I'm a minimalist but the art director in me says: all but two or three of these are design failures. Don't get me wrong, they look lovely, but they fail to fulfill the products' core brand promises.For all but the …
This is a brilliant animation featuring education reform & creativity expert Ken Robinson. His central thesis is that all modern education systems are built on industrial-age models that are no longer appropriate. Take 12 minutes to watch it, you won’t …
I wish I knew how to surf, and how to make things with my own hands. I never tried the first and I fail repeatedly and miserably at the second.(Inspired by this interview with Jay Nelson.) …
Because every designer is apparently required to have an opinion about the (now scrapped) new Gap logo, I feel compared to clarify:This design monstrosity is nothing like the scrapped new Tropicana logo, or the despised new Pepsi brand. Those two …
(From a comment I left on BikePortland.org, more info here) I have two dogs in this fight. So I've spent a few hours thinking about my reaction and writing it down. I apologize in advance for the length.Beginning in the …
Tonight on my ride home up Montgomery Drive I passed a woman walking her bike up the hill. Don't ever do this.I've written previously about this hill and how I conquered it. Here’s my recipe for mastering hills:Ride your bike …
I have not been feeling the Drupal love lately. Drupal seems hell-bent on making my designs as difficult as possible. I thought this reflected either a technical failure on Drupal's part, or a profound lack of getting-it on mine.This weekend …
I get “networked” a lot, especially now that I’m working at Mercy Corps (which is a really great place to work). Similarly, a lot of people come to me with leads: “do you know any Drupal developers?” That kind of …
Dave Moulton writes:Pro-cycling change is happening all over the US, and I believe it is partly because of this change that the non cycling public is kicking against it; people don’t like change.This is probably true but I think it's …
In 1994, when I was 23, I was shopping for graduate schools. I remembered a paper I’d read by U of O archaeologist Madonna Moss, “Shellfish and Gender.” So I applied to the U of O. A year later Dr. …
My wife is a teacher and I help her a lot with creating and planning computery classroom things. I used to work at a school, where I helped teacher create and plan computer classroom things. At that school I also …
For two years in college (1990–1991) I shelved books at the University of Nebraska’s Love Library. One day I discovered a whole class of reference books I had no idea even existed: town directories. Love Library had collected all of …
I’m in Seattle right now for a web conference. When I travel I’m highly aware of my usual patdown routine. This is the thing I do every time I leave the house: I pat all my pockets to check for …
ONEThis morning when I got the trailer loaded up in POURING FRICKING RAIN I thought “today is a ‘tough’ day, not a ‘fun’ day.” Before we even left the driveway I was defeating myself. I started up the street with …
Today, peopleforbikes.org asked me to share my ideas about “improving the future of cycling.” Here’s what I wrote them:Check out this ad, for the Gap: This ad for pants does more for bike advocacy and bike love than any specifically …
For the last decade or so, every time I wanted to design something like a “subheader,” I’d code it like this: <h3 class="subheader">This is a subheader</h3> And then I’d define a style in the main stylesheet like this:.subheader { color: …
Dave Moulton wrote today about the evolution of mountain biking. He asked for his readers’ “take on the period” — here’s mine:I grew up in rural Nebraska in the 1970s when banana seats gave way to BMX. My favorite thing …
So I’ve been thinking a lot about the recent sentencing of Antonio Cellestine in the hit-and-run death of Gordon Patterson. Mr. Cellestine was, by his own testimony and subpoenaed cel phone records, texting at the time (and smoking a cigar). …
...via a music-related internet discussion group consisting mainly of people I know in the Real World™ (i.e. 30- to 40-something white people, mostly male). Prior to today all I knew about Lady Gaga was the name. Based only on this …
...has not apparently rendered Oregon drivers any less inattentive.I’m all YAY for this new law but it feels like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Hell, it feels like writing a strongly-worded letter to the White Star Lines home office …