Beauty Literally Moves Us

At the NYTimes, Lance Hosey on why we love beautiful things:

Great design, the management expert Gary Hamel once said, is like Justice Potter Stewart’s famous definition of pornography — you know it when you see it. You want it, too: brain scan studies reveal that the sight of an attractive product can trigger the part of the motor cerebellum that governs hand movement. Instinctively, we reach out for attractive things; beauty literally moves us.

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Human Experience

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Not On My Face

Google has a new website for Glass, their heads-up display computer glasses they demoed during Google I/O in 2012.
First off, I’m not wearing this shit.
This is not just because I already wear glasses and I’m particular about what I put on my face. They just look goofy. And I’m fairly certain my father, mother, sister and brother won’t be racing out to get Google Glass either. I’m also pretty sure none of my friends will be getting Google Glass.
This isn’t Google responding to the iPhone and iPad like they did with Android. Glass is is clearly something the guys at Google are excited about. And they don’t care what anyone else thinks. They really seem passionate about Glass. I can respect that.
Google Glass strikes me as a very cool toy for engineers, developers and die-hard science fiction fans. I would definitely try it out in the privacy of my own home, but hat’s where I would draw the line.

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Technology

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Thanks, Sis.

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—Via My sister’s wall on Facebook

Thanks, sis.

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Quotes

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Evolution, Not Reinvention

Over at ABC News, details on the new HTC One (via The Loop):

“We think it’s time to shake things up in the smartphone space,” Mike Woodward, President of HTC America, told ABC News in an interview. “We have decided to come out and reinvent the smartphone.”
Careful with the ‘R’ word.
I got news for ya, Mister Woodward. Your HTC One smartphone is not a reinvention, it’s an evolution of the smartphone paradigm Apple introduced in 2007. Instead of making a phone with a few portable computing features, Apple made a mobile computer with the ability to make phone calls. The HTC One follows this paradigm precisely.
Follow?
That said, the phone looks really sharp. Nice work.

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Innovation

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Exclusively and Unapologetically

At Stemmings, Matt Chase on his mother and Comic Sans:

My mother, in addition to being my apparent number one fan, is also an educator of children. This means several things, but chiefly: 1) she has an endurance typically found only in Olympic athletes and 2) she uses Comic Sans exclusively and unapologetically. Sometimes in red, sometimes in blue, it’s there–all over her classroom and often in the e-mails she sends my sister and I. And while it’s true that our phone chats don’t often comprise the typographical considerations of my day-to-day work process, the use of this typeface is a notable point of contention. “Why, mom, why,” I used to wonder. Is it buried deep in the teacher DNA? Part of some iron-clad contract? A perverse joke lauded in the teacher’s lounge, legendarily discussed by professors sipping coffee from mugs reading “I Love Helvetica” emblazoned in a fluorescent swath of Comic Sans mockery?

Finally, I just asked.

Categories:

Typography

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