If anybody is going to be attending the MeshU Workshops this year and fancies geeking out over a pint (or three) let me know.
I hope these three slots dont crash, but i’m really keen on catching the Teehan Lax, Daniel Burka and Ryan Carson presentations.
Mencap has been collaborating with Fontsmith and user groups to produce a font to aid readers/users with learning difficulties entitled “FS Mencap”. The font design appears to focus primarily on readers with Dyslexia, and employs various traits in order to make the letter forms unique and easily identifiable to the reader, for example; similar letter forms such ‘b’,'d’,'p’,'q’ all have a unique design and do not use mirroring or similar shape patterns (it will probably make more sense when you look at them).
One thing i did wrongly assume this morning (never go on the internet before you have had your weetabix) is that the project was a collaboration which involved microsoft in some way. Which of course it does not. But it does raise the interesting question around screen readiness. Given that we are at the second dawn of custom Web Fonts, and Mencap’s aim is to use it on their own website, It would be an amazing achievement if Mencap could produce a a version designed to render well on screen at different sizes which could be embedded in accessible versions of Stylesheets.
Its also important to note the amazing font project from 2002 designed for to help children with Dyslexia called Read Regular which seems to share many of the same findings and design principles as FS Mencap. The site also describes some of the issues dyslexic people face when reading bodies of text. Unfortunately, I have yet to see Read Regular in the public domain for purchase.
There is a bit more background on Read Regular in a Wired magazine feature.
I have just read this really depressing blog post titled “Ignorance and inspiration“.
I find it really disturbing that despite all the great work that so many people and organisations do in promoting the concept of inclusive internet. That you still get ignorant comments like this, which I really hope are just Digg kids. Although, I know very well its not just smart arse kids who express that sort of view.
Over the past 18 months I have been doing a lot of contract and freelance work and in that time I have had a two interviews which really stick in my mind. In both cases I have spent 10 mins talking about various designs, how the experience I have gleaned from testing and working with users could be easiliy applied to their projects with very little extra effort, only to be told “We don’t do that here”. It is very difficult to put in to words how frustrating it feels when a such minor change to an existing development model (for example; building standards based HTML) is greeted with an expression which thinks you have suggested they build all their web sites in binary.
The By Designers for Designers Crew have relaunched the BD4D website. For those of you who don’t know the site. BD4D was a real driving force for the online design community way back in 2001 by creating online and off-line environments for creatives to network and share ideas. Over the years the event has grown from a small grassroots event held at the Digit Offices (London, UK) to Auditorium filling events held all over the world. The off-line events were often lead with world famous artists and designers, while also providing a great springboard for many young designers to get their work out to their peers for review and critique while allowing them a chance to get connections with agencies looking for fresh new talent.
Best of all the events were Very Cheap (not much more than the cost of a pint in most cases) or FREE.
This is where you come in! Do you want to see a BD4D event in your local area? Why not organise one?
If your in Toronto, I’m hoping to run an event towards the end of the summer. I have already started looking for Venues and Speakers. So, if you want to help me organise the event or if you want to present, Drop me a line and lets make it happen.
This post also comes with a Bonus Feature: Mutado (The Agency Ryan Shelton, Lorenzo and Mauro head up) has also been relaunched with cool site and tons of great work.
The Foundation for People with Learning Disabilities has just updated their website, their work on learning disabilities includes research, social inclusion, family support, service development, policy and our consultancy service. The site features a wealth of information relating to a wide selection of learning disabilities presented in a clear and concise manner.
The site also offers an extremely useful forum and a broad selection of good practice publications and DVDs, which can be downloaded or ordered online.
I saw this Grand Theft Auto style Coke advert in the cinema the other evening. Its a great short with one of those tunes that you won’t shake for hours.
I recently treated myself to an Apple Cinema Display. Its a great monitor and I’m really impressed with the clarity and colour depth, until I saw one in action I never would of considered using a flat screen monitor for anything where colour was important..
But, when I booted up in XP on bootcamp the resolution out and unchangeable (which surprised me considering I built the thing using the apple driver CD). The image was distorted and the definition was pretty blurry. So I started looking around on Google for Windows Drivers, which you will probably guess are bloody hard to come by. I did find a couple of tutorials for hacking together a custom driver from others, unfortunately, everyone I tried failed to work
After a few days I found a perfect solution which was also very easy to get results with. The what you will need to do;
Ta-Da, a monitor running at its native resolution.
I also unistalled Powerstrip application after I installed the driver without any problems either.
After what feels like an eternity i finally got round to making the new site live and I named it Suthen (Southern with a northern accent). So why the name change? It’s simple really, I have been freelancing since January and every time I apply for a contract the first question is always “Are you a trio of Designers/Developers?”. So in order to make things simpler on myself a name changed seemed like the best idea.
Suthen is very much a work in progress and will probably change a lot as I start adding new content and features I have in the pipeline. The plan is to build the site in small steps and update often. The first is to migrate my personal Accessibility notes and documents to the journal so they can be used by everybody.
Enough for now, it’s a Friday and Toronto beckons.
Only three days to go until we can all order the coolest keyboards on the planet. The only down side is they are slightly more expensive than your average logitech job at a cool $1600.
This post has now been sitting in my to-do list for 2 weeks. So i think its about time i finished it off.
A few weeks a go I was in a borders-a-like book shop and discovered a new (to me) outline of a world map. Its called Peters projection and it is a map which shows the world by physical area rather than relative position. It was a bit of a shock to see Africa and South America so big and Europe and North America so small - And it made me realise firstly that I never really questioned my visual perception of the world and secondly how much power a single image can have over your view of something.
Something which has really intrigued me over the past few weeks is Brendan’s new blog. From what I can gather he basically uploaded the site complete but unfinished, and over the period of a few weeks he changed and refined the design in a public space using the comments as critique. Its a great idea, especially in a medium where 90% of the effort and process put in to a project is never seen.
A few extra bits for good measure.