Carambolage

alexlikesdesign: Today marks the launch of Google Treasure Maps...

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 09:22:56 +0200

Today marks the launch of Google Treasure Maps (and my first appearance/voice-over in a Google video!). Anyone who has been following me for a while knows my love for process and the importance I place on sketching out projects prior to making them. With that in mind, I thought this would be a good opportunity to gloss over the process of redesigning Google Maps.

When we set out to make Google Treasure Maps, I sat down and sketched out a multitude of ways to handle things like terrain tiles, landmarks, and borders.

Once these ideas had solidified a bit, I began experimenting in the computer with different color schemes, textures and aesthetic approaches; ranging from 100% vector to 100% hand drawn, and hybrids that were a mix of both approaches. Here are a few examples.

After deciding on the third direction pictured, I sketched out a world map.

I then scanned this map and spruced it up a bit, which simultaneously helped to pitch the idea and gave us some idea of what to shoot for during the next month of actually building the map. Some ideas, such as the map’s border, were abandoned during production because of technical constraints and/or a lack of resources.

Next up, I split the map up into four different zoom ranges and decided how much information would be displayed at each zoom level. Below, you can see basic black shapes at the outermost level; slightly more detailed terrain, state lines and city icons at the next level; roads and landmarks at the next; very detailed terrain, road markers, and landmarks at the closest zoom. Again, various elements and features were cut over the course of production and we eventually settled on three levels of detail as opposed to four.

Once the zoom level detail was decided upon, I drew each type of terrain, later scanning it in and modifying it to work in the map. People far smarter than I then figured out how to place the terrain on the map without revealing the clear borders between each land type.

Last year, we replaced Google Map’s Pegman with an 8-bit hero. While I toyed with a few ideas, I eventually settled on the idea of a spyglass; I liked the idea of contextualizing Street View by using a pirate’s viewing device. I also remade the UI in red to introduce a little color into an otherwise brown map and to make sure an old compass was always present.

The Street View team really brought the spyglass idea home by doing this:

Now that the look and feel of the map was settled upon, I designed a handful of landmarks that served as a guide to other Googlers that were kind enough to contribute their time to the project. I believe that we ended up with 175+ landmarks, only 20 of which were designed by myself.

Finally, we began troubleshooting and embellishing the map with more details that would serve to make the map interesting for everyone, regardless of whether they were merely glancing at it, or spending more time discovering its secrets.

In the end, building this map from the ground up was a great exercise in designing with constraints, picking and choosing your battles, not being afraid to scrap ideas you like and coordinating a large team toward a single vision. It’s a cheesy adage, but I hope everyone else enjoys Google Treasure Maps as much as I enjoyed making it.

colchrishadfield: Air and pepper oil suspended in a water blob....

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 01:09:27 +0100

colchrishadfield:

Air and pepper oil suspended in a water blob. I blew on it to make it wiggle.

elliottlarson-artwork: “HAHAHAno” + detail

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 10:32:44 +0100

elliottlarson-artwork:

“HAHAHAno” + detail

Wannus Returns!(On January 24th at Theater Aufbau Kreuzberg)

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 18:00:23 +0100

Wannus Returns!
(On January 24th at Theater Aufbau Kreuzberg)

The severed branches of local government

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 11:42:07 +0100

cairobserver:

by Aaron Jakes

Sometime in the middle of last March, while I was still living in Cairo, I was working at my desk when I heard a noisy argument outside my window. The street in Zamalek where I lived was home to about a dozen little shops, along with a small café and a cafeteria, and I had long since learned to tune out the shouts and clamors that punctuated the busy working day outside. So I didn’t take much notice of the altercation or the more subdued commotion that followed for the next couple hours. When I headed downstairs and into the street a bit later, I was immediately struck by the brightness of the afternoon sun and by a queasy feeling that something was out of place. The cause of these unexpected sensations, I quickly discovered, lay before me in a pile of logs, neatly stacked next to the curb. Those logs were all that remained of the trees that had formerly lined the entire block.

Two of the neighborhood shopkeepers were standing together across the street, so I wandered over to ask what had happened. Earlier that morning, they explained, a large branch had fallen from one of the trees, damaging the hood and windshield of a car parked on the street. When the car’s owner arrived a short while later, he flew into a rage and demanded compensation from the proprietors of the shops nearest to the car, alleging they were at fault for failing to care for the tree. They argued back and eventually resolved the dispute by paying him a token sum, but once the disgruntled car owner had driven off, they gathered a meeting of the other shopkeepers. The trees, my friends explained, were the property and responsibility of the Governorate of Cairo, but it had been years since the city government had sent anyone to clean or prune them. It had therefore fallen to the small commercial establishments on the street to fill the void of basic municipal services, even in this most affluent neighborhood of the city. The shop owners had loved the trees and enjoyed the canopy of shade they provided. But the day’s events had convinced them that the cost and liability of upkeep were more than they could bear. With some reluctance and an awareness that they were breaking the law, they cut them all down.

I have found myself thinking a great deal about those trees in the months leading up to this week’s referendum on the fiercely contested final draft of Egypt’s new constitution. Since the drafting began, debates have raged over the religious identity this document assigns to the state, over the privileged status it reserves for the military, over the rights it does and does not protect, and over the balance of powers it describes between the different branches of the national government. But despite the breadth and intensity of the struggle over both the text of the draft and the process by which it was written, all sides have overwhelmingly focused on the central state that governs the nation as a whole.

In this context, there has been very little discussion of the seemingly mundane articles dealing with provincial and local government. But as my colleague Mohamed Elshahed recently argued in a fiery posting on his blog Cairobserver, these articles fail to address in any adequate fashion the problems of urban and local governance that affect so many aspects of people’s everyday lives. The issues, of course, extend well beyond the erosion of basic services that led my neighbors to take matters into their own hands and chop down some trees on our block. Indeed, as Elshahed and others have argued, the highly centralized and profoundly undemocratic structures of governance below the national level have played a central role in driving forward a process of rapid, haphazard, and devastatingly uneven urbanization across the country. The corruption, incompetence, and institutionalized impunity of provincial governors and local officials, moreover, played a crucial role in the pillaging of public resources and the unplanned allocation of land in both urban and rural areas under the Mubarak regime.

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good: Rebrand Your ‘Hood for Good- Lee-Sean Huang wrote in...

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 01:24:41 +0100

good:

Rebrand Your ‘Hood for Good
- Lee-Sean Huang wrote in Design, New York City and Brooklyn

How can we use the power of branding to strengthen a shared identity and spark positive change in the neighborhoods and cities where we live? An effective visual identity references the culture and history of a place’s people and reflects their hopes and aspirations. Logos, fonts, or color schemes, the most tangible parts of a brand identity, are not magical cure-alls for the financial, social, and cultural ills of a city, but they can be powerful symbols and rallying cries that galvanize people to action.

Here are some stories and insights on how you can create a brand identity for change in your community:

Photo

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 15:31:12 +0100

tomhiddlestonswife: you fuckin’ tell ‘em peach

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 22:03:41 +0100

tomhiddlestonswife:

you fuckin’ tell ‘em peach

darksilenceinsuburbia: Mathieu Frossard / Atelier Frossard....

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 21:54:08 +0100

darksilenceinsuburbia:

Mathieu Frossard / Atelier Frossard. Totems.

This puts a whole new light on my kitchen after a week… So it’s not unwashed plates and cutlery, it’s an act of pagan worship slowly building itself.

Violinist Jascha Heifetz playing in Mili’s darkened studio as...

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 13:59:20 +0100

Violinist Jascha Heifetz playing in Mili’s darkened studio as light attached to his bow traces the bow movement.

Photo by Gjon Mili, 1952 - LIFE archive

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reginasworld: Robert Rickhoff ‘Out of Place’

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 09:38:37 +0100

reginasworld:

Robert Rickhoff ‘Out of Place’

Photo

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 03:50:08 +0100

ranoooza: stoooooooooooooooooooop

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 00:04:06 +0100

ranoooza:

stoooooooooooooooooooop

Poster for the German Premiere of Sa’dallah Wannus’...

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 15:44:00 +0100

Poster for the German Premiere of Sa’dallah Wannus’ “Rituals of Change and Transformation” on the 29th of November 2012 at the Theater Aufbau Kreuzberg

By me.

springlessons.org

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 13:02:56 +0100

springlessons.org:

Spring Lessons präsentiert das „Alexandria Streets Project“ im
Theater Aufbau Kreuzberg

18.11.2012

Radioscape Egypt 11 Uhr
Gespräch zwischen Berit Schuck, Julia Tieke und Omar Hatem, Projektmanager von Radio Tram (Alexandria).

Alexandria, Invisible City 13 Uhr
Hörstücke aus Klängen, Gesprächen, Musik und Literatur bilden eine akustische Karte von Alexandria.

moderiert von Sonja Hegasy ( ZMO)

Sa’adallah Wannous — Rituale, Zeichen, Veränderungen —...

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 11:51:17 +0100

Sa’adallah Wannous — Rituale, Zeichen, Veränderungen — 29.11.2012 at TAK

prostheticknowledge: Dyskograf Interactive sound installation...

Sat, 20 Oct 2012 03:30:21 +0200

prostheticknowledge:

Dyskograf

Interactive sound installation developed by Avoka can let participants create music by marking sequences on a paper disk with a pen, which is then read by the machine - a sort-of Oramics Machine in turntable form:

Dyskograf from Jesse Lucas on Vimeo.

DYSKOGRAF is a graphic disk reader. Each disc is created by visitors to the installation by way of felt tip pens provided for their use. The mechanism then reads the disk, translating the drawing into a musical sequence.

The installation is above all a tool, which allows the creation of musical sequences in an intuitive way. The notion of a loop, closely linked to electronic music, is represented here by the cycle of the disk. The disk passes indefinitely in front of a camera fixed onto an arm. This substitution for the needle converts the drawing into sound by way of a specific application program (software). Through this system, the sequential ordering of music is learnt in a playful way, at the same time creating a unique object, souvenir of the musical composition.

More info can be found here

Photo

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 20:59:05 +0200

jessiedunks: Some sketchy typography.

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 16:19:18 +0200

jessiedunks:

Some sketchy typography.

Concerto per Tavola é Oud — The result of Spring Lessons...

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 15:48:29 +0200

Concerto per Tavola é Oud — The result of Spring Lessons workshop “Instruments of Life” with Ahmad Elsawy at Theater Aufbau Kreuzberg