David Lidsky's Blog, page 3390
November 29, 2013
The Co.Design Guide To Black Friday
Here are 16 of our favorite products from 2013. Go wrestle some grannies to get 'em.
If we had to pinpoint what we appreciate most in consumer goods, we'd say this: shortcuts. We're dazzled by them. We're talking about everything from environmentally conscious shortcuts (turning a used water bottle into a micro-humidifier) to money-saving shortcuts (stick-on panels that look like reclaimed wood) to recreational shortcuts (skipping the very literal pain-in-the-ass task of breaking in a leather bicycle seat, with a cleverly designed alternative). This has little to do with laziness; we just like to live efficiently. What follows is a guide to some of our favorite products from 2013. Call it a shortcut to the shortcuts.
Your Ultimate, Ridiculous, Insane, Essential 2013 Holiday GIF Guide
There's a week of Kwanzaa, 8 nights of Hanukkah, and 12 days of Christmas. And we have 21 amazing GIfs here for you to help you celebrate! Math!
As you may have heard, selfie is 
November 27, 2013
2013 Is Almost Over. Get Your Productivity Game In Order
Now that you've digested all that stuffing and pie, it's time to start thinking about the new year. Here's how.
You never feel quite as productive as you should. But it's not too late. You can do it--you can be more productive. Here's our guide do making it all happen. Learn from the pros:
Letter-Pressed Notebooks Celebrate The Gettysburg Address
150 years ago, Lincoln made history with the Gettysburg Address. To celebrate the anniversary of this famous speech, a designer created a series of prints and notebooks featuring Lincoln's timeless words.
150 years ago, in November of 1863, Abraham Lincoln made history with the Gettysburg Address, in which he reaffirmed the Constitution's "proposition that all men are created equal," and vowed "that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth." But there was one thing the president got wrong that day: "The world will little note nor long remember what we say here," he said. That speech is now one of the most famous in history.
Reinventing MIDI For A Big Data World
Standardized for 30 years, MIDI continues to be useful to a lot of musicians despite its age. Still, WaveDNA is trying to improve MIDI and give it a new outlook on life.
Like a lot of older technologies past their prime, MIDI was widely implemented and so it remains key for a lot of musicians--even some 30 years later. With an older standard comes the headaches of modernism, however, and because MIDI is a simple and linear technology it needs to be dragged into the future.
For Clothing Designers, Virtual Models Are Faster Than Flesh
New software by a company called Body Labs lets designers try new styles on avatars that flex and move like real human models.
Traditionally, fashion designers have had to rely on flesh-and-blood models to understand what their clothes look like on the human body, and shoppers have been wary of ordering clothes online without the chance to try them on.
For Clothing Designers, Virtual Models Make All The Difference
New software by a company called Body Labs lets designers try new styles on avatars that flex and move like real human models.
Traditionally, fashion designers have had to rely on flesh-and-blood models to understand what their clothes look like on the human body, and shoppers have been wary of ordering clothes online without the chance to try them on.
How Did "Drone" Become Such A Dirty Word?
The term is about as politically charged as tech vocabulary can be. Should we stop using it?
In 2013, the word "drone" has referred to a number of gadgets: on one end of the drone spectrum, there's a $300 consumer quadcopter that you can buy at a Toys R' Us that is a "drone". On the other, you have a $4 million piece of advanced government hardware that can do everything from monitor forest fires in order to assist with their containment to the deployment of surgical CIA-led missile strikes.
Marvel's New "Uberframework" Graphs Every Character In The Universe
The business of heroes needs saving from the crushing weight of its own data. The Marvel team thinks they've built a solution: a massive database that uses graph theory to give fans a simple take on characters that span comics, movies, and video games.
After 70 years of publishing, Marvel Entertainment has built up an incredible universe of heroes, villains, and super teams--a sea of data that no mere wiki can organize. At long last, Marvel has embarked on a mighty quest of its own: to create an entirely new graph database and search system to conquer continuity malaise by visualizing each character across the Marvel Universe.
Go From A Tropical Rainforest To An Arctic Wonderland In One Awesome Building
Five different climate regions will be housed in this Korean center for ecology, designed by Grimshaw.
At the National Ecology Center in Seocheon, South Korea, visitors will soon be able to walk through more than 35,000 square feet of greenhouses mimicking the world's most diverse ecosystems.
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