The flow/state blog recently had a good series of posts on improving the new user experience on websites: hurdles at the entrance to a site, easing visitors in with anonymous accounts and slickest trial-to-signup yet. Well worth reading!
Andreas Gursky creates beautiful large-scale photographs. The supermarket shot above happens to be most expensive photo in history, at $3.3 million. Phew!
Driving a manual on the steep hills of San Francisco, I find Uros Pavasovic’s Fiat Scratch particularly appealing:
The Fiat Scratch comes pre-equipped with scratches and quirky lights that vaguely resemble freckles. The aim is to make drivers less protective of their cars and more able to lighten up and behave with tolerance on the road.
A concept design for a competition, the Fiat Scratch comes with a “scratch-happy” bumper that is explicitly designed to be more beautiful as it gets dented and nicked. You can find Uros’ competition entry at the Michelin site.
Two related concepts:
The first picture in this set of photographs by Eugene de Salignac is absolutely stunning.
As some of you may have guessed, posting has been light because I was busy launching offline functionality for Google Reader. Go try it out and let me know what you think!
More from the GEL conference:
Chris Jordan quit his job as a corporate lawyer to take high resolution pictures of huge piles of garbage. In his words, we have access to the good information about our consumption (through commercials, noticeable quality of life improvements, etc.) but we can’t see the cumulative, negative effects of this consumption. Chris’ goal is to make people aware of this waste … though one of my friends commented that the pictures were so beautiful, one might conclude that the trash is a good thing after all!
He also creates very large-scale composites that illustrate various statistics about the environment and the world. Raw data is emotionally meaningless; these pictures make statistics “visible”. I like these pictures less, but a worthwhile message and neat idea nonetheless
Another example of retrostalgia from Frog Design’s Samantha Holmes in this wonderful essay about her “love affair with the record player”.
At first, I was fascinated by the odd tension this might pose: the possibility of experiencing a pang of nostalgia for a past that never belonged to me – the establishment of a new period of time, outside the bounds of either a relived past or a fully embraced present.
Also check out the great picture by Bashed
This was taken on Polk Street, just a few blocks from my apartment. I got very lucky, as that car left just after I’d taken the shot (and it wouldn’t be the same without it). Original shot.
