Link Banana

I’m not sure why, but this bit of idle technological speculation caught my eye. Jonathan Hedley wants to know why all modern mice seem to use a clearly inferior design.

Matrix found that the best place for the ball was up front as far as possible between the users thumb and forefinger. The forefinger can be controlled very precisely — much more so than the wrist and forearm. Matrix found that users would move their wrist and arm to move the cursor are large distance, but for fine control relied on the thumb and forefinger.

.. It simply seems that designers and manufacturers have, over the years, forgotten about the benefit of putting the sensor up front, or have placed precision and control further down their list of priorities. I hope that this isn’t the case: that newer research has shown that the current placement is the correct placement, or that something else has changed over time. But if that’s not the case, then I hope that some design team will rediscover either the principle, or the findings — so that we can continue to strengthen the connection between the user and the computer.

(via Big Contrarian)

Far more variable than you might think. The comparison of various renderings is well worth a look.

(via kottke)

I’m a touch late, but Cabel Sasser has collected some thoroughly entertaining pictures of fireworks packaging. It’s ersatz America through the eyes of Chinese gunpowder manufacturers. What could be better?

Some things are just cool.

(via Neatorama)

You may have seen this already, but it’s too cool not to share. A New York apartment with puzzles and mysteries built right in.

Architectural Record has an interesting run-down of the most innovative skyscraper designs that were never realized.

Because sometimes the gentle therapy of turning virtual pages of solid color is all you want to do.

(via MetaFilter)

One problem with building new cities where nothing was: architects have no idea how to design buildings.

In Dubai, for instance, what might once have been the product of 100 years of urban growth has been compressed into a decade or so. Given such seismic shifts, even the most talented architects can seem to flounder for new models. No one wants to return to the deadly homogeneity associated with Modernism’s tabula rasa planning strategies.

It’s today’s entrant for the cool-but-pointless prize.

(via GOOD)

Or “a picture that uses a pair of legs to frame something, usually a torso, in the picture.” Print Magazine — which appears to have little talent at web design — has documented hundreds of examples of what it calls “the most popularly copied trope ever used.” Am I the only one that thinks it’s a little bit dirty?

(via kottke)

Logoblink has amassed a collection of campaign logos from 1960 to today. I’m not sure which is more remarkable: how little they’ve changed or how much they’ve stayed the same. (Editor’s note: That childish quip is an unfair slight of all the interesting oddities that makes the list worth viewing.)

(via kottke)

Designing the News has a pretty clever idea for advertising: using pictograms. Admittedly, part of the reason I like it is it reminds me of a childhood “activity books.”

(via Magnetbox)

In the category of “news so weird there seems to be a moral obligation to convey it,” Victoria’s Secret is accused of having stolen the design for a bra from a Long Island paralegal, Katerina Plew.

“The first time I thought of it I was getting ready for a christening,” Ms. Plew said in a telephone interview from her home in Selden, N.Y. “It was an idea that just popped into my head in — don’t know — like March of ’99.”

The bra, with its various hooks and eyelets, is something like the Micronaut of the undergarment world. By a complicated set of maneuvers, it can be worn in as many as 100 different ways.

Which, of course, made it a highly prized commodity to underwear purveyors. In 2006, Ms. Plew said she had arranged to meet with designers from Victoria’s Secret. But without warning and on the very day it was set to have occurred, the designers canceled her appointment, she contends.

This week’s oddly cool charts are provided by Matt Mason and Nicholas Feldon for We Tell Stories. In a beautifully presented (but sometimes confusing) set of grids, they argue that life today is full of many kinds of problems but that there’s a great possibility for as many kinds of solutions.

(via Snarkmarket)

I’ve been fiddling with the site recently. You may have noticed. Mostly it means that I’ve made most things a tad smaller and thus more compact. Thanks to that, I’ve taken the opportunity to increase the number of posts visible on the front page. Currently, that only means there are 15 (up from 10) but I may increase it more.

The other thing is that now when I forget the link on a post — something I do far too often — the title text will be visibly different (as is intentionally the case with this one). Hopefully this means that such errors will be corrected much faster, but I can make no guarantees.

If you ever notice anything that’s broken or wrong or just requires commentary, please use this form.

I’m not that big a fan of art museums, but I think I’d have to go the new exhibit “Design and the Elastic Mind” at the MoMA were I anywhere nearby. Two would-be highlights are victimless leather:

“I FELT cruel when I turned it off,” says Paola Antonelli, senior curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The “it” in question is a tiny coat that has been grown in a test tube using cells around a biodegradable polymer structure. The coat had flourished to such an extent that its “life support” system had to be switched off to stop it getting too big.

And this:

Most entertainingly, however, the exhibition illustrates this theme with a screen-based system that projects silhouettes of visitors and then mutates them into sci-fi monsters. This is hugely popular with children (and journalists) and if nothing else would make a perfect executive toy.

The UK’s Royal Mint does it right:

As you can see [by clicking the title link], the Shield of the Royal Arms has been given a contemporary treatment and its whole has been cleverly split among all six denominations from the 1p to the 50p, with the £1 coin displaying the heraldic element in its entirety. This is the first time that a single design has been used across a range of United Kingdom coins.

(via kottke)

I’d already mentioned the BBC redesign when I came across a charming chronicling of opinions about it.

But I thought it was more fun to give the last word to Ed, who didn’t just dislike the new design, but found it: “Very insulting!”

(via preoccupations)

They meet in the zeroHouse.

(via Magnetbox)

I’m fascinated by typography even though I don’t understand a thing about it. This link includes a visual of the following:

They speak the arm (of, say, an E), the crotch (of an M), which could further be described as an acute crotch or an obtuse crotch, the ear (of some g’s), which might be a flat ear or a floppy ear, the eye (of an e), the leg (of a k), the shoulder (of an n), the tail (of a j or a Q), and the spine (of an S).