This is really nifty. Here’s an optical illusion that will turn a black-and-white photograph into a colour one.

I’m pretty good at working up a nice presentation (Keynote rocks my socks). The main rule for doing good prezo is don’t show up naked. You’d be surprised how many people here forget that one.

No, the actual big rule is don’t read your slides. Gruber linked to an excellent step-by-step guide to making sure the presentation you’re making is a good one. There are some excellent tips in there on how to design slides and the language to go along with them.

This dovetails nicely with what I’m up to now in real life. I’ve signed up for the PBS announcer’s course, with a view to eventually having my very own radio show on a real honest-to-goodness radio station. Golly. Last night, we learnt about writing for the radio – it’s similar to writing for presentations, which I’m used to. It’s important to be quick and punchy, far more conversational and simplistic than traditional journalistic or fiction writing.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the design of my software product. It’s kind of what I’m supposed to be doing all day. I keep coming back to a quote from (real) Steve Jobs:

“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer—that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ ... It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Steve’s no dummy.

So this thing we’re building not only needs to look good (which it does, to a point), it also needs to work well (which it does, to a point). The tricky part, from a business perspective, is to be able to justify the bits that can’t be seen. Changing some colours in the UI is dead easy (therefore cheap) and will create more ooooh-aaahhh than doing the less glamourous, more expensive, harder to justify under-the-hood stuff.

I’m still pursuing elegant utility.

Here’s some more design wank, via Monoscope.

I’m sitting at the Railway Hotel in South Melbourne, waiting for my mate Gary to show up (bastard is late!), and read about this article about data visualisation on Guy Kawasaki’s blog. I haven’t even finished reading it yet, and I want to share it with you, gentle reader. For an information visualisation geek like me, it’s pure joy.

PS: There’s free wireless at the Railway. Hooray!

The New York Times has a lovely in-depth story about the creation of the Clearview font – a font that is starting to adorn US highway signs. It’s a twisty tale that starts (as many twisty tales do) in the state of Oregon, and winds its way across that country, ultimately ending in a story that will subtly affect the entire place. I never really liked the US highway signs. They looked, in comparison to the Canadian ones, a bit dopey. Their penchant for using the abbreviation “No” for “North” would also lead to such brilliant signs as “Fort Lewis (left arrow). No Fort Lewis (right arrow)”. I’ve got a picture someplace, I’m sure.

I wonder how many people will notice the change. People don’t think about signage systems that much (I think I’m some kind of weird exception), but they permeate our lives, almost subconsciously. I remember when Vancouver changed the font of their street signs, from a rather boring all-caps white-on-black, to a system of mixed-case signs, with individual colour accents depending on the neighbourhood. Very nice indeed. Melbourne’s public transport system re-signed everything about 2 or 3 years ago. Train stations, tram stops and bus stops all got a uniform system of signage. Now if only they could work on the capacity issues…