One thing that surprises me is how few people use RSS feeds to keep updated with news and blogs. Even though it saves users countless time, few seem to know about or understand what it is. Whenever I try to explain RSS, it’s hard to get across what exactly it does in a clear and concise manner. So if it’s difficult to communicate the value of new technology that’s essentially invisible, how do you do it?
Enter Common Craft, a company I found yesterday via Twitter, who they’d produced a video for. They use simple paper drawings to explain concepts like Wikis and social bookmarking in short and clear presentations. Check out their RSS video:
Common Craft then license better versions of these videos to individuals and companies, as well as creating custom ones for clients. It’s a neat way of explaining Web technologies to people and an inspiration for anyone trying to wrestle with a tricky concept.
As books go, The art of looking sideways is a pretty big one. At 1066 pages, Alan Fletcher’s “primer in visual intelligence” is not something you can take with you to work or quickly use as a reference. It is, however, an interesting compilation of ideas which is well worth a look at.
Arranged in 72 chapters, The art of looking sideways is more a collection of anecdotes, quotations, odd facts and random material than a guide to design. There are no rules or guidelines, but instead numerous snippets of knowledge. In a way, it is about everything and nothing, a compendium of thoughts gathered through years of experience.
You can use it in a few ways. First of all, you could read it in a linear fashion, soaking up information chapter by chapter. You could also open a few pages a day at random and be inspired. Because of its massive size, you get the impression that every time you read it, you’ll find something new and that you’ll never exhaust it. Either way, you could use it for design ideas, since there is no visual consistency and every page has its own individual style.
The art of looking sideways is one of those coffee table books which might come across as overpriced and pretentious, but given a chance, it delivers on its promise to entertain and inspire.
I only subscribe to two podcasts and one of them is TED. Technology Entertainment Design conferences take place every year and videos of talks are now available online for free. Apart from having an awesome website design, the speakers are what makes TED worth paying attention to.
People who have given talks include Al Gore, Richard Branson, Philippe Starck, Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), J.J. Abrams (Lost, Cloverfield), Bill Clinton, Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com), Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Steven Levitt (Freakonomics), Sergey Brin and Larry Page, amongst others. The list alone tells its own story!
Some of the best talks are those where the speaker doesn’t talk directly about what they do, but about something entertaining but enlightening. Malcolm Gladwell’s (Tipping Point, Blink) talk is particularly good, for example. If you’ve ever got a spare twenty minutes or are looking for something interesting to watch, then TED.com has an endless amount of inspiration.
As books go, The art of looking sideways is a pretty big one. At 1066 pages, Alan Fletcher’s “primer in visual intelligence” is not something you can take with you to work or quickly use as a reference. It is, however, an interesting compilation of ideas which is well worth a look at.
