The new Bond covers from Penguin are gorgeous:
archive for the Design category
Edinburgh Council have a “Citizen’s Account” area on their website. I registered so that I could view and pay my council tax bills online. The process had been surprisingly painless until I came to add my council tax account number. I was presented with this stellar piece of form design:
Ignoring the incredibly sloppy layout bugs, it doesn’t look so bad, until you actually read the text:
Your account number is an 8 digit number which forms part of the 11 digit number to be found in the top right hand corner of your Council Tax demand. Please ignore the first digit and the last two digits of the 11 digit number. For example, if the number shown on your Council Tax demand is 91234567807, please enter 12345678.
(my emphasis)
Why, why, why are they making the user jump through hoops when entering a simple number? Why isn’t all this stupid number truncating done by the server? Entering an 11 digit account number (only once I notice) can be difficult enough without having to do a number puzzle on the data first. Council, you must try harder.
Good grief! Coudal’s photoshop tennis has returned! Now re-named as “Layer Tennis”. It feels like an awfully long time since the last one, and I’m certainly looking forward to Shaun Inman vs Kevin Cornell on friday.
Awesome. Reminds me of those diagrams in geography textbooks.
The unstoppably awesome moo.com have launched yet another incredibly nicely priced product line: Moo Stickers.
My logo design for the Open Street Map conference “State Of The Map” has been chosen as the favourite entry from the sea of other submissions (two). Apparently it’s going to be on tshirts and everything, how exciting! Unfortunately I can’t make the conference but I’ve recently been getting very enthused about Open Street Map. A couple of weeks ago I saw an Edlug talk by Chris Fleming and was inspired enough to go out and buy a GPS device. I got a Holux 236 pretty cheaply off ebay.com. It’s a tiny wee unit that has no display, but can communicate through usb or over bluetooth. So, I can run a java app on my mobile that connects to the Holux and receives the data stream automagically. It all Just Works, most of the time. Here is a random route that I’ve run through GPS Visualizer to get some KML that is then plotted on our old friend Google Maps.
The UK National Archives currently have a very nice online exhibition on the Art of War. It has quite a range of materials and includes decent sized quality images as well as ‘zoomable’ versions. All quite competently assembled! It also has a good range of the “comic” style art which would probably get called “pop art” these days. They remind me of Lichtenstein’s Whaam! which is hanging right over my desk as I type this.
Via Joe at the Forbidden Planet Blog.
