Web Design Cool

A novel concept for new breed of musical instrument.  Read more... (111 words, 2 images, estimated 27 secs reading time)

The program is one of six finalists in the $100,000 Buckminster Fuller Challenge.  Read more... (254 words, 3 images, estimated 1:01 mins reading time)

We all need icons and especially vector icons are the most common icons used by designers in their project. Basically everything you do, every project you have there is a 98% chance that you’ll need a icon for it.

I’ve created this post and added all the vector icons that you might ever need.

You can rest assured that you’ll never have to download some other icon set in the near future, because you’ll find in this pack over 100 EPS files and every EPS contains at least 20 icons. You do the math

You can see below all the previews of the icons you’ll get in this one single download that has 144 mb of vector icons.

 Read more... (196 words, 112 images, estimated 47 secs reading time)

Cows fart. A lot. And their gasses don’t just smell–they also spew toxic greenhouse gas emissions like methane and nitrous oxide. Thankfully, Jen Phillips at Mother Jones points us to this handy chart that crunched the numbers on the EPA’s $15 million worth of research on cow emissions data to figure out just how bad the farts are from state to state.  Read more... (132 words, 2 images, estimated 32 secs reading time)

You know when you meet a cute kitten, all fluffy, innocent and sweet…and when you stroke it it sinks four sharp teeth into your thumb? The sheer surprise of that is about the same as what Amazon’s just done to Penguin books over pricing.  Read more... (385 words, 3 images, estimated 1:32 mins reading time)

This week, Linda Tischler has revealed the ins and outs of Stanford’s new d.school building. We asked the students to provide some insight on their new digs as well.  Read more... (197 words, 2 images, estimated 47 secs reading time)

The wonderful work-life world of designer/inventor Steven M. Johnson. From his days at Honda, to his musings on office life, we look at a career of daydream creation. [Republished from Design Mind magazine.]

click on the image for more of Steven M. Johnson’s designs

I want to tell you about a statistic that changed my life and afterwards give you some thoughts about making your own data more life-changing. The stat was authored by my colleague Charles Fishman at Fast Company in his piece on the bottled water industry.First let me give you some backstory: In San Francisco, the city water comes from Yosemite National Park. It’s so clean that the EPA doesn’t require San Francisco to filter it. And it’s cheap: San Francisco city water costs about .0021 cents per ounce. Meanwhile, bottled water costs about 7.9 cents per ounce. So obviously bottled water costs a whole lot more. But you knew that.Now, let’s try a thought experiment. Let’s say you buy a bottle of Evian water for $1.35. You drink it and decide to reuse the bottle. Once a day, you fill it up with municipal water. Here’s the question: How many days could you refill that bottle before you could have racked up $1.35 in water charges from San Francisco? You could refill it once per day for 10 years, 5 months and 21 days.When I read that, my brain exploded. And my purchases of bottled water have probably gone down 80%. Here’s what’s interesting to me: Fishman’s thought experiment isn’t adding some data to these two original statistics. He’s adding drama and depth by putting them in a real-life context. And that’s the fundamental strategy needed to make numbers stick: To drag them within the grasp of our intuition.Here’s a more business-oriented example. For instance, years ago, Cisco Systems was deciding whether to install a wireless network for its employees. (That’s a “duh” decision today but not at the time.) The network could cost roughly $500 per year per employee to maintain. Is that worth it? Maybe yes, maybe no – we don’t have some strong intuition about $500 yearly expenses.One employee did something to activate intuition. He figured out that if the wireless network could save the average employee 1 to 2 minutes per day, it could be a good investment. Suddenly, that’s a problem we can think about. Can we imagine a situation where the network might save someone 2 minutes? Almost certainly yes. (Whereas if the network had required 52 minutes of daily savings, that could have been a hard sell.) So bottom line: To make your data stick, you’ve got to drag it within the grasp of your audience’s intuition.  Read more... (475 words, 1 image, estimated 1:54 mins reading time)

Uh oh, it looks like as well as U.S. governmental types, Facebook’s own user base is beginning to get angry about the site’s recent thrusts to redefine individual Net privacy. Does Mark Zuckerberg actually express concern? Nope.  Read more... (531 words, 3 images, estimated 2:07 mins reading time)

Red Sox fans, prepare to break something; Yankees fans, you can continue your smug gloating.  Read more... (266 words, 4 images, estimated 1:04 mins reading time)