Category: Design Researcher

Pelican Books

Pelican Books

Read on any (or all) of your devices

Whether you are reading on a smartphone, tablet or widescreen monitor, the text adapts to offer the ideal reading experience for any screen size.

Always pick up where you left off

Start reading a book on your phone on the way to work, continue at your desk over lunch, and pick it up again in the evening with your iPad.

Your reading position is automatically bookmarked and synced across all your devices.

Highlight and share passages

Highlight a passage of text to save for later, or share your favourite extracts with friends on social media.(Highlighting is only available on laptop / desktop devices at the moment – we’re working on bringing it to mobile soon.)

All Pelican books are available to read online. Read the first chapter for free, and unlock the full book for £4.99.

Unicode Emoji

Unicode Emoji

Unicode Emoji Resources

Unicode Emoji Subcommittee

The Unicode Emoji Subcommittee is responsible for the following:

  • Updating, revising, and extending emoji documents such as UTR #51, Unicode Emoji and Unicode Emoji Charts.
  • Taking input from various sources and reviewing requests for new emoji characters.
  • Creating proposals for the Unicode Technical Committee regarding additional emoji characters and new emoji-related mechanisms.
  • Investigating longer-term mechanisms for supporting emoji as images (stickers).

The Unicode Emoji Subcommittee is a subcommittee of the Unicode Technical Committee operating under theTechnical Committee Procedures. Current co-chairs are Mark Davis (Google) and Peter Edberg (Apple).

Participation in the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee weekly video/phone meetings and mailing list is open to members of the Unicode Consortium as listed in §13.1 of the Technical Committee Procedures, plus invited guests. Contact usfor more information.

The Little Book of Design Research Ethics

The Little Book of Design Research Ethics

This one is about ethical practices in design research. It covers the principles that guide our interactions as we search for insight. It’s written for everyone at IDEO and for all the people we work with—those we learn from, and those we teach.

We’ve distilled lessons learned—as you’ll see, sometimes the hard way—from more than a quarter-century of experience and dozens of stories from the field. We’ve integrated advice and recommendations from external sources too from ethicists and from existing codes of ethics in related professions, such as journalism and market research.

Principles of Mobile App Design: Engage Users and Drive Conversions – Think with Google

Principles of Mobile App Design: Engage Users and Drive Conversions – Think with Google

In a crowded market, how does an app attract new customers, gain loyalty, and deliver value? With great design for a delightful app experience.

Here, Google’s UX Research Lead Jenny Gove will take you through 25 principles to build an app that helps users achieve what they’re looking to do.

About — Graphic Means

About — Graphic Means

“It’s been roughly 30 years since the desktop computer revolutionized the way the graphic design industry works. For decades before that, it was the hands of industrious workers, and various ingenious machines and tools that brought type and image together on meticulously prepared paste-up boards, before they were sent to the printer.

The documentary, Graphic Means, which is now in production, will explore graphic design production of the 1950s through the 1990s—from linecaster to photocomposition, and from paste-up to PDF. Support the production of this independent film, by pre-ordering your copy here.

…

PS: Major props go to Doug Wilson and his team, the makers of Linotype: In Search of the Eighth Wonder of the World. Watching that film clarified so much of what I’d missed in the previous decades of typesetting. And it charmed, and entertained while doing so. If you haven’t watched the film yet—go do that ASAP!
…

Interviews

Paul Brainerd: Co-founder of Aldus (producers of Pagemaker)

Colin Brignall + Dave Farey: Letraset typeface designers

Lou Brooks: illustrator, curator of The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies

James Craig: author and educator

Steven Heller: writer, educator, designer

Cece Cutsforth: designer, educator

Tobias Frere-Jones: typeface designer

Ellen Lupton: designer, author, educator

Carolina de Bartolo: designer, writer, educator

Gene Gable: designer, writer, consultant

Ken Garland: designer, author, educator

Malcolm Garrett: designer, educator

Walter Graham: author, paste-up expert

Dan Rhatigan: typeface designer

Frank Romano: design historian, author, educator

Adrian Shaughnessy: designer, writer, publisher

Ian Swift: designer

Joe Erceg: designer

 

…

 

Linotype: The Film — “History of the Linotype Company” Hardcover Book

Linotype: The Film — “History of the Linotype Company” Hardcover Book

Written by film participant Frank Romano, this is THE definitive history of the Mergenthaler Linotype Company. In fact, we wish this book had been published when we were making the film! If you are curious about the Linotype or the Linotype Company, this will become your ultimate reference.

The book contains 464 pages of in-depth history of the people, places, and products manufactured by the Mergenthaler Linotype Company. Frank Romano traces the history of corporate acquisitions, product development, and competing machines all with his usual wit and experience. He also writes about his own personal history working at Linotype starting in 1959. There are hundreds of color reproductions of advertisements, publications, photographs, and typeface specimens. It also includes 120 pages listing every font manufactured by Linotype or its subsidiaries.

 

Learning machine learning — Benedict Evans

Learning machine learning — Benedict Evans

As has happened with many technologies before, AI is bursting out of universities and research labs and turning into product, often led by those researchers as they turn entrepreneur and create companies. Lots of things started working, the two most obvious illustrations being the progress for ImageNet and of course AlphaGo. And in parallel, many of these capabilities are being abstracted – they’re being turned into open source frameworks that people can pick up (almost) off the shelf. So, one could argue that AI is undergoing a take-off in practicality and scale that’s going to transform tech just as, in different ways, packets, mobile, or open source did.

This also means, though, that there’s a sort of tech Tourettes’ around – people shout ‘AI!’ or ‘MACHINE LEARNING!’ where people once shouted ‘OPEN!’ or ‘PACKETS!’. This stuff is changing the world, yes, but we need context and understanding. ‘AI’, really, is lots of different things, at lots of different stages. Have you built HAL 9000 or have you written a thousand IF statements?  

Back in 2000 and 2001 (and ever since) I spent a lot of my time reading PDFs about mobile – specifications and engineers’ conference presentations and technical papers – around all the layers of UMTS, WCDMA, J2ME, MEXE, WML, iAppli, cHTML, FeliCa, ISDB-T and many other things besides, some of which ended up mattering and some of which didn’t. (My long-dormant del.icio.us account has plenty of examples of both).

The same process will happen now with AI within a lot of the tech industry, and indeed all the broader industries that are affected by it. AI brings a blizzard of highly specialist terms and ideas, layered upon each other, that previously only really mattered to people in the field (mostly, in universities and research labs) and people who took a personal interest, and now, suddenly, this starts affecting everyone in technology. So, everyone who hasn’t been following AI for the last decade has to catch up.