Category Archives: Design
Accelerator Diagrams
I’m working on a project to explain particle acceleration through design and interactivity. Using the International Linear Collider as a model, I created diagrams for each step in a collision experiment. They’re intended to help define a visual language for the project and will soon be animated and used as the basis for an interaction [...]
Text Masks with sIFR3
I’ve been using sIFR for a while to get pretty typography for my headers on this site. As part of my latest design refresh, I upgraded to the beta of sIFR 3 and discovered something cool in the process. It’s possible to embed an image within the flash movie used by sIFR and use the [...]
Under the Streets, Part 1
With 468 stations, more than 700 miles of track, and over 6,400 cars, the New York subway is one of the largest and most complex transportation systems in the world. As someone who has long been fascinated with railroads, maps, and public transportation in general, interacting with the subway on a daily basis has been [...]
On Costumes: The Obligatory Halloween Post
I stopped by the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade earlier this evening and caught these amazing pumpkin-headed puppets before the crowds got so thick that I couldn't see anything. At school, the Halloween celebration came early with a costume contest sponsored by the Communication Design department. A pair of students with wheeled hands and feet, representing [...]
Connections
Yesterday I got the chance to head out to the New York Hall of Science hoping to gain inspiration from their signage for a museum project I'm working on. Their wayfinding system was effective, but didn't provide too much enlightenment. The museum offered a nice assortment of hand-on exhibits, many that I had seen elswhere [...]
The only kind of Super Bowl post you’ll see me make
Continuing with the critique of television advertising, I just finished watching the playlist of super bowl advertising on Google Video. Overall, I think that I've been more impressed in years past, but there were definately a few high points. Some things that I noticed: Jerome Bettis for asthma control test (okay, admittedly, this is nit-picky [...]
Bad Nestle!
Sometimes I see an advertising campaign that just bugs me. I just watched a television ad from Nestle for their pre-made packaged cookie products. It showed a mother and her children baking cookies together with a voice over beginning "childhood quickly flies away like cookies on a plate". While the sentiment they're trying to convey [...]
Pondering Redesign
While I had a vague idea of features that I'd wanted to include when working on my current site design, I hadn't thoguht them through enough when I started. As it happened, the design evolved out of some things that I discovered while implementing a different design in css and just stuck. In this process, [...]
Be Patient, Peter
Back in December of last year, Erin, Leah, and I collaborated on a children's book for our ethics class. After much discussion of content, writing of text, drawing of pictures, and painting of backgrounds we all met one night in the student publicity office to assemble everything into a finished product. Many hours later, we [...]
Deconstructing a Process
On Sunday I spend nine hours at PNCA sitting in on a planning meeting for p:ear, a local nonprofit that works with homeless and transitional youth through arts, education and recreation programs. I was not there to learn about p:ear or to help them plan their future but to study their planning process as part [...]
