Grand Theft Price is Right

The Price is Right and Grand Theft Auto have something in strangely in common. And I can honestly say that I came upon this realization all by myself.

The font is called "Pricedown" is available here for download.

Tennis in Dubai

3.00 / gallon has to be going somewhere. Andre Agassi and Roger Federer playing as guests at the Burj Al Arab in Dubai. Wow.

Did I mention Typetester was Great?

Typetester is the best tool out there for quickly comparing web typefaces and styles. It even spits out css. Great. Great. Great.

Imagery Not Included; Not Required

You don't necessarily need splashy or intriguing photography to communicate your ideas on a website. This "website for one of the most prestigious law firms in the world," designed by the people at Pentagram proves this point rather convincingly.

Your Best Work

Via Kottke, via AIGA
Michael Bierut listed 20 courses he did not take in design school, but got to learn about extensively because he was involved with the subjects as a designer:

Semiotics
Contemporary Performance Art
Traffic Engineering
The Changing Global Financial Marketplace
Urban planning
Sex Education
Early Childhood Development
Economics of Commerical Aviation
Biography as History
Introduction to Horticulture
Sports Marketing in Modern Media
Modern Architecture
The 1960s: Culture and Conflict
20th Century American Theater
Philanthropy and Social Progress
Fashion Merchandising
Studies in Popular Culture
Building Systems Engineering
Geopolitics, Military Conflict, and the Cultural Divide
Political Science: Electoral Politics and the Crisis of Democracy

Kottke said: "His point was that design is just one part of the job. In order to do great work, you need to know what your client does. How do you design for new moms if you don't know anything about raising children? Not very well, that's how. When I was a designer, my approach was to treat the client's knowledge of their business as my biggest asset...the more I could get them to tell me about what their product or service did and the people it served (and then talk to those people, etc.), the better it was for the finished product. Clients who didn't have time to talk, weren't genuinely engaged in their company's business, or who I couldn't get to open up usually didn't get my best work.

Bierut's other main point is, wow, look at all this cool stuff you get to learn about as a designer. If you're a curious person, you could do worse than to choose design as a profession."

Window Or No Window?

On the issue of whether or not to display a web mockup inside a browser window when presenting it to a client:

Yes, the window takes up room, and yes, you'll have to size down the mockup a little bit more so it'll fit nicely on your godforsaken PowerPoint page. But when we're building site layouts, we design them inside a make believe browser window. Why? We take into consideration how everything looks inside it. Contrast, color, etc. Sometimes a good design loses 35% of its appeal when you kidnap it from its environment or take it out of its container.

Than again, what do I know. The Interactive Annual I got last week in the mail displays winning designs and, ..nope, no browser windows.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see the perils of PowerPoint

Microsoft "presentation software" has twice been singled out for special criticism by task forces reviewing the space shuttle disaster.

Exhibit A in Tufte's analysis is a PowerPoint slide presented to NASA senior managers in January 2003, while the space shuttle Columbia was in the air and the agency was weighing the risk posed by tile damage on the shuttle wings. Key information was so buried and condensed in the rigid PowerPoint format as to be useless.

"It is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation," the Columbia Accident Investigation Board concluded, citing Tufte's work. The board devoted a full page of its 2003 report to the issue, criticizing a space agency culture in which, it said, "the endemic use of PowerPoint" substituted for rigorous technical analysis.

"The deeper problem with the PowerPointing of America -- the PowerPointing of the planet, actually -- is that the program tends to flatten the most complex, subtle, even beautiful, ideas into tedious, bullet-pointed bureaucratese."

"the program encourages "faux-analytical" thinking that favors the slickly produced "sales pitch" over the sober exchange of information."