Check out these awsome notes by Rachel Smith.
She has made them on her iPad using Sketchbook Pro from Autodesk.
Compared to this my own notes look like a gathering of sick pen strokes.
I have downloaded Sketchbook some time ago. But nothing I've made comes close to this. It's all about talent baby ;-)
Tip of the hat to Boetter.
A couple a weeks ago, I attended the conference An Event Apart in Boston, MA.
There I heard a presentation by Jason Santa Maria who talked about the narration of design. He briefly touched upon the french engineer Charles Joseph Minard and his Carte Figurative (from 1861) showing the progression of Napoleon and his army to Moscow and back in the
campaign of 1812.
The chart is famous for it's clear and simple communication of something incredibly complex, difficultly graspable and horrific (i.e. the progressively lower number of soldiers in Napoleon's army in relation to temperature and location).
Thereby the chart has become quite a guiding light for designers everywhere trying to communicate complexity with simple measures.
Another presenter at the conference Jeffrey Veen also referred to Minard's Carte Figurative. He pointed to the fact, that Minard himself said this beautiful thing about the chart:
"The aim of my carte figurative is ... to convey promptly to the eye the relation not given quickly by numbers requiring mental calculation."
Veen - a former designer at Google Analytics - has this insight to offer:
"Well designed sites "convey promptly to the eye" what's possible, while doing so intuitively as to avoid "requiring mental calculation." That's not to say we should treat people as stupid. Rather, we should help them focus on what they're trying to do, rather than struggle with the means for achieving it."
I don't see myself as much of a nerd. But when I actually get excited about a service like Google Chart API it makes me reconsider my self image :-))
Danish front runner ad agency WDP (also known as NetPeople) has drawn the conclusion that Google rules. Thus they have centered their site totally around Google searches. Take a look at www.wdp.dk
I see where they are going with this approach. Linking to Google search results about their work is a nifty, no nonsense way of showing potential clients that they know what the web is all about, namely search.
Still, a list of search results is a pretty naked promotion of site content and the over all design is pretty horrible in all its 'Googleness'.
That leaves me stranded between praising the concept as a nouvelle design idea and downing it for it's cheap looking design and total lack of structure.
This is a hilarious review of the Samsung E900 from the Guardian. The phone is verbally spanked to a degree that I almost start to feel sorry for the poor thing:
Samsung E900 seems to have been designed specifically to irritate anyone with a mind. It starts gently - a pinch of annoyance here, an inconvenience there - but before long the steady drip, drip, drip of minor frustrations begins to affect your quality of life
The new iPhone has sent people reeling in awe of Apples cunning design abilities. I too found myself excited about the damn thing. But then I read what Hugh Macleod of Gaping Void had to say on the matter and I found myself chuckling in agreement:
Everyone's been getting all excited about Apple's new "iPhone", but somehow I just can't be bothered.
I feel much the same way about my new MacBook Pro laptop, which I've had since November. The most interesting thing so far has been opening the cardboard box it came in. Since then it's been all downhill.
Yes, Apple is great. And the new Iphone sure looks sweet. But where is the critical distance you people of the Blogosphere!?
If you want to be successful in e-commerce don't copy the web design of Amazon! Sounds like a paradox doesn't it? Well, according to web usability expert Jakob Nielsen the design of Amazon only works because its implemented by the worlds largest e-commerce site. 
»The company is simply so different from other e-commerce sites that what's good for Amazon is not good for normal sites,« writes Nielsen and continues:
»Amazon has recently changed so much that the average e-commerce site will reduce its usability by emulating its design too closely.«
The usability pro points to several aspects of the Amazon design you should not attempt to do at home. Among other things he argues that Amazons cluttered pages are problematc - a single book page he analyzed contained no less than 259 links and buttons. He also sees Amazon's Internet-wide search feature as a problem: If people want to search the web, they'll go to their favorite search engine, not your site, he argues.
But not everything Amazon does is bad. Nielsen praises Amazon's login screen and their confirmation e-mail as well as their comprehensive product selection.
»Amazon lays claim to "earth's biggest selection" and for once, a company actually lives up to its slogan,« he writes.
