Bold Strokes: New Font Helps Dyslexics Read
Christian Boer, a graphic designer from the Netherlands, has developed a way to help tackle his dyslexia. The 30-year-old created a font called Dyslexie that has proved to decrease the number of errors made by dyslexics while reading.
…One of the first things he did was increase the boldness of letters at their bases, to make them appear weighted, causing readers’ brains to know not to flip them upside down, as can occur with “p” and “d.” Boer also enlarged the openings of various letters, such as “a” and “c,” to make them more distinguishable from one another, and increased the length of “the tail” of other letters, like the “g” and y.” He also put certain letters at a slant so that they would appear to be in italics, like the “j,” a tactic to increase the brain’s ability to distinguish it from the letter “i.” Finally, he boldfaced capital letters and punctuation, and provided ample space between letters and words, to allow the brain more time to compute the letters and begin forming them into words and sentences.
The details of this just totally fascinate me.
Source: brittq
World-Shaker: Five Tips for Faculty Working with an Educational Technology Designer
1) Trust me. I know how to use at least two different learning management systems, including the one at our school. I can train you to use at least a dozen different technologies to help you create interesting multimedia or content for your online course. I’m familiar with all the things that do…
All five … wow, do I relate!
Source: world-shaker
Beautifully shot short film on the intricate process of letterpress printing by RISD students Phil Cao and Kebei Li.
(via our risd)
The painstaking detail of setting these 60 beautiful words — selecting one single character at a time from the type case and adding it to a composing stick, carefully stacking them line by line separated by thin strips of lead, then surrounding it with large blocks of furniture, tapping it with a mallet, and locking it securely into a chase — demonstrates the way nearly all printed text was created with movable type for more than four centuries, from Gutenberg’s Bible in the 1450s, to daily newspapers in the 1880s.
No mouse. No keyboard. No copy and paste. No monitor. No gestures on a touch screen. No font menu. No spell check. No backspace, delete, print.
Just human hands arranging thousands of pieces of cold metal, and then when the printing was done, carefully taking it all apart again piece by piece and helping each character return to its proper slot, in its proper case, and the case to its proper cabinet, where it will wait until another job calls for the upper case letters K or Y or S in 24 point Garamond.
Source: explore-blog
Google-Trained Minds Can't Deal with Terrible Research Database UI
College and university librarians are concerned about students’ search skills, and no wonder:
At Illinois Wesleyan University, “The majority of students — of all levels — exhibited significant difficulties that ranged across nearly every aspect of the search process,” according to researchers there. They tended to overuse Google and misuse scholarly databases. They preferred simple database searches to other methods of discovery, but generally exhibited “a lack of understanding of search logic” that often foiled their attempts to find good sources.
The librarians quoted here understand most of the key problems, and are especially sharp about “the myth of the digital native” — about which see also this deeply sobering Metafilter thread — but there’s one vital issue they’re neglecting: research databases have the worst user interfaces in the whole world.
» via The Atlantic
Research database UI are truly abysmal, followed closely by the UI of most popular online course management systems, and by the UI for most college and university web sites for course registration and other student management activities.
Yet miraculously the forward facing web sites for most colleges and universities are glitzy and dazzling, precisely because they are seen primarily as a recruiting tool.
So there are two Internets in higher education: there’s the spectacularly slick 2012 Internet students see before they enroll, and there’s the barely usable and archaic throwback to a 1997 Internet that students must endure to interact with the registrar, the library, and their courses throughout the remainder of their college career.
Source: infoneer-pulse
“Stop the presses!”
Des Moines Register redesigns front page six times in just five hours on Iowa Caucus night.
via copydesk.org
“The NYC startup world needs more web product design talent. NYC has perhaps the best design community in the world, but most of the designers are trained in non-web design fields (e.g. print design). Most of the good design schools don’t emphasize web product design.”—
Over the past few years, Web Design and Motion Design have emerged as full fledged sub-industries to the traditional Branding and Print Design industry. Product/Service Design is a nascent discipline, but the curricula are being created, programs are being built, and communities (this very blog) are starting to form. It’s a huge opportunity for designers to set a career path early.
quote: Chris Dixon
(via logtransition)
I’ve been a graphic designer and design educator for over 25 years and I keep an eye on the employment ads for teaching positions at colleges and universities. Web design has been a staple for a decade, but there has been a clear shift in the last two or three years and now almost every ad I see for teaching positions requires motion design. I suspect this is because there is student demand for these courses, and partially input from employers.
But I think the main reason for this turn in hiring is that current faculty generally do not have these skills or experience in this area of design (I certainly don’t — everything I do has the good manners to sit still). Departments are looking to round out their lineup. This will probably even out eventually (programs still need folks to teach studio, print, prepress, typography, advertising, and general web skills) but for the foreseeable future, if you don’t also have motion in your portfolio, you are going to get quickly passed over for teaching jobs almost anywhere.
The same is about to be true of those with experience designing for the mobile web in their portfolio. The curriculum hasn’t yet caught up, but demand for “mobile first” thinking and responsive design is spiking very, very quickly.
Source: logtransition
131 seconds of visual brilliance … wow …
More at http://watchthetitles.com/articles/00214-A_History_Of_The_Title_Sequence
Ideas, from the papers of Frederick Hammersley, Archive of American Art
Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists’ Enumerations from the Collections of the Smithsonian Museum, by Liza Kurwin
via Brain Pickings
Source: brainpickings.org
Wow … I posted this last night and this afternoon Tumblr rolls out a new dashboard … with no annoying footer!
I must be single-handedly responsible for the new Tumblr redesign. :-)
Thanks, Tumblr!
I am annoyed daily by the 80 pixels of clickable vertical screen real-estate that I lose on the Tumblr dashboard every time their footer pops up out of nowhere. On my 13-inch laptop, I can’t click on any visible item on the bottom 15% (one-sixth) of my screen without the footer getting in the way. If the footer was there all the time, I would see less on the screen, but at least I wouldn’t think I can click on links that I can see but really can’t get to without scrolling them out of the footer’s hover zone. Hasn’t anybody at Tumblr ever noticed that they have plenty of room for those links in the right sidebar below the Radar? They can even make them magically disappear and reappear there if they want to, because there will never be a clickable link there that they obscure. Hey, Tumblr … I have hated this dashboard “feature” every day for years … I can’t be the only one.
I am annoyed daily by the 80 pixels of clickable vertical screen real-estate that I lose on the Tumblr dashboard every time their footer pops up out of nowhere.
On my 13-inch laptop, I can’t click on any visible item on the bottom 15% (one-sixth) of my screen without the footer getting in the way. If the footer was there all the time, I would see less on the screen, but at least I wouldn’t think I can click on links that I can see but really can’t get to without scrolling them out of the footer’s hover zone.
Hasn’t anybody at Tumblr ever noticed that they have plenty of room for those links in the right sidebar below the Radar? They can even make them magically disappear and reappear there if they want to, because there will never be a clickable link there that they obscure.
Hey, Tumblr … I have hated this dashboard “feature” every day for years … I can’t be the only one.
Designing for iPad: Reality Check
Great article, but what the heck is “Schriftbild”?
The article defines it as “text impression,” which I assume means the overall look and feell of the page typography. I’ve never heard the word and wonder about its origin. Googling it came up mostly with German web sites (obviously) or German-English translations, but nothing I could find putting this word in a design context. Would be interesting to find out more.
(via iamdanw)
Source: iamdanw
