At the weekend I went to see this exhibition at the V&A Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green. It features more than 100 posters charting the history of the games and their eras through design, including prints from post-war London 1948, remarkably modern designs from Melbourne 1956 and works by David Hockney and Andy Warhol. Tokyo 1964 and Mexico 1968 are my favourite, but take a look for yourself…
Netlife Research illustrate several misuses of Web 2.0 interface elements in their 2008 Bad Usability Calendar. You can download a PDF of the calendar and print it in your office as a reminder of what not to do.
Great ad for Nike Football, shot from a first person perspective by Guy Ritchie
The Rather Difficult Font Game is quite a challenging test for any designers that think they know their fonts. Telling the difference between Arial and Comic Sans is easy, but when you are trying to make the the distinction between Adobe Caslon Pro and Adobe Garamond Pro, then, you need to know your stuff. Give it a go, and the score to beat is 24…
Dangerous Mike and I have spent the weekend at a tinker.it workshop, learning about Arduino. It’s a simple yet powerful board with a microprocessor that can be programmed using a language similar to processing.
Pretty soon after you’ve created your first working circuit, you start to realise that the possibilities are limitless. It can accept a variety of digital and analogue inputs, and can feed back to a computer, or be used to control any number of devices.
Already it has been linked up to numerous Flash applications, used to create a glockenspiel that plays a tune based on the magnetic strip on the back of your favourite credit card… Or you could use it to control a espresso machine, using a Wii remote. If you really wanted to.
And to think, some people waste a beautiful sunny weekend by going outside and sitting in parks or pubs.
While researching something completely different, I discovered there’s a whole community out there dedicated to collecting and documenting pencils and erasers. Even though I’m only casually interested in them, it’s still fascinating to see the variety of designs out there and how things have and haven’t changed. I also learned interesting but useless trivia like the origin of the electronics company Sharp’s name - it’s from their first product, the EverSharp mechanical pencil, from 1915. I was also surprised by how long ago the first mechanical pencil was invented. They may seem like a ‘modern’ product, but they were first invented in 1822.
Some select pencil sites:
- Wooden pencils: Pencil Talk, Brand Name Pencils
- Mechanical pencils: Dave’s Mechanical Pencils
- Erasers: Joy of Erasers, Erasersworld
As we mentioned a few months ago, Ranzie was on the CBBC programme ‘Beat the boss’.
The show aired yesterday, and has just gone live on the BBC i-player. Which means, you have 6 days left to see it! (Although, we may just have a recording of it in case you miss it!)
We’re not saying anything about whether he won or not…
We’re a sociable lot at tonic, and sometimes after a hard day of website-making, we enjoy nothing more than sitting in the local pub and mulling over the issues of the day.
Discussions of the current state of the economy, the political crisis in Zimbabwe, the plight of the Olympic torch as it makes it’s way to Beijing, who would win if we were to start a tonic fight club, no topic is considered too high-brow.
This time around I brought my camera along to try to catch some of the lively debates in action. However I only seem to have captured…
The Royal Mail have just released the new British Coin Redesign. The new designs have been chosen via an open competition which was widely publicised in the national media in August 2005 and attracted 4,000 entries. The winning designer is 26-year-old Matthew Dent, originally from Bangor who now lives and works in London as a graphic designer. The only question now is, ‘Have they aged the Queen too?’