position: absolute - Design resources and inspiration.

The long-anticipated Pixelmator image editor for Mac OS X has just been released. I can’t say much about its capabilities, as I haven’t tried it yet, but damn it looks good.

Built up on a combination of open source and Mac OS X technologies, Pixelmator features powerful selection, painting, retouching, navigation, and color correction tools, layers-based image editing, GPU-powered image processing, color management, automation, and transparent HUD user interface for work with images. Pixelmator uses Core Image and OpenGL technologies that use the Mac’s video card for image processing.

I think the “GPU-Powered” bit sounds particularly interesting. I’d like to know why Photoshop doesn’t utilize my GPU’s power, what a waste of perfectly good transistors.

pdf-mags.com has lots and lots of free, lovely PDF-magazines. There are many inspiring PDF-publications scattered throughout the intarwebs, and this site collects them all (well, a lot of them) in one spot for your convenience. Now if someone could please let me in on the secret of how to find the time to read all of them, and do all my other stuff, that would be sweet.

The MIT Media Lab’s John Maeda lives at the intersection of technology and art — a place that can get very complicated. Here, he talks about paring down to basics, and how he creates clean, elegant art, websites and web tools. In his book Laws of Simplicity, he offers 10 rules and 3 keys for simple living and working —
but in this talk, he boils it down to one simply delightful way to be.

Entertaining tidbit for a Friday, eh? Have a great weekend.
(Thanks, swissmiss)

Elements of Design is a design showcase that I think is a lot more useful in an everyday work environment than most of the others. Why? Because instead of showing us complete designs, Elements of Design showcases solutions to common design problems in a quick and concise manner. Among that are things like comment forms, date pickers, search boxes, pullquotes and headlines. They seem like small elements but often they are those parts of a design that take up the most time. I get caught up on these details a lot, especially when I’m trying to achieve optimal usability.

While I’m at it, I’d like to (yet again) recommend Defensive Design, a book that, in my opinion, offers a great deal of insight and solutions for bullet-proof user guidance.

(Thanks for the tip, neck).

Those of you tired of hearing the same old arguments on why you’re too expensive and how your potential clients’ nephew and/or grandmother could do the same job for less pay will take solace in this designer’s rant. Godspeed.

(Thanks for the tip, Rob. Illustration by Ivan Raszl.)

Go check out
Visuals of the World,
which boasts
to be the longest
visual website
in the world.
It’s currently
23233.29 cm long,
which is pretty long.
And it keeps growing,
and inspiring,
because you,
the artist,
keep adding
on to it.

Who Knew is a design magazine taking on “difficult content” – ideas and issues that are commonly misunderstood and censored. Every 3 months, students graphically communicate texts considered complex, confusing and/or controversial – things that make us go, “Who knew?”. Who Knew studies the interpretive power of graphics and typography in the access, efficiency and transparency of information.

A few example questions that are discussed:

• Should work be abolished?
• Is your doctor killing you?
• Can a designer do good?
• Are you beautiful enough to survive?

All-in-all a great read for us “intellectual designers”. ;)

Communist-era propaganda posters have always been a great source of inspiration for designers, with their bold character, aggressive colors and unmistakable qualities in conveying a message. As a piece of propaganda, each of these posters has a history of its own. A Soviet Poster A Day shows us these pieces of art and helps us understand them by telling each poster’s background story. (Thanks for the tip, neck)

Nice little discovery by Oyayubizoku: there is some striking similarity between the iPhone’s calculator app and Braun’s 1970s-era calculators. Before someone accuses Apple of design theft, however, it appears that this calculator is actually a part of Apple’s own history: the Apple Collection shows an almost identical, co-branded calculator.

Erik Spiekermann, in his own words a Braun collector, puts up a few images of a 1962 Braun T100 world receiver that clearly appears to have inspired Apple’s design style. For the type geeks among us, he also notes that the iPhone version uses Helvetica for its buttons, while the Braun calculator uses its older sister Akzidenz Grotesk.

The title of this post may sound a bit like hyperbole, but after seeing it for yourself, you just might agree: Hotel Fox in Copenhagen, Denmark, is (almost) one of a kind: each and every room has been individually designed by a different contemporary artist. Definitely check out the making-of video if you have a few minutes. I’m having a hard time deciding which room I’d stay in, there are so many good ones to choose from, so I’ve collected a few after the fold. What would be your pick?

I said “almost” because this is not the only hotel of its kind: those planning to stay in San Francisco can also check out the Hotel des Arts, which has the same concept.

Check out some more rooms after the fold.