John Van Den Nieuwenhuizen's HiddenRadio has either no user interface...or...is all user interface. That's because, instead of having an obvious "control panel", the entire product itself is a control...okay, that's as clear as mud, let me elaborate...As you lift up the cap on top of the device, the volume of the radio increases proportionally. Likewise, if you push the cap down, the volume decreases until the point at which the device is silent (i.e. switched off). To tune the radio you simply rotate the cap.
href="http://thatisright.blogspot.com/2008/09/cymbolism.html" title="That's Right: Cymbolism">
Color is the ultimate tool a designer has at his or her disposal to communicate feeling and mood. Cymbolism is a new website that attempts to quantify the association between colors and words, making it simple for designers to choose the best colors for the desired emotional effect.

If you watch AMC's excellent Mad Men, there's plenty of things to be shocked by: pregnant women smoking, scotch-fueled business meetings, and a spacious office layout that predated $75-per-square-foot Midtown Manhattan rents.
Speaking of office layouts from the '60s, the oft-unsung George Nelson designed
...the first open-plan office system, which has filled offices all over the world with island after island of L-shaped desks divided by screens. When it was put into use in 1964, the new concept seemed so futuristic that its designer, George Nelson, named it the Action Office.
Blaming Nelson for the soullessness of today's open-plan offices seems as unfair as slating Le Corbusier for other architects' sloppily designed skyscrapers, or Marcel Duchamp for every lazy piece of conceptual art. Yet his association with something that's become synonymous with corporate monotony is one reason why Nelson's role in mid-20th century design has been eclipsed by those of his peers, such as Charles and Ray Eames, Isamu Noguchi and R. Buckminster Fuller.
Germany's Vitra Design Museum will be showing Nelson some love with their retrospective celebrating his 100th birthday. Opens September 13th.
via international herald tribue
The Archive from Sean Dunne on Vimeo.
To mark the 70th anniversary of the diaries of George Orwell they're being published online "live" as a blog, 70 years to the day he wrote them. The project started August 9th, and so far the entries are about strangely bland stuff: the weather and the antics of catching some snakes at his home. More what you'd expect from Eric Arthur Blair (his real name) rather than deep insights into the mind that created Big Brother. This is his domestic diary, though... the political one (which starts September 7th) will make for very interesting reading. I wonder what Orwell would've thought of this idea, and indeed the slightly Orwellian society we seem to be living in.
Via nucleardreamer via CP
Check out this excellent write up on Typophile on how to setup a flexible baseline grid in Adobe InDesign. The author has set up the grid so that every baseline is 12pts apart. This is a good setting that gives you a few leading options to choose from, but someone commented below the article that theyâve setup a 3pt system, which in my opinion works very nicely. Having a baseline every 3 pts gives you great flexibility with leading allowing you to create typography that is more dynamic.
The first cuts of Trade Gothic were designed by Jackson Burke in 1948. He continued to work on further weights and styles until 1960 while he was director of type development for Mergenthaler-Linotype in the USA. Trade Gothic does not display as much unifying family structure as other popular sans serif font families, but this dissonance adds a bit of earthy naturalism to its appeal. Trade Gothic is often seen in combination with roman text fonts, and the condensed versions are popular in the newspaper industry for headlines.
Love this font, but "earthy naturalism" ?