Design

One from the attic - 1961s “The Elements of Design” by Donald M. Anderson surveys the graphic landscape encompassing pretty much all modes of representation from the modern mathematic to the archaic organic, commercial to the avant garde through its 218 pages of largely black and white illustrated text. By treating visual matter in formal categories such as colour, shape, line and texture, the illustrations on any given spread cut across both time and culture to make some often surprising juxtapositions.
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News From Earth ^TM now with added clock.

Revisited News from Earth - added a brand-new analogue clock feature (get time, rotate object) and shifted the type to be more in-keeping with that as used on the spacecraft screens in 2001 - it’s still the best sci-fi inspired bbc rss newsfeed gathering widescreen desktop screensaver in the galaxy (download it).

Oh, and it’s still Windows only.

Sustainability is everywhere these days - but what about on the web?

It won’t come as a shock to any thinking person - but on a monitor dark colours tend to use less energy than light ones - so light backgrounds on websites ect. are actually causing us to use more energy than we need to. Energy Star show the wattage used for several colours. The energy use difference is much lower on LCD monitors, but darker is still more efficient, and that’s why Nightsoil has gone dark.

Of course the web is a network and The Sustainable Web is not just about the end-users energy …[more]

News from Earth transforms your boring old monitor into a randomly colour changing live news broadcast, inspired by the on-board spaceship screens from 2001: a space odyssey and it’s (under-rated) sequel 2010: the year we make contact - complete with mysterious TLAs.
Download News from Earth screensaver (PC only I’m afraid).

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The One Laptop Per Child project is an incredible idea. Design and build a laptop for under $100, and send it out to the third world. I’ve been intermittently following the project for a few years. As of now, the hardware has been made, and beta units of the XO are being shipped.

It’s incredibly interesting from a design perspecitve - from the ruggedisation (no HDD!), mesh networking to the user interface.

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