UMaine NMDNet » design

Amber waves of grain? No, a bladeless wind farm

Jon Ippolito — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 03:58:58 +0000

New Media alumnus Rob Hussey points to this story about a proposal to tap the wind’s energy with “windstalks” rather than windmills. The idea is to harness the ability of a column made of piezoelectric material to convert the stress of bending with the wind into fossil-free electricity. Unlike a battery of conventional wind turbines, [...]

Stylin’ camouflage makeup hides your face from computer surveillance

Jon Ippolito — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:54:12 +0000

How long before the Occupy line of cosmetics hits Bloomingdales?

Skeleton – A Boilerplate for Mobile Development

Nate.Blanchette — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 16:55:47 +0000

Basically Skeleton is a really elegant boilerplate setup done through JS + CSS to scale a website from a desktop size to mobile resolutions. I’m currently using it on my own projects, it’s a great framework to get going if you want mobile usability. Source: http://getskeleton.com/

In the Microbial Home, the kitchen eats your plastic bags

Jon Ippolito — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 20:04:49 +0000

Imagine an apartment where kitchen waste provides electricity, your interactive bathroom mirror helps prevent disease, and mushrooms in your composter devour plastic bags. If you call yourself a twenty-first century design student, you should be studying this. To be sure, this triumph of closed-loop design would fit better in a Manhattan apartment than in a [...]

Balsamiq Wireframe Mockups

Jennifer Hooper — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 19:37:01 +0000

This is a pretty cool product that allows users to very quickly create website and moblile phone mockups. It uses a very simple drag-and-drop interface. The actual product is $79, but I used this free demo to create the mockups I wanted, then I took screen shots of them. http://builds.balsamiq.com/b/mockups-web-demo/

State-of-the-art Cybercafe

shelbycaret — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 18:08:38 +0000

http://www.yankodesign.com/2011/03/24/more-than-a-cyber-cafe/ I think this is a fantastic idea, really useful and would be utilized effectively by so many people. Enjoy!

Designers wanted to work on wind and wellness

Jon Ippolito — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 19:49:16 +0000

if you are interested in any of these jobs, contact these folks directly or via New Media Department chair Larry Latour or Jon Ippolito. Designer for Operation Breaking Stereotypes Wanted — Graphic Designer for Lesson and Study Guide materials. Operation Breaking Stereotypes, a non-profit organization in Orono that facilitates understanding, appreciation, and connections between diverse [...]

Is Steve Jobs the most influential remix artist?

Jon Ippolito — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 18:08:42 +0000

On the occasion of his retiring, Apple's CEO is being hailed as the "recombinant mash-up" innovator par excellence.

Making lemonade from lemons–er, meat from sewage

Jon Ippolito — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 01:13:13 +0000

Sustainable ecosystems reuse so-called waste in closed loop processes. Scientists are now applying this principle to human manufacturing: making flowers from shoes, meat from sewage, and on the space shuttle, water from pee.

Calling all comic artists, logo designers, and video makers

Jon Ippolito — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 01:27:13 +0000

Graphic artist wanted for high-profile comic novel Logo needed for environmental research course French Web site looking for student artists 1. Graphic artist wanted for high-profile comic novel Professor Jonathan Farley is looking for a U-Me student interested in helping with a graphic novel that has already received publicity in the National Post, in the Washington [...]

Is design dead?

Jon Ippolito — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 11:32:52 +0000

Writing in the Atlantic, Dylan Tweney claims that online publishing is challenging designers to give up the control they were used to in print publications and even in the first decade of the Web. According to Tweney, software like Cascading Style Sheets and JavaScript and platforms like the iPad are enabling the separation of form [...]

Why pushing the elevator’s “close door” button doesn’t do squat

Jon Ippolito — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 22:13:11 +0000

Turns out the placebo effect isn't just for drugs. It apparently works for elevators, thermostats, and walk buttons at intersections--most of which don't work and aren't even intended to! Oh, and turns out in addition to his other firsts, John Cage may have created the first placebo music.

William Gibson’s “Zero History”

Douglas Lamb — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 03:56:26 +0000

William Gibson's last three novels (starting with Pattern Recognition back in 2003) are essential reading, in my opinion, for anybody who's really into New Media these days. They're all set in the modern day, though the characters are decidedly sci-fi-- hackers, advertising execs (hackers of a sort), graphic designers, fashion designers, filmmakers, and so on--generally generators and controllers of information. More after the jump.

Work Parties Not Tea Parties @ 350.org

Joline Blais — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 17:08:10 +0000

350.org has launched a glocal event–locally engaged, globally networked–to send a message to our political leaders that we want to work for positive life-affirming goals for our communities and families. You can see two local Orono events as well as nearby events on the map Still Water Permaculture Guild launched their own event described below: [...]

chapter fourteen

margaretha haughwout — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 13:40:57 +0000

Hey all, I’m writing from San Francisco, my home these days. San Francisco is at the forefront of an amazing urban gardening movement, and it is very exciting! I’ve been working very closely with one urban farm in particular, called Hayes Valley Farm. It’s a 2.3 acre food forest rising from a freeway that collapsed [...]

Dumbing down design

Jon Ippolito — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 19:10:51 +0000

I’m all for designing with simplicity in mind. But when I was shown this sign by a Bangor ER triage nurse after breaking a crown off my molar, I couldn’t help noticing that the picture had a couple of names in the “credits.” Which left me with two questions: 1) Did both scientists get tenure [...]

Can’t afford Adobe? Just fire up your browser

Jon Ippolito — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 13:09:43 +0000

Get ready for a whole new wave of goth tattoo graffiti art, thanks to DeviantArt and HTML 5.

How to design anything, according to Fred Brooks

Jon Ippolito — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 23:19:32 +0000

Fred Brooks: design starts with scarcity.

Why you never find what you want on a university Web site

Jon Ippolito — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 12:31:57 +0000

From the XKCD school of Web design. [Link]

Cigarette packaging: When bad design is good design

Jon Ippolito — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 18:28:54 +0000

Discouraging smoking by creating an irritating package is a great idea, but the problem is that good designers just can’t bring themselves to make something look uncool. Now, if you only had a Microsoft design team take over…