Studioclues – Industrial design blog and portfolio site

I just downloaded a clever little iPhone app called “What the font”. The app analyzes a screen grab or a picture of a word and then suggests matching fonts. A very handy app for any designer.

Link to the app in the iTunes store..

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/whatthefont/id304304134?mt=8

I spent quite a long time on this site tonight and wanted to share. Vintage electronics get me going.

Via

http://www.core77.com/blog/news/128_vintage_old_school_calculators_17164.asp

iPhone 4 is here if you haven’t heard. And it’s has proven to b,e in the short time available, Apple’s most successful product launch. 1.7 Million units sold in the first weekend. So what is so special about this phone? Designers revel when a product in which design plays a center role is so successful. I would call it vindication?  It proves that attention to detail and user experience can take a product to another level. There is no way to measure how stunning the phone is and a highly thought out user interface is a tough thing to quantify. But Apple still strives for perfection in both of these areas. It’s just ingrained in their culture.

Core 77 interviewed Jonathan Ive, VP of Design at Apple about the iPhone 4. It was a great write up about how Apple takes so much time and effort understanding manufacturing and how manufacturing affects the materials in use. Ive talks a lot about how a lot of products miss the mark when it comes to executing these points. Many products spend a lot of time in CAD where designers work on the actual 3d dimensional form and then pay little attention to what is going to actually happen when the materials spec’ed are shaped into the form in which the designer intends.

Read the whole interview at Core 77

Today I received notification  that I am nominated as a featured designer at Monkee Design. I want to thank Monkee for the nomination. If you feel so inclined please cast a vote via this link.

I was talking to someone the other day about my new Cintiq and I mentioned the felt tip nibs that I prefer to use. I didn’t realize that a lot of people neglect to change their pen nib type from the standard white one that comes out of the box. The felt nib is the black one shown below. It has a significantly shorter life span than the standard white one, but offers a lot more friction on the screen. Which, in my opinion, creates a much more natural drawing experience. I do find that over time a flat spot forms on the nib tip that I sometimes have to sand away with some fine grit sandpaper to get a little more life out of. There is also a spring loaded pen tip that I do not know whether is still available.

I love design that takes the artifacts and designs that we all we know and love and makes them a bit better. The school chair below was designed by IDEO and Steelcase and brings together a bunch of small innovations while keeping the classic side entry configuration that we all grew up with. Then they wrap it all up in this exceptionally gorgeous form. I want to point out the amazing surfacing craft on that seat. Truly beautiful.

Via http://www.fastcompany.com/

I know this is getting a bit geeky but it might come in handy someday when you are pumping CAD.

I tend to get into small decisions like this all the time. When laying out 2d curves in CAD and you want similar “looking” radii at the corners it tends to be a judgment call if the straighter sections come off at different angles. The below sketch shows a 12mm radii on the left off of two perpendicular lines. The same size radii on the right is placed between two lines that come together at a 45. The size of the radii does not look similar to me, although they are identical.

Decreasing angle as seen below on the right to 22.5 degrees ( half of 45) makes the radii look even more different.

Read the rest of this article here.. »

A few weeks ago Google announced Google fonts and the Google font directory. Being a very novice web designer I typically use the standard system fonts or web safe fonts. These fonts are common on most machines and are usually safe to use on web pages as you know how they are going to be displayed. You know these fonts as Veranda, Copperplate Plate Gothic, and Arial, etc. I was aware that their have been ways to get around this but I thought they were a bit clumsy and somewhat unreliable. Well Google has announced the Google font directory which seems to me like a pretty exciting thing. Not only does Google typically make things better and more user friendly, but also I see the look of the web visually changing now. You can expect to not be looking at the same fonts that you have been used to. Information will continue to spread but the characters that represent that information will now be able to evolve visually at a much faster rate. Of course the fonts will only be limited to open source fonts, but they will available for commercial and private use on any site. Obviously they have made it very easy to implement already as I changed this font in a matter of minutes.

This post was written in Lobster, a Google font.

Read more here.

We had a local IDSA Happy Hour hosted at Keytech, a local engineering and design firm. The host, Jeremy Davage organized a sketch competition on concepts for a better light rail. Here is my entry into the competition. Click on the image for a larger view.

Some quick sketches practicing arrows. Because stuff always needs to articulate, right?