Good, user-centered design is often simple and elegant.

I just wish the process of designing was as well.

It’s been a while since I did an image dump:

The Fill the Bus project is being run by the Center for Service Learning and Civic Engagement. We needed a very fast turnaround for this. I think it took me about 20 minutes total to create this image in Illustrator.

Interestingly enough, the font (Ravie) was a random pick. I wanted a font that would be fun and bouncy and chose it because it sounded like it might fit. Normally I’m pretty obsessive about font selection, but this time the first try actually worked well. I love it when things work out in my favor.

A friend of mine from grad school works at a company that promotes magazines.  Apparently the P.R. director got approached by the editor of this magazine:

It’s called Cats in Space, and I think it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.  It even beats out SparkleWorld. Seriously. I hope it’s real.

Actually, one of the even better things about CiS is its parent site. This high-quality publication is hosted by the similarly high-quality awesomecats.com. Content-wise, awesomecats performs its function of being a site about, well, cats. If cats are your thing, it has a decent collection of resources–if you can get past the horrible page design, at least. And the sad thing is, people have obviously very specifically spent a fair bit of time on the design of the site. The header, for instance, is beyond my Flash capabilities. Not that I’m some flash guru by any means, but somebody had some good quality bonding moments with Flash over that header. And they obviously try to offer a reasonable range of services. Why, I could register wasabijane@awesomecats.com if I so chose, or even have an awesomecats.com website of my very own!

Actually, this is what I find the most telling. Look at their site features: 5K free web space is but one example. For you non-techy people, this randomly selected image is 4K. A single-spaced, one-page Word doc is likely to be at least 25K. This blog post is probably more than awesomecats can handle. And, even more telling, the first line of their site features reads as such: “No knowledge of web design or HTML is required to create websites.” No kidding. But then, I think the only ones who would take them up on such an offer are people like the creators of Cats in Space.

…and anyway, I was always more of a dog person.

Sally pointed out this blog, which features strange maps and their function. I must admit I find it fascinating. This map, in particular, is a startling reminder that reality differs greatly from our perceptions thereof; this map, on the other hand, fills me with empathy for the designers. I’m actually working on a similar map for a conference program at the moment, so I can honestly say, given the design problem (too much text, too little room), the designers could have done worse.