Source: www.adhemas.com

Welcome to Fall of 2006!
So excited to start the new school year! Great events in store!
Source: msugraphicdesign.typepad.com

Design out of the box
Last week, Yahoos from company headquarters were invited to lick lollipops that propelled crawling baby dolls, run their fingers through grass to control videos, and observe a virtual sheep market. These curiosities were all part of University Design Expo 2006, a program sponsored by Yahoo!’s User Experience & Design (UED) group and Yahoo! Research to encourage and stimulate out-of-the-box thinking. We called on students from five universities around the world to propose some innovative design prototypes for future-facing social, mobile, and media experiences. Teams from leading graduate design programs at New York University, London’s Royal College of Art, UCLA, ESDI Graphic Design in Brazil, and California College of the Arts came to present their work. The result was a series of very unusual yet inspiring designs that illustrate future uses and user desires for technology services and devices some more far-out than others. Marveling right along with me were legends of the design world, including Don Norman, author of “The Design of Everyday Things,” and Peter Merholz from Adaptive Path, a premier user experience consulting company. Incidentally, he’s also the man said to have birthed the term “blog.” The program is the brainchild of Joy Mountford, who recently joined Yahoo! as senior director of UED. She dreamed up the concept 17 years ago at Apple and then took the program with her to Interval Research, Microsoft, Mattel and now here. Joy estimates that about 1,800 students have participated since its inception. In Edible Interface: The Lick Races project, students embedded photo sensors into lollipops that were used as event triggers to race toy babies the faster I licked, the faster my doll crawled to the finish line. Another student created Feelers, which allowed me to experience nature through the eyes, body, and mind of an insect via motion sensors embedded in fresh grass. Every time I touched the grass, a toy insect changed path and software sensing my touch chose different video and audio to play. Other student projects included “(Geo) Phone Tag,” which allowed mobile phone users to leave and retrieve contextually relevant messages about points of interest in their vicinity. “Chatsum” gave users a way to chat with other people while looking at the same web page. The “Sheep Market” leveraged Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system to employ thousands of Internet workers and create a database of 10,000 sheep drawings that were bought and sold. “Deadends” used the online-map interface to trace dead-end streets in L.A. and let people email videos or photos of dead-end streets through their camera phones. Here’s a short video of some of these inspiring prototypes and check out the Flickr photo set. After the tent came down, I had a chance to sit down with Joy to get her thoughts on the event, the status of design today, and the next generation of designers. Catch our conversation here. Larry Tesler VP of User Experience & Design
Source: feeds.feedburner.com

Modified Musical Commodore 64s Live Happily Alongside Classic Roland Gear, Modern Computers
Thanks to the release of the Prophet 64 music production cartridge for Commodore 64, a lot of C64 music makers have been hanging out on the Prophet 64 Yahoo Group. There are some really talented hackers and case modifiers building beautiful custom computers out of vintage Commodore machines. Last week, we got to see Traktor DJ controllers and knob mods; here are some more: 8GB has a gorgeous case mod for a C64 dubbed the M64. It has the onboard knobs we saw in the other modifications, plus a lovely black paint scheme, shown here. It’s also nice to see the C64 with the Prophet64 cart coexisting with more modern computers; this is truly an outboard hardware synthesizer for the computer age. (Once I get mine, I hope to do the same, though I kinda like the original Commodore beige. Good thing, too, because my building-and-painting skills leave a lot to be desired.) AlphA has performed extensive modifications to a C64c to make it easier to use with Prophet64 and easier to integrate into a studio. The I/O mods are the best part: would you believe a C64 with audio inputs and outputs, S-Video, and standard serial, sync, and power, all relocated for convenience? This isn’t just hacking for the sake of it; this is really building a usable, custom instrument that fits a musician’s needs. Check out this pounding track featuring the SID synth from the C64 along with Roland TB-303, TR-909, TR-808 and a quick SH-101 arpeggio. No glitchy oddness here: this is heavily-modded vintage gear you can dance to. If there’s a global cyber-apocalypse and the world winds up looking like something out of a Japanese manga, with people scavanging old computer and electronic hardware via underground markets, I think people will make music that sounds like this, dancing away the night inside their mech suits. Check out the Roland gear here. Now you know who sniped you on those eBay auctions: Back to reality — if you notice how clean the SID sounds in the mix, it’s because this is the later revision of the SID chip as included on the C64c, without the design defects that causes the earlier SID’s glitchy sound. Each chip has its following — the later is the synth as intended, whereas the earlier synth has a personality all its own because of its defects. Wikipedia explains it better than I do, because I’m still high on Benadryl as I try to get over a virus. (See, you knew there was a reason my recent posts have been a little scattered.) For overwhelming evidence that we’re not worthy of AlphA’s graphical and hardware-modding skills, take a look at the rest of the site and be humbled. (At least, that’s how it worked out for me. I think this person is indeed living in a manga.) 8 bit, C64, DIY, hacks, hardware, retro, Roland, synths
Source: feeds.feedburner.com

Keywords: Printing,Publishing,Graphic Design,Printing,Color Copies,Publishing