude of the military. [via]

Where’s Web2.0?

There are probably a whole lot of Web2.0 collections out there but go2web20.net is certainly the most Web2.0 of them that I have come across. There’s a whole lot of time-killin’ potential if you’re planning on visiting.

A Series of Pipes

Over the past week or so I have been getting re-acquainted with my Yahoo account ever since Flickr decided I needed to tie my two accounts together. Lo and behold I discovered their mashup service Pipes. I can’t help but think that the name is a wink to Ted Stevens’ tubes - which still makes me turn my head in shame each time I hear it (full context here).

Despite my novice programming skills and lack of desire to read the directions, I was able to cobble together a local search for coffee within 10 miles of a user-provided location - all within about 3 minutes.

More interesting than what individual users can do is that Pipes lets you view the inner workings of Pipes created by others and clone them into other modified mashups.

So maybe there are some tubes in there somewhere. See also: Dapper - the data mapper

Read/Write Reality

The advent of the read/write web is a topic that comes up frequently where I work. Likewise, community contribution and knowledge sharing is popular among people I come into contact with online too, but I don’t run into too many people in real life, outside of work, who care much about the idea at all. Or maybe they just don’t realize just how cool it really is - or that maybe they are already doing something similar.

It really isn’t a new idea. Humans have been inclined to express their creativity and share ideas in a public forum for centuries. Let’s take graffiti for instance. I seem to remember seeing examples from ancient Rome. (My art history professor would be so proud I remembered SOMETHING.) And today even, in restrooms, I observe disparate conversations scrawled across latrine doors. Now whether you consider graffiti destruction of public property or spontaneous self-expression is another debate - but the fact of the matter is that it has been around for a while.

Which brings me to this chalkboard wall, which is actually what got me thinking about all these other things in the first place. Such a simple idea that has so much potential for kids and friends and family. Not much different from graffiti, and also not such a far cry from analog read/write web - read/write reality. Granted there isn’t much of a mechanism for reverting your work on the chalkboard wall if someone draws all over it, but you get my point. I’m a master of the obvious today.