Tangentially design related, but a follow up to my previous post about the International Space Station: Apparently a free-tailed bat was a stowaway on the fuel tank of the Discovery shuttle mission that made the recent delivery to the ISS.

It held on as rocket boosters fired and held on as the shuttle headed up above the launch tower. It is thought to have eventually been shaken off and incinerated. (A bat expert who inspected the pics after the fact postulated that it had a broken wing, and so couldn’t fly away sooner.)

After the bat was discovered during pre-flight walkthroughs, shuttle engineering did debris analysis on him and ultimately a waiver was written to accept the stowaway and allow the launch to continue as planned.

This was reported on the news at the time but I missed it. Aww. Poor bat. But great that the sensors and monitoring of the shuttle takeoff can notice such a miniscule thing. Can’t wait for 2001-like space flights. I hope in my lifetime. I hope.

UPDATE: Images now link to larger versions…

Wow. The new Sony OLED TV has impressive specs and garnered a lot of press, but you have to see it in person to really experience the jaw-dropping clarity of the moving image it displays.

It is currently on display (and available for purchase, just $2,499) at the Sony Style | Comcast Labs cool place (I mean, store) below the Comcast Center at 17th and JFK.

The Organic Light Emitting Diodes have a million-to-one contrast ratio and produce incredible color.

Looking at it is not like looking through a window. There is no glass in the way. Look through the little 12″  frame and you see what appears to be reality on the other side. Go check it out.

I really always wonder how product and brand designs like this can hang around as long as they do.

Perhaps it’s a matter of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Or perhaps they still have printed bags left over from the 1930′s? Doubtful. But amusing.

Okay, not to mention the product name itself. Also a relic from earlier times, I imagine.

And Bryn Mawr Smokers Sundries is now Chenille Kraft Company in Illinois, with a single graphic placeholder website.

Maybe I should offer them my services…

The separation of content and style is a philosophy that is strongly encouraged in design, and especially web design these days.  The main idea is that this allows great flexibility. Colors and styles can be changed without affecting actual content — text or photos.  Different styles can be applied depending on how a visitor is viewing, such as via computer, mobile phone, or as a printed out version of a page.

It’s tricky to fully put into actual use, though, and most web designs I’ve seen or created mix style with content at least a small amount. 

The one exception is blogs — especially template-based blogs hosted on providers like typepad.com and wordpress.com.  In this case, the content must be separate from the style, because the front-end content is constantly changing, being updated and rearranged by the blogger.

Additionally, in order to maintain full functionality offered by these services, the back-end, behind the scenes content also has to stay the same (for the most part), and can’t be changed or accessed by a designer at all.

This was the challenge I faced in redesigning the blog from my previous post to match the rest of my client’s (totally custom built) website.  I learned quite a bit more than I knew before about CSS styling during this project.  Perhaps I will post some tips on what I discovered. In general, a success.

Before

After

I am moving this post here from an old blog I started a few years back which has lain dormant for a while. The one post that did garner a bunch of attention was the Adobe Bridge script I cobbled together to automate creation of the XML needed to use the lovely photo gallery presented by the developers of Adobe Spry. I’ve used this script to create photo galleries for many client sites as well as my own.

I do plan on addressing code design here, so this is an appropriate place for the script to live.

Spry is a relatively new and easy-to-use AJAX library. AJAX use is very common on the web today, one of the technologies that powers what is often referred to as “Web 2.0.”

Basically, the technology allows webpages to change and update without requiring the user to “refresh,” “reload,” or navigate to another page.  For example: Gmail, which updates every incoming mail every so often without user interaction. And saves drafts every so often in the same fashion.

Find the download link and nuts and bolts of using the script after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Proofreading is important in print design, and that means more than running spell check. The omnipresence of auto spell check has allowed designers to become much more lazy on this point.

Instead it should make them more vigilant (note to self!), because this reliance makes it easier for other kinds of errors to make it into final products.

For example, grammatical inaccuracies. Or simply typing “cat” instead of “can”. Or using the wrong version of a homonym.

Fixing those that do slip by can look almost as silly as the mistake in the first place.

For example, this sign in a shop on South Street has a word cut out of it and replaced. It immediately caught my eye — I was just walking past, rather quickly, when I saw it (okay, okay, I admit, I shop there everyday… .

It looks silly, and makes the whole shop look kind of second-rate, which it’s not (it’s actually a rather fancy “erotica shop”).

My husband speculated that maybe this was part of a marketing campaign, a sign with a changeable tag line. We pondered what other slogans could be featured:

“Better LEAVE Your Boyfriend”
“Better WANT Your Boyfriend”
“Better KILL Your Boyfriend”

None of which seemed as likely as the mixup of then/than making it all the way to the final printed poster.

The International Space Station is very near completion with the success of the latest mission, the addition of the S6 Truss, the last part of the station’s “backbone.”

The design of the ISS evolved somewhat over the years since it was first conceptualized, but hasn’t changed too much.  It’s a relatively elegant structure.

I was surprised to remind myself that the Station’s construction began very recently in 1998, after the end of the Cold War allowed designs and ideas to flow more freely between Russia and the US, and also with Europe, Japan and others.

The ISS is a momentus accomplishment. Not only the impressive technology, but the coordination of design and construction thoughout so many nations all over the world.

One of the most important goals of graphic design is to facilitate communication. I am surprised when people don’t recognize this fact. (Cough, cough, my dad, when I was describing this project to him!)

My sister, Tamar, runs a non-profit in New York City called the Women in Prison Project at the Correctional Association of NY. The CA has been around since the 1860′s, and has a mandate and a right, written into the NY State consitution, to monitor conditions in New York State prisons.

Tamar’s work focuses on the women’s prisons in the state, and in addition to inspecting and monitoring the prison conditions, her group also coordinates advocacy groups, lobbying efforts and re-entry programs.

Monitoring conditions in prisons, and reporting the findings, is a slippery slope. Physical visits to prisons need to be coordinated well in advance, and, like any inspection, a lot of “tidying up” will happen before the inspectors arrive. (Think cleaning up your house before a dinner party.) The resultant inspection will most likely find things in different state than they normally would be (Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle’s observer effect applies).

So Tamar decided to also gather data on prison conditions another way — by asking questions of the inmates themselves. 

She enlisted me to help transform her pages upon pages of questions into something the inmates would want to pay attention to, something they might even view as fun, and not become bored with. We worked hard to create documents with enough color, whitespace, consistency and clarity to elicit a large and accurate response.

We’ve created a few different surveys by now, on general prison conditions, on reproductive health issues and more, that have been sent out to all incarcerated women in New York State, and the response has been very good. 

I learned quite a bit about graphic design of surveys doing this, but also a lot about design in social communication — how to craft each question, in what order to ask them, how not to be leading towards a certain answer, and how to view questions as your target audience would. This can be helpful in business situations just as well.

Check out one of our finished surveys here, if you wish.