design – jstrauss

Delicious Bookmarks for June 9th

These are my Delicious links for June 9th:

Writing Microcopy – Bokardo – Good advice on the importance of descriptive microcopy in product design. Sometimes it's the most obvious (and least sexy) things that drive the biggest value.

These are my Delicious links for April 10th through April 15th:

15 Places to Find Great Fonts | Lists | Tutorial Blog – A list of sites where one can find free fonts.
The Quiet Coup – The Atlantic(May 2009) – A very interesting in-depth analysis of the rise of the financial oligarchy in the US over the last 20 years and how it has created dynamics similar to those of emerging market economic crises, according to a former chief economist of the IMF. “In a society that celebrates the idea of making money, it was easy to infer that the interests of the financial sector were the same as the interests of the country—and that the winners in the financial sector knew better what was good for America than did the career civil servants in Washington. Faith in free financial markets grew into conventional wisdom—trumpeted on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal and on the floor of Congress.”

These are my Delicious links for March 2nd through March 4th:

THRU YOU | Kutiman mixes YouTube – Unbelievable remixes of music samples from various YouTube videos into really great songs and fascinating videos. This is the poster-project for Remix culture! (hope someone sends it to Lessig)
Good design: The ten commandments of Dieter Rams – A great collection of rules on how to design products. While originally meant for physical products (industrial design), I think many of the rules still apply to online products and web design. Some of my favorites:
– Good design makes a product useful
– Good design helps a product to be understood
– Good design is unobtrusive
– *Good design is thorough to the last detail*
– Good design is as little as possible

And some quotes:
"The aesthetic quality of a product – and the fascination it inspires – is an integral part of the its utility."
"Things which are different in order to simply be different are seldom better, but that which is made to be better is almost always different."
(And on a personal note, my late grandma had Rams's Cylindric T2 lighter in her apartment when I was a kid and I always got in trouble for playing with it, but its design fascinated me.)