Coding with Fountain Pens

The New York Times has a great information graphic showing Olympic medals won by various countries over time.  It reminds me a lot of gapminder, although I’m not sure if it is related.

The user interface design snafu that bothers me the most is the “hit cancel for credit” routine while swiping your card at a local retailer.  Clearly, it would be ideal to present a choice between credit and debit with separate buttons on the touchscreen, as opposed to defaulting to debit and requiring the user to […]

One Laptop Per Child is an effort to produce a $100 laptop that can be distributed en masse to the school children of the world.  The first pass attempt at the hardware was going for $200, featured a 400 MHz CPU, flash for storage and wifi. And it’s powered by winding. That’s great, but the […]

I’ve long had a poor opinion of the plastic clamshell packaging encasing many products, especially electronic gizmos.  Considerable technique is required with the scissors to avoid major injury, and indeed the packaging has been blamed for 6400 emergency room visits in 2004. Seth Godin approaches the packaging from a slightly different angle, highlighting how ridiculous […]

Truly new thinking always has to break through a barrier of skepticism before gaining wider adoption.  I’m sure this is true of Urban Farms, an idea that at first blush sounds slightly crazy, but may have real benefits.  It seems that in a world of increasing transportation costs, producing food right in an urban center […]

The Clear Sky Clock shows overhead viewing conditions for astronomers with a unique graphical presentation of the information. Created with data from Environment Canada, time is laid out horizontally, and colored squares indicate cloud cover, transparency, and darkness through the next 48 hours. Nice, simple information design.

If you’ve ever tried to get work done in an environment that prevents you from doing so, you may appreciate this photo essay from The Guardian, showing the rooms various writers write in. Themes seem to be a lot of books, and a modicum of clutter. [via Lifehacker]

If you’re tired of wrangling broadcast times for television out of tv.yahoo.com or tvguide, I’ve finally found a simple, decent television calendar site. CAT allows you to display only a whitelist of the programs you’re interested, as well as simple nomenclature for episode numbers, mouse-over synopses, and correct time display for your time zone. All […]

Wired has an article about the increased importance of design to manufacturers like HP and Dell, and area Apple has historically been strong in. A lot of traditional engineering business are rapidly turning into fashion businesses.  Technology is not enough.