Ive been meaning to begin cataloging the collection of prints I have from various exhibitions, events and artists. Well, to start things off, here’s my favourite piece : Shepard Fairey’s Obey With Caution .

If you are unfamiliar with Fairey or his work, he started life as a skater street artist, and has made a career out of subversiveness.

I really like the boldness of the lines, the simplicity of shape and colour, and the power with which his communications resonate beause of these design choices.

As you can see from this picture, this print is numbered 262 of a limited run of 300 and is signed by Fairey. Given the number printed, I should probably take a bit more care with it, but I prefer to just hang it off its bulldog clip and enjoy Can’t remeber exactly which year I bought it, but I do remember it was at a Flash conference in Sydney - it must have been around 2000 or 2001… Anyway, enjoy!

Update: The print is signed 2002, and was bought at the iDN Fresh Conference.

So last week I had the opportunity to get my hands dirty with PaperVision3D. As mentioned previously, the company I work for has been responsible for implementing the 2008 Earth Hour website.

Well, as part of that, I had a crack at visualising the global support being given to the Earth Hour movement. Using AS3, I first load in a zipped text file containing lat/longs of each user sign up, and of those users broken down by country, which I uncompress and iterate over to create textures. I then use PaperVision3D to generate a set of spheres which I wrap the textures around, and add some simple mouse interactions.

I settled with an early release of the engine - but am keen to have a go at the 2.0 branch and see if it speeds things up.

Global Earth Hour supporters

So, what to do when your presented with a week off? You could spend time catching up on the InterWebs, you could try and reply to all those emails asking you to buy Viagra or rescue some Nigerian Prince from the global credit crunch… or you could do something rewarding and totally offline. I chose the latter (something I’m doing more and more these days when I can get away with it )

Yup, nothing Ikea about this puppy - not a single allen key was harmed making this coffee table! Unfortunately I didn’t have the presence of mind to take shots as I was building it, so you’ll just have to take my word.

Materials
The top is actually an offcut from a solid-core fire rated maple door. Very heavy, but has an excellent grain. I (with some help from my step father Roger), had to repair one end of the offcut, filling it with a spare piece of maple trimming - because the internal cavety of the door is filled with particle board which looks butt ugly!

The shelf is another spare piece of MDF that Rog had lying around, with the rest of the table made out of pine (the legs were bought from Bunnings for 20 bucks each). Because of the design, each leg needed to have mortiose joints to accomodate the shelf, and rebates cut at the top for the tabletop brackets.

The bracket was attached to the top using liquid nails, and allowed to set. Then the legs were arranged, and the shelf supports carefully inserted into their mortises, and again everything was set with liquid nails - legs to brackets and top, shelf supports to mortoise joints. As everything was setting, the legs were then nailed to the bracket and top using a nail gun. The shelf was added last, much like a puzzle piece. It isn’t fixed to the supports, but is rather a snug fitting piece.

It still needs to be stained, but I’m just waiting for the timber colours to go off, but we are considering something dark with a hint of red. Maybe a Jarrah or similar.

Tools

• Nail gun
• Plane
• Drop saw
• Panel hacksaw
• Clamps
• Liquid Nails
• Triton workbench
• Chisel

Cost

• Time -Approx 12 hours (including beer-stops)
• Materials - Approx $50 plus offcuts

Oh, and for those interested, the wonderful fruit bowl shown on the top of the coffee table was given as a wedding present by the folks at Redant, and is by Italian designers Alessi.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of spending time in several bookshops, just browsing. One of the stores I visited was Kinokuniya, in George St. It’s a great store (if at times a little over-priced), with a huge range of books. But because the shop is so large, they try and help shoppers with a touch-screen kiosk that searches for your book, and prints out a map of where the book is located (if it’s in stock).

As you can see, it’s a very simple interface. In fact, this is the second screen. The first screen lets you choose what items you want to search on, author name, book title, etc. And the results are very accurate. But this screen in particular, while it may look simple enough, it’s perhaps a little too simple. Why?

QWERTY
Yes, Qwerty layouts might not be as optimised for performance as Dvorak’s, but it’s what we know.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

I put it to you, that when presented with a keyboard-esque layout for entering text, our brains, which are now so used to the standard qwerty layout, have great difficulty swapping to the unrelated visual order of the Kinokuniya interface. Sure, it’s simple, but it’s been overly simplified.

Did I miss something?
Funny enough the thing I missed - which you might have on first glance as well - is the button “PC Keyboard mode”. Sorry, but im not using this kiosk to set my personalised options - there is no ubicomp going on here, I just want to search for a book. So as far as im concerned, my brain is like “this button doesnt even exist”. Especially when im standing on an angle to the screen, AND my focus is on the keyboard, and not in the bottom right corner.

While the time difference between using Qwerty or not wouldn’t be measured even in minutes, it just bugs me they dont use Qwerty by default, AND that I have to choose to use it. I dont want to have to learn another layout. Ive already got to deal with mobile phones, pda, dvd’s, security locks… my brain just wants to enjoy the browsing experience. I want to find a book.

iPhone
Interestingly, I initially had the same reaction (but for different reasons) to the use of the Qwerty layout on the iPhone.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

After using Nokia mobile devices for such a long time, with their predictive text and limited 12 button interface, I thought that using the qwerty layout for sms was too complicated, and perhaps it is (I haven’t had a chance to really play with the SMS capabilities of the iPhone - not having one of my own!!), but at least Apple didn’t attempt to come up with a new layout.

Conclusion
The Kinokuniya kiosk may be helpful, but from an interface design point of view, I find it ignores the user and their use-case. It is (for want of a better term) undesigned. And although undesign can be found everywhere and is a legitimate approach to interface design, ignore the user at your own peril!

Found around the Pyrmont area, these Lost signs are actually subversive advertising for the new dating website Meet My Friend.

And while it certainly catches your eye (which I guess is the whole point), it stretches the friendship when you realise that it’s not some poor sod whose gone missing, but some start-up looking for clients. It seems I’m not the only one who feels this way either.

Reaction
It’s the name of the game I guess. Illicit a reaction from the viewer, in the hope that they will tell their friends what they saw. Increase brand awareness at minimal cost. Viralness. And if you look it at it from that point of view, it certainly works. After all, im blogging about it, so it got me talking/thinking/reacting didn’t it?

However, beside the fact im married, this kind of advertising would not lead me to actually use the service. If this kind of guerrilla campaign turns people 50/50, then id be in the camp that get turned away, not towards. My 2 cents.