Building sophisticated educational tools out of cheap parts, Johnny Lee demos his cool Wii Remote hacks, which turn the $40 video game controller into a digital whiteboard, a touchscreen and a head-mounted 3-D viewer [...]

A great user experience starts with the user interface. In this talk, Jason Beres explores best practices in user interface design in a learn-by-example approach of the good, bad and the ugly in user interface design. From web sites to rich client, you will learn how areas such as navigation, layout, typography, controls and dialogs can make or break the usefulness of an application [...]

Rives — star of the Bravo special Ironic Iconic America — tells a typographical fairy tale that’s short and bittersweet. Flat pages can’t contain Rives’ storytelling, even when paper is his medium. The pop-up books he creates for children unfold with surprise: The Christmas Pop-Up Present expands to reveal moving parts, hidden areas and miniature booklets inside. On stage, his poems burst in many directions, too, exposing multiple layers and unexpected treats: childhood memories, grown-up humor, notions of love and lust, of what is lost forever and of what’s still out there waiting to unfold.

Reading about designers can be moving. Seeing their work can be inspiring and, at times, provoke us to action. Hillman Curtis, in his video series, allows us to experience leading designers through sound and motion, uncovering what it is about them that inspires him. Watch David Carson’s video [...]

Great design is a never-ending journey of discovery — for which it helps to pack a healthy sense of humor. Sociologist and surfer-turned-designer David Carson walks through a gorgeous (and often quite funny) slide deck of his work and found images [...]

Animation created for the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Chinese calligraphy has been submitted to the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as a candidate for the Masterpieces of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity (MOIHH) designation. With a 3,000-year history, Chinese calligraphy developed along with the evolution of Chinese characters, Li Shenghong, an expert with the Chinese National Academy of Arts, said recently [...]

In previous post in which I discussed chinese calligraphy, I talked a little bit about chinese calligraphy’s history, and my impressions of its influence in contemporary chinese design. Since a lot of people have been asking me for more on the topic, I’ve decided to post on YouTube some videos of a trip my wife, a couple of friends and I did to Zhu Jia Jiao, one of the many river towns just outside Shanghai. In Zhu Jia Jiao, we’ve met Master Yue Le, a local artist that makes his living on creating banners/posters for tourist that visit that town: with our little domain of Mandarin, we’ve asked him to create some banners to represent something he would consider typical [...]

Calligraphy has a long and respected tradition in China, swirling around history and myth: some legends attribute its invention to a man called Cang Jie, around 2,600 b.C. Nowadays, Calligraphy has become a symbol of eruditeness, and has a strong influence on Chinese design. I’d dare to say that, with its strong repetition and reproduction practice drills, Calligraphy has modeled the Chinese world view…