October 27, 2010

Cubicle-ism


I was on a business trip to the Silicon Valley area last week, and had the chance to enter into one of the most dismal offices I’ve ever been in before. The upper floor had a full set of windows, but proceeding to the basement we found ourselves in a subterranean cubicle farm. The airport-sized room was partially dark as many of the cubicles seemed to have been vacated, but a head or two would occasionally pop up in the far end of the room. The large posts supporting the floors above were labeled by location, and the isles between cubicle rows seemed roomy enough. The picture above was snapped from this basement location.

When thinking about spaces that inspire creativity, this seemed like the opposite of one of those spaces. It reminded me of a print I bought back in 1994 at the Park City Arts Festival that I found rather comical entitled “Cubicle-ism”. I don’t remember the artist name, but his art mainly consisted of pasting different found pieces of art, illustration, and print work together to make a statement or story.

For this particular poster he had taken many of the master painters and stuck them in a cubicle farm, some working at what seem to be very old computers. I’ve always thought the statement he was making both comical and quite thought provoking.

Cubicle-ism poster

I myself work in a cubicle at my 9-6 job, but unlike those at that dismal basement location, I only have to turn 180 degrees to see beautiful Mount Timpanogos. I took the following picture from just behind my cubicle this afternoon.

I always find it refreshing to take a moment at my desk to look outside and get re-inspired to be creative again.

October 26, 2010

Understanding the human experience through travel

Machu Picchu masthead
I love to travel and I have always made it a priority to do so. When I think about it, my desire to really see the world began after being inspired by something Steve Jobs said in a Wired Magazine interview in the mid nineties. The idea behind the quote, which I wrote in the front of my college sketchbook at the time, pushed me to explore the world and expose myself to new ways of life and experiences. It goes like this:

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s a rare commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design he/she will have.”
Steve Jobs, co-founder Apple Computer, Founder NEXT computing
Wired Magazine, February 1996, page 163.

“Understanding the human experience”, wow what a great statement.

This last September I had the opportunity to visit Machu Picchu in Peru. This destination had been on my to-do list for some time and recession-related financial issues had kept me from doing so. In the beautiful ruins of this ancient Incan city, I found numerous points of inspiration not only in fine craftsmanship, but in the ancient people’s love of their Gods and the land. I have some specific examples that I’ll share in the near future; I still need to get an opportunity to organize some of the photos I took from the trip.

Links:
Wikipedia: Machu Picchu
Wired Magazine: www.wired.com

October 25, 2010

Who says RSS is dead? Ask.com does

Death of Bloglines masthead
Just over a month ago, I logged into my Bloglines account to read my RSS feeds just as I do on a daily basis. I found a red statement before me that said, “The Bloglines service will officially close October 1, 2010.” The date was later extended to November 1st.

I understand that businesses have to shift focus as the Internet changes from one technology platform to the other, funding is lost and hard decisions have to be made. But proclaiming the death of RSS? Is this true?

In a statement issued by Ask.com (who owned Bloglines, a fact I didn’t know), said, “…Flash forward to 2010. The Internet has undergone a major evolution. The real-time information RSS was so astute at delivering (primarily, blog feeds) is now gained through conversations, and consuming this information has become a social experience. As Steve Gillmor pointed out in TechCrunch last year, being locked in an RSS reader makes less and less sense to people as Twitter and Facebook dominate real-time information flow. Today RSS is the enabling technology – the infrastructure, the delivery system. RSS is a means to an end, not a consumer experience in and of itself. As a result, RSS aggregator usage has slowed significantly, and Bloglines isn’t the only service to feel the impact. The writing is on the wall.”

In other words, social experiences such as Twitter and Facebook have replaced the RSS aggregator? I disagree. Social media has enhanced the experience of getting to the best stuff in a crowded online world, but the RSS feed is the “subscription” to a constant flow my favorite stuff. There’s a difference there for me. Maybe that makes me old-fashioned?

I’ve already ported over my feeds to the Google reader which seems to be the leading next best thing, which is hard to say considering their terrible interface (I tell people with a scowl on my face, “it sucks!”). Perhaps Steve Gillmor (quoted in the Ask.com statement) is just upset because he was using Google reader.

I will miss Bloglines and thank the folks that ran it for providing me a daily feed to my favorite places online.

Links:
Bloglines: www.bloglines.com (at least for a few more days)
Ask.com’s Statement: Bloglines Update
TechCrunch Article: Rest in Peace, RSS

October 24, 2010

Flipboard for iPad

Flipboard for iPad masthead
As I finish re-tooling my new design for bradmccall.com, I’m finding how much less I want to “blog” about design in the typical sense of the word. There are some great designers out there who do that full time and have refined it down to a science. That’s not me. I’ve decided that I’m going to use my blog “zone” as a format for sharing things I’ve run across that inspire me.

Lately much of my inspiration has been linked to my new toy, Apple’s iPad.

After hearing that I had purchased an iPad, a coworker mentioned that I try Flipboard, an application that turns your Facebook, twitter, and other new streams into a new, more consumable format. After downloading it, I’ve found that I can hardly view my regular twitter stream in any other format versus the more compelling view that Flipboard has created. Just this simple “redesign” of information has inspired me to think of other things in my world that can be looked at in new ways. It’s a product where the aesthetic design and enjoyable interactions have clearly improved the experience.

Links:
Flipboard for iPad: www.flipboard.com
Apple iPad: www.apple.com/ipad

June 9, 2010

Under construction! (Pardon my dust?)

Under construction masthead
How long since you’ve seen a title like that? Yeah, not so user experience friendly, but I truly am working to re-create my whole site and to show my progress, this blog page may look REALLY ugly (depending on what day you visit). Watch for the new and improved site this year. Until then, I promise there will be no digging spade hardhat guys or big flashing detour graphics that will appear here.

Thanks!
Brad

September 29, 2009

Seamless patterns (some pixel) for wallpaper or backgrounds

Desktop Patterns Masthead

Repeating backgrounds for HTML have been around as nearly as long as I can remember. I first fell in love with the concept years ago while creating some for my desktop. (I had just discovered the wrap-around functionality in Photoshop and thought I was a genius). Most recently – if you call 2006 recent – I blogged about pixel patterns being used as wallpapers, as I played around with them for a couple of my site’s holding pages. (Like Tweet Sweet!)

Today I discovered a great link with a lot more resources than I had mentioned, and wanted to send you there to check it out: 27 Best WebSites to Download Free Seamless Patterns Some are graphic, a few are pixel, but all seem to be pretty high quality. Enjoy!

August 30, 2009

IKEA & Verdana as you’ve never seen them before

IKEA and Verdana masthead

I recently noticed that traffic to my blog article entitled IKEA is Coming to Utah and My Logo’s On It! increased, so I investigated why. I found it was because there was raised interest in IKEA based on this Time article The Font War: Ikea Fans Fume over Verdana published last Friday.

IKEA has always been one of those places that has been pretty clear on their brand. Buildings with their strong blue and yellow palette on the outside lead way to the inside where everything is labeled with unfamiliar names in a customized version of Futura. But all designers, and lovers of fonts are surprised to find out that IKEA has changed its catalog font to Verdana. Yes, VERDANA. (Oh the shock and horror of it!) Verdana which was specifically designed in 1996 to be readable at small sizes on a computer screen, it seems was never meant for print in the eyes of true lovers of type. It’s a ‘web’ font that’s clunky and outdates, especially in our new CSS world.

I for one (among many) mourn the loss. I understand that there are probably more issues involved (such as localization) that I may not know about, but Verdana in print? It’s a sad day for typography everywhere. And for corporations everywhere, note the outcry and remember that when you make the effort to develop a brand, your customers care.

IDSGN Article: IKEA says goodbye to Futura
Petition: Online petition against the change
TIME Article: The Font War: Ikea Fans Fume over Verdana

August 10, 2009

Trying something delicious

Delicious bookmark cloud masthead
After collecting interesting links in my Yahoo Notes, on 3 or 4 different computers (home and work) and emailing myself dozen of things “to read”, I finally decided to give Delicious a try. I’m still trying to figure out the best way to tag all of the things I’m interested in, but have already begun to make it a necessary part of my daily process to save links and refer back to frequently accessed searches. Here’s the tag cloud for Brad McCall’s bookmarked links thus far. Hopefully I’ll be able to incorporate this tag cloud into my future “About” page on bradmccall.com as I’ve seen some other designers do.

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