Design: September 2007 Archive Page

ArsTechnica:

Rumors of Google's plans to create a virtual world that rivals that of Second Life have popped up once again over the weekend. The company could now be collaborating with Arizona State University to test the 3D social network, which may be tied into Google's current applications of Google Earth and Google Maps.

I really like Google's 3D model builder, SketchUp, but was frustrated because you can't really interact with (walk around in) the models you create, and the free version does not let you export the models to other programs, so I did not explore it much.

Google never releases a product until it's thoroughly ready for the general public, so I have high hopes for the user interface attached to Google's 3D world (whatever it should be like).

How will Google make money off of this? In-world ads? Virtual shopping malls? I have no idea.

The marketers and programmers at Google's Blogger.com are not speaking with each other much, or so it would seem.

The folks in charge of the home page love verbs. 

Here's a thumbnail I cropped from the blogger.com home page.








Verbs, verbs, everywhere verbs!  Create! Publish! Go! Post! Interact!  Take a tour! Name your blog!  Okay, well "Get" as they use it in "Get Feedback" is a bit lame, but it's better than "Feed!"

Bear in mind I'm analyzing just one tiny sliver of the site, but the designers know that every square inch on a home page is precious, and look at how much effort they put into using verbs.  For crying out loud, if you type the URL www.blogger.com, you're forwarded to a page named "start," and the inline title of that page is "Blogger: Create your Blog Now -- FREE"   

But have you tried leaving a comment on a Blogger site lately? Here's the message you get:

Your comment has been saved and will be visible after blog owner approval.

Oh! The pain!

A scene from Ridley Scott's youth, via Wired:

The air smelled like toast. Toast is quite nice, but when you realize it's steel, and it's probably particles, it's not very good. Crossing the footbridge at night, you'd be walking above the steel mill, crossing through the smoke, dirt, and crap, looking down into the fire.

I missed this when it came out during a recent rush of newshole fodder about Anna Nicole Smith. It is predictable yet slightly amusing for the first minute and a half, but be sure to watch past that point -- I'm still recovering from my coughing fit.
 

Great Zork map.

Emily Short reviews a game that tries to make a point:

While I sympathize with the message of the game, it didn't really work for me, for two reasons.

First, the game is irritating to play. It's impossible to undo mistakes (if you accidentally confiscate someone's pants instead of his shoes, for instance, as I did repeatedly) and the list of banned items is posted at the opposite corner of the screen from the passenger luggage list, which means that you have to look back and forth quite a lot. Many of the frustrations that constitute the "message" of the game result from game design decisions, even screen layout decisions, and not from the system being emulated. This is the game-design equivalent of a rhetorical cheap trick.

Second, the game doesn't argue the issues. I agree that TSA guidelines tend to be arbitrary and that they don't make us safer, but this game doesn't really argue that; it takes these facts as read. It felt more like an exercise in whipping up the indignation of people who already agree with the central premise. There's much to be indignant about in the American political environment lately, but I don't think my inconvenience in going through transport security is the most important issue by a long shot.

Most academic slide shows are dreary affairs. Our students might as well be writing "I will not think outside the box" on the blackboard 100 times.

Imagine a conference in which every presenter spoke for exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds. Is it heaven, or is it a pecha-kucha night? That would leave a lot of room for conference attendees to, you know, confer. (Wired offers a good intro to pecha-kucha, and an example.)

The inventors of the concept have trademarked it, which I confess is a bit of a downer for me; nevertheless, the slideshow genre needs this kind of creativity. The inventors are architects, so it makes sense that their style emphasizes quality images that are worth looking at for 20 seconds. Larry Lessig, a lawyer, has a very different presentation style, which can involve a hundred slides or more, but each slide might only contain a few words; he cycles through them rapidly as he's talking.

Then, of course, there's comedian Don McMillan's spoof of over-designed slideshows.