Category: design

QOTD – Marshall on Helvetica

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

I was amused by today’s quote from this quote of the day mailing list:

“Every now and then you’ll see a tattered piece of 1950s signage, something exuberant that harks back to flash bulbs and frozen glamour. Most have been torn down now, replaced by brutal information boards stamped out in Helvetica, the official typeface of purgatory. Helvetica isn’t designed to make you feel anything good, to promise adventure or gladden the heart. Helvetica is for telling you that profits are down, that the photocopier needs servicing, and by the way, you’ve been fired.”

—Michael Marshall, The Straw Men, on the way to Santa Monica.

Hmm, I wasn’t aware about the photocopier ;).

Fonts in Red Hat’s “Null” release

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

Red Hat is preparing the next version of its distribution, code-named Null. They’re working on unifying the look, to an extent, between KDE and Gnome (and I have no problem with that).

However, the big news for me came in the form of these KDE screenshots from the Null beta: the fonts look amazing. For instance, the fonts in this menu screenshot look almost OSX-good to the naked eye :).

Whether it’s KDE, a Red Hat configuration, or something else, I’m not sure which software is responsible for those fonts looking so good — but I would be very interested in trying a distribution that could do fonts like that.

(See also this Slashdot story on Red Hat’s upcoming release)

Bad Designs

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

Via WebWord Usability, I discovered Bad Designs. The site features bad designs of everyday objects, such as auto ceiling lights where the front ceiling-light is push-on/push-off but the rear ceiling-light is operated by a dashboard switch.

There’s also a Bad Designs mailing list, which is sent out each time the site is updated. (Of course, WebWord also has a mailing list, which is how I found out about Bad Designs in the first place)