This little verbose gem brought to you by the fine folks on the Adobe Updater Team. Obviously still getting paid per word.

I was lucky enough to be chosen to present a topic in their Lightning Round sessions, and today is the day! So hopefully all of my hard work, power point nit picking, all those working weekends will finally pay off.

So far the conference has been a blast. Connecting with like minded folks, learning a thing or two, visiting the EffectiveUI Vancouver office (BTW: those guys rule!). I even got to catch up with an old colleague from way back in the past.

I’ve been so busy fluttering from here to there that I hadn’t had a moment to offer my sincere thanks for to IXDA (and the EffectiveUI marketing team) for giving me this opportunity. And I’m having a blast!

My presentation on How Gestalt Laws inform Interface Design is scheduled to begin in a few hours, and to be honest, I am totally psyched!

If you’re interested, you can follow the IXDA presentation tweets at: http://twitter.com/interaction09
And peep the photo pool at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/interaction09/

And until I return to the States, I’ll be all, “Youbetcha”, “Aboot”, and “Eh?”.

We didn’t have no fancy clone-stamp tool. All we had was our finger. “Smudge it some more,” they’d say, and we would.

Found at HumorPix. 

All six have unity, and can be read as one. All six have independence, and can exist alone. This is a fantastic example of successful information design. The viewer is lured in, and invited to explore. The subject matter, loaded with industry specific jargon, is explained in detail without abandoning the reader. There is much to learn from this. (Click the photo for a larger version.)

Image from “Flight Thru Instruments,” a 1945 US Navy pilot-training manual designed by the Graphic Engineering Staff at General Motors, under the direction of Harley Earl.

Found in  Telstar Logistics’ photostream.

How many more Amazon customers have to die before you take the “Suicide-bot” offline? How many more Mr. Bezos? One hundred? A thousand?

Via sickbastard’s blog, poor guy. (Here’s the book’s entire title.)

The idea is pretty simple, we define “unlocked” in a way that isn’t company or product specific, but rather stands for open, standard files, and allow anyone selling or creating unlocked files to use it. Then, of course each time the mark is used in conjunction with a product or store, it reinforces that meaning. Ultimately, over time, the hope is that consumers come to associate the ‘unlocked’ mark with compatibility and versatility, and to make a distinction that will shame all the DRM vendors (although they are obviously not easily shamed).  

Cheers to you gentlemen. After all: Graphic Design is the language of post-modern social revolution, and it’s always inspiring to see the teeth of advertising used against itself. Good luck in your quest, you have my support – even if you are a little heavy handed with that drop shadow and couldn’t kern your way out of a paper bag. 

Unlike a perspective painting or three-dimensional computer graphic, this windowed interface does not attempt to unify the space around any one point of view. Instead, each text window defines it’s own verbal, each graphic window it’s own visual, point of view…The multiplicity of windows and the heterogeneity of their contents mean that the user is repeatedly brought back into contact with the interface which she learns to read just as she would read any hypertext. She oscillates between looking at hypertext as a texture of links and looking through the links to the textual units as language.       

This characteristic can be exploited by good design. If you have a sound metaphor, and if you group you content into logical clusters, users will overlook any “differences” in data display. What always amazes me is that each discrete window or part is read individually and read collectively – simultaneously. Then, to top it off each piece is expected to transform independent of the whole. This gives you tremendous leeway that you are not afforded in any other art form. The post-structuralists would have a field day.Of course, this doesn’t take into consideration interaction, only the presentation layer. Everyone knows that looking fabulous and performing horribly is only tolerated in Hollywood.

You can’t force people to follow directions they deem arbitrary.

I bet if that gate spit out $100 bills people would use it.

Update: Eagle-eyed readers have spotted the original post (perhaps) and the actual location. Doug remembers seeing the photo on “Bruce Schnier’s blog talking about the effectiveness of security.” And Mortiz pin-points the useless gate as being outside the University of Bielefeld in Germany. Thanks y’all.

Michael Wesch, PhD, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, once again drops some elegant, structured and easily digestible visual atom bombs. You’ve seen his work before with the awe-inspiring Web 2.0 explanation: The Machine is Us/ing Us. This time, it’s his take on information management and categorization in the age of the Internet.

“Such features are not just cool tricks. They change the basic rules of order.”

Snap.

“It refers to the idea that one’s understanding of the interface as a whole is established by reference to the individual parts; and one’s understanding of each individual part by reference to the whole. Neither the whole interface nor any individual part can be understood without reference to one another, and hence, it is a circle.”

Natch.