One of my favorite things to do when I taught design at Rutgers Newark and FIT was to have students rethink existing websites/services.
SVA Masters student Tom Calabrese did this with one of my most hated services of all time, the United States Postal Service.
Check out his presentation on Slideshare.
via Brand New
Update: Regarding my hate for the USPS–I’m specifically referring to the experience of waiting in line at the physical post office locations. It’s just a miserable experience. When at all possible, I use the automated machines, where you can weigh, stamp and mail things without having to interact with postal employees.

Naz Hamid, on the industry versus the design schools:

Something I’ve noticed, and as an industry we all have, is the disconnect between “The New Design” and what’s currently being taught in schools. Interactive designers, also called UI, UX or visual designers, are in short supply. The young guns are emerging, but product-driven start-ups and companies are searching high and low for those who have experience.
I agree with the whole piece. Design is about problem-solving and design students need to articulate their solutions beyond visual means. Writing, speaking and programming (to name a few) should all be in design students’ tool belts.

Taken from UltraLinx
via Craig Mod

Chase Jarvis gave a great talk at the PSFK Conference in SF recently where he talked about career as self-taught photographer (his portfolio), as a photo app creator (his app is Best Camera) and as a live creative education site launcher (his site is CreativeLIVE).

via PSFK

Short Version:
You can’t watermark images of artwork or photographs you don’t own the copyrights to. No, even if you buy a book and scan the images.

TLDR Version:
There’s a Tumblr I follow called Vintagegal. The site features tons of photos of classic movie stars from the 1920’s through to the 1970’s as well as pinup illustrations and shots from horror films.

It seems though, that the site’s creator, Cat, is confused about copyright law. In a post from 1 November titled, Here We Go Again, she (unintentionally) makes it clear how little she understands.

Below is the post in it’s entirety:

People you are just going to have to get over the fact that I will indeed watermark my scans. Just like people watermark their gifs.

I can physically hold these pictures, so yes I own them. I paid for them. I bid on them. I buy things and take the time to scan and edit them to share. And since people constantly re-post them, yes I will watermark them.

The hypocrisy that makes it ok to watermark gifs and not scans on here is ridiculous.

I am sorry some of you STILL can’t grasp this concept.

I really do not care if you choose to unfollow for this reason, or any reason, just don’t waste my time sending me some lame message about it.

Reposting is not the same as re-blogging.

This is the last time I will ever address this.

Cat is not the only person ignorant of what is legal and not legal in the realm of copyrights surround art and reproductions of art. I’ll even be the first one to admit I have a lot to learn on the subject.

But I do know this: When you buy a book of artwork (photographs, paintings, illustrations) and then scan images from the book and post them on your blog, you do not have the right to put your watermark on them. You actually don’t even have the right to post them to your website in the first place. You do not own the copyrights to those images. The right to copy is not yours. Is this sinking in?

This is similar to a DJ who creates a carefully curated playlist of tracks by other musicians and thinks it’s ok to “watermark” a voiceover saying their DJ name on top of the tracks they’ve arranged. You can’t do that.

In the case of a work of art, the copyright usually resides with the artist or artist’s estate, if they’re deceased. In the case of stills (or animated GIFs) from movies, the copyright usually resides with the movie studio that produced it.

I understand these laws when I post images to Daily Exhaust I don’t own the copyrights to. How does the law work when there’s a violation? The copyright owner contacts me about the offending image and I take it down.

The other issue Vintagegal brings up in her post involves reposting versus reblogging. Reblogging is an important function on Tumblr, where her site is hosted. Reblogging a post from someone else’s Tumblr on to your Tumblr maintains the trail of attribution. Reblogging allows you to see where the content of the post you’re looking at originated. It’s part of what makes Tumblr such a thriving community.

I agree with Vintagegal that reblogging is not only important on Tumblr, it’s just plain courteous. In the case of Daily Exhaust, I host it on a shared server environment on Dreamhost and I’ve been using Movable Type for my blogging software since I launched the site in 2006. Movable Type has no built-in reblogging feature which means I manually type in and link to the sources of my posts. The Internet is built on the strength of links and I think it’s important to give credit where it’s due and who knows, when someone sees I’m linking to their site, they might end up interested in Daily Exhaust and decide to reference one of my posts.

There’s another detail about reposting I should mention: I always download, rename and upload images to my server when constructing my posts. I do this for two reasons. First, it’s illegal to deep link to an image on someone else’s site. It’s called ‘bandwidth stealing’ because you’re not hosting the image, but reaping all the benefits of showcasing it on your site. And what if your site receives thousands of visitors a day and the site you’re deep linking to has a small bandwidth cap? You could potentially cost that person thousands of dollars. The second reason I re-upload images to my site is so it can be as self-contained an archive as possible. Sure, embedded YouTube videos eventually die, but I at least want the images posted to Daily Exhaust to last as long as the words written on it do.

But just because someone does not reblog or link back to your post does not give you the right to watermark images. In fact, if I wanted to, I could crop off any (illegal) watermarks from images I find and repost them on my site. In turn, I would also have to take down those images if the copyright holder asked me to.

Note: There are scenarios I have not accounted for in this post where you can post copyrighted material without risk of prosecution, such as reproducing images in educational environments. I also didn’t discuss images in the public domain.

Update: Reader (and law student) Eli Stoughton emailed me to correct my use of the term “deep linking”:

What you are doing is actually the exact opposite of what you would want to do to steer clear of infringing. What you are describing is not deep linking, but actually inline linking. And the legal precedent on inline linking is that inline linking is not infringement. The reason for this is that when you inline link an image, you have not copied that image on your server. In fact, you are merely telling the web browser to display that image. If you, instead, make a copy of the image on your server, then this constitutes making a copy and could potentially be infringement.
So, despite the fact that your intentions are well-meaning, the way you are doing things could be found to be infringement, whereas if you were inline linking, you would most likely be in the clear.

I’m happy people are keeping me on point. While my process of copying images to my server is more of a copyright infringement than inline linking to another site, I’d still rather have a archive of posts without broken image links (that I might have to take down) than to feed off of someone else’s bandwidth.

Truth be told, most of the images I post on Daily Exhaust run little risk of being taken down since many times they’re kitschy ads and illustrations from books and magazines from the early 20th century or photos by people who know and are ok with me reposting their work (like Just A Car Guy).

In my experience, if your intentions are good and you properly credit and link back to your sources, most people don’t have a problem when you repost their content.

Update 2: Seems Vintagegal has pulled the link I was referencing from her Tumblr. I’m not sure why. I guess she doesn’t realize it’s still accessible via Google Cache.

A special thing happens when designers open up to code, or when coders gain a deeper grasp of design. Suddenly function and beauty start to blend naturally. This is where interaction design shines both as a creative pursuit and a craft

—Amit Pitaru, new Co-Chair of the MFA Interaction Design department, SVA

Some of you old school web designers out there will recognize Amit. He’s the co-creator of InsertSilence and an early experimenter in interactive design and art in the early 2000’s and someone who’s work I admired when I first started my career in web design.
Yes, Flash has gone out of fashion and wasn’t designed to make the jump to mobile computing, but the work Pitaru created would not have been possible without Flash. He, along with many other digital artists like James Paterson (creator of Presstube) and Joshua Davis (creator of PrayStation) helped lay the groundwork for for all the so-called ‘progressive’ interactions we’re now seeing done with JavaScript and HTML5.
Praising the great work being done in HTML and JavaScript today without acknowledging the work these guys did over 10 years ago in Flash is like being a fan of The White Stripes without knowing who Led Zeppelin was.

Earlier this week The Telegraph published an interview with Jonathan Ive by Shane Richmond. In it, Ive talks about the early influence of his dad:

Ive was born in 1967 in Chingford, Essex, but raised in Staffordshire, where he went to Walton High School, a large comprehensive in Stafford. He says his father, a teacher, was a significant influence on his decision to pursue design. “My father was a very good craftsman. He made furniture, he made silverware and he had an incredible gift in terms of how you can make something yourself.”

Ive talks about Apple’s attention to detail in its products – details that often won’t be seen by consumers at all – as a desire to “finish the back of the drawer”. “We do it because we think it’s right,” he says. The seed of that idea was planted while watching his father work. “Growing up, I enjoyed drawing but it was always in the service of an idea. I drew all the time and I enjoyed making.”

Sounds eerily similar to another dude who used to work at Apple.
Maybe his best friend and boss, Steve Jobs. Here’s a piece from his biography by Walter Isaacson:

Jobs remembered being impressed by his father’s focus on craftmanship. “I thought my dad’s sense of design was pretty good,” he said, “because he knew how to build anything. If we needed a cabinet, he would build it. When he built our fence, he gave me a hammer so I could work with him.”

Fifty years later the fence still surrounds the back and side yards of the house in Mountain View. As Jobs showed it off to me, he caressed the stockade panels and recalled a lesson that his father implanted deeply in him. It was important, his father said, to craft the back of the cabinets and fences properly, even though they were hidden. “He loved doing things right. He even cared about the look of the parts you couldn’t see.”

The more I learn about Jobs and Ive, the more I understand why they worked so well together.

From the PSFK Conference NYC, Clay Shirky shares what’s he learned about creativity by watching creatives (about 26 minutes long).
I love how he describes the program at ITP where he’s an associate professor:

It’s an interdisciplinary program. It’s about half engineers and techies who care about human factors. It’s about half artists and designers who aren’t afraid of machines.

If I was entering college right now, this would totally be where I’d be going.

Startups, this is how design works.
A guide for non-designers by Wells Riley.
via Shane Guiter

In light of my last post, this news about This American Life retracting their episode on Apple’s suppliers is interesting.

From the Wisconsin State Journal:

Madison teachers will soon be handing out Apples to students.

The School District for the first time plans to buy more than 600 iPads for use in the majority of schools this spring. Another 800 iPads are expected to be in classrooms by next fall, all paid for with money from a state settlement with Microsoft.

Microsoft better get over those Windows 8 tablet hurdles.
Via The Loop