Interactive Foil

The company ‘Visual Planet‘ has developed interactive foil that can be used as a touch screen. One major advantage is that it can be glued on every surface that is not metallic. Consider the possibilities. Now displays in public will get vandalized less easy as the display (read foil!) can be glued on the inside of windows / plastics. Read the article here.

Folding Electric Bike

Inspired by the mythological creature Unicorn, who controls the star Capella in Greek folklore, designer Truong Minh Nhat has come up with a unique electric bike that folds into a backpack. Named as ‘Capella,’ the foldable bike is so lightweight and compact that users can effortlessly carry it on their back, while cruising through crowded city roads. Running on a battery, the electric bike can move at a top speed of 30 kilometers per hour for 12 kilometers after charging it for two hours.

Now Pulling Luggage Is Easy

Climbing a skyscraper on foot, carrying heavy luggage is the last thing that you would ever wish for. However, the Climbing UP suitcase is a luggage with difference that helps the users to save more energy in pulling their suitcase upstairs.

Creative Thinking Is More Than Just Creativity

The British are known for pushing the boundaries of alternative art and music and fashion, art is very much of a part of the British culture.

Best of Yanko Design 2008

2008 has been an eventful and inspiring year, and it’s hard to put all the top news in one place; still, if there’s one Yanko Design article you want to bookmark this year, this should be it.

What Color is Hope?

When a loved one is in intensive care, it can be terrifying for all concerned. Industry leader Hamilton Medical and world-recognized industrial design consultancy RKS have combined efforts to create a new ventilator designed to create a better ICU experience for medical professionals, patients, and loved ones, and, in turn, improve patient recovery. Read the article here.

How to Create a Music Magazine Cover in InDesign

In this tutorial, you'll see how to create a magazine cover in InDesign. You'll learn how to set up a page layout and add text. This is an introduction to InDesign and no previous knowledge is required. This is a simple project put together to help get you started with InDesign.

Yahoo's Design Pattern Library

Welcome to the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. Here, Yahoo shares patterns and code with the web design and development community.

The Bloomberg Makeover

View how IDEO and Ziba Design, took Bloombergs interface through a rigorous redesign.

Who's Connected How?

Technology connects us more and more each day. Who are the most and least connected people in the world? View here.

Various Ways to Visualize Consumer Spending

Depending on how you spin it, how consumers spend can be reflecting as positive or negative.
Here are a few methods to display that type of data.

Visual Complexity: Visual Design Methods

VisualComplexity intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project's main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web.

Vizzl: Visual Search and Shopping Engine

Vizzl [vizzl.com] is a new visual search / shopping engine that allows users to perform dynamic filtering, sorting and a number of view modes on all the search results retrieved from Amazon, eBay or YouTube.

As a new Adobe Flex based application, Vizzl features dynamic animations and transitions to deliver a more immersive search experience, in an aim to make searching information "fun and fast". For example, Amazon books can be sorted by relevance, best selling, price, alphabet, or release date, while views can be changed to reveal more or less detailed information.

The Vizzl application is also offered as a commercial application to the industry, such as "The Inspiration Room" [theinspirationroom.com], an online aggregator of the worlds best talents and work in the creative industry, as well as a Facebook spin-off called "Friendly Search", which offers a visual way of browsing your Facebook contacts.

The Information Architecture Institute

The Information Architecture Institute is a 501(6)c professional organization, operated by a dedicated, multi-national group of people. Volunteering their own resources, the aspire to build bridges to related disciplines and organizations. You're invited to join them in advancing the state of information architecture through research, education, advocacy and community service.

Dobpler Interactive Led Wall

The system is an interactive LED wall installed in an Oslo subway which interacts with the public, every movement creating a reaction, leaving a impression of an environment that 'keeps an eye' on the public, with no intrusive video surveillance involved.

The Zenvo ST-1

Danish boutique automaker Zenvo Automotive had exactly one goal in mind when it designed the ST1 hyper-exotic: build "a real supercar with excessive power."

Newsweek Features frog design’s Concepts for “Resurrecting the Republican Brand”

Frog design was asked by Newsweek magazine to provide ideas and design direction for “resurrecting the Republican brand,” featured the (December 29) print issue.

Before the Levees Break: A Plan to Save the Netherlands

On a late fall afternoon on the western edge of the Netherlands, coastal engineer Marcel Stive stands atop a 40-foot dune. He stares out beyond the posse of wet-suit-clad surfers wading into the breakers of the North Sea. Where the surfers see inviting waves, Stive sees dry land—and a distant storm.

Modular Robot Concept Design Digs In

A new robot concept is raising the hopes of the building industry that the high-tech future will be populated with smart excavating robots that will easily replace the high-cost of insurance-needing human contractors.

Barcelona opens a design center

Spain’s Dhub is officially open.

Is IDEO still king of innovation?

As the playing field for design management becomes more crowded, does IDEO still have an advantage?

Ford's Green Plan to Drive Sales

Promising a slew of new green vehicles, the troubled Detroit automaker is turning to top design firms to make those cars innovative and appealing.

How Apple Could Survive Without Steve Jobs

This isn't a question. It's a suggestion.

2008 Design Company of the Year: Nike

In 2008, Nike Design was about heritage, pioneering technology and an entirely new way to build shoes, proving that--even in design--some things are better with age.

Applying "design thinking" to, um, design

Lessons from the development process of Google's Chrome.

Google's Mayer: Staying Innovative In a Downturn

The mantra that's been flooding the Googleplex this year? 'Scarcity brings clarity,' explains Marissa Mayer, Google Vice-President.

24 Fantastic Future Wonders of Green Design

The ‘green movement’ has swept the world and architecture is at the forefront of the new industrial revolution - buildings being by far the biggest energy-sappers in the world.

Five Questions

A short video talking about design thinking.

Ripple

Great concept designs never fade away, they always remain alive in the memory of designers and the Nokia Aeon is definitely one of them.

Supervision

Supervision is the personal financial assistant you wish you had. The electronic budget diary scans receipts, charts money coming in/out, talks to your bank, and gives you monthly expense details so you can balance your finances more effectively - or for most people, at all. The display doubles as a touchscreen and comes with a stylus so you can manage your monies the old fashioned way too.

Alan Kay: A powerful idea about teaching ideas

What's design got to do with it?

The film 'What's design got to do with it?' shows how a selection of Danish companies have successfully used different design disciplines and design strategies. The video shows that the concept of ’Danish Design’ is changing and undergoing a very interesting development these years.

The Ideas Exchange

To reach customers better some firms have taken the idea of a focus group to its logical extreme and created huge online communities.

d.NEWS

Blog covering the happenings at the Institute of Design at Stanford.

Green Appliances and Kitchens

As the Consumer Marketing Manager of Sub-Zero and Wolf, Christopher Parr knows what people want in their kitchens, and knows what it takes for a fridge to be green.

Sucking Waste Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Here is an infrastructure investment America should consider: an Envac waste disposal system. Instead of filling our streets with garbage bags and waiting for trucks to pick them up, many European cities (they invest in infrastructure that isn't for cars there) are trying out these clever underground vacuum systems.

Simple Is Not As Simple As It Seems

An article in the New York Times says customers are being more attracted to "simple" products:

And, as it turns out, the buyers of consumer electronics could very well have been a leading economic indicator. Over the last year, they chose to buy two inexpensive and simple products, the Wii and the Flip, over competing gadgets bristling with more features.

Larry Burns: Reinventing the car

General Motors veep Larry Burns previews cool next-gen car design: sleek, customizable (and computer-enhanced) vehicles that run clean on hydrogen -- and pump energy back into the electrical grid when they're idle.

What makes a 'User Experience expert'?

So what is the added value that a user experience expert brings?

Robert Brunner

Before Jonathan Ive, there was Robert Brunner, the designer behind Apple's original, iconic PowerBook. Brunner, now has a new product-design studio, Ammunition, worked with Amazon.com's Lab126 unit, also staffed with Apple veterans, to design the Kindle e-book reader

Apple Store - Glass Staircases

A unique and eye-catching feature of Apple's high-profile stores is the glass staircase, intended to attract visitors to visit the second (or even third) floor, which most retail shoppers avoid. Besides the visually interesting design, the stairways and their accompanying glass bridges are engineering and architectural marvels, and made possibly by recent advances in glass technology that allows its use in more demanding applications.

Six Design Lessons From the Apple Store

Here are a few design ideas and lessons, to learn from the Apple Store.

20 Cool Interaction Design Concepts

Here are twenty interaction design concepts, both 2D and 3D concepts. Every interaction designer out there should have a look at these concepts to get inspired!

21 Simple But Impressive Corporate Web Designs Of Top Brands

If you want to come up with some creative web design ideas or just need to motivate and inspire yourself, browse these 21 simple but impressive corporate web designs of top brands.

IDEO Labs

Welcome to IDEO Labs workshop, playroom, garage, and launch pad. This is a place where they show bits of what they’re working on, talk about prototyping, and share their excitement over the tools that help them create.

Social Innovation

How can we unleash and leverage the power of the global design community on some of the world’s most intractable problems? Find out here.

Speed bumps that won't flatten your tires

Designers Jae-yun Kim & Jong-Su Lee say it’s time to move on! No more of this silly giant bumps in the road when we could advance!

Liquid Mongoose adds Picasa to its repertoire

Liquid Mongoose, the purveyors of the do-it-yourself DVD and music CD sleeves has put out a new version of its bookmarklet that supports Picasa Web albums.

The visual thinking weblog

Visualization can be a very powerful tool. Even simple images have the power to be provocative, insightful, challenging, and even funny

Feeling Muji

Satoshi Yasui is the kind of designer who can riff on any product--including socks. Not just any socks, but comfy ones with a 90-degree heel, knit for a perfect fit by Czech grandmothers, that he and his 15-member design team at Muji transformed into one of the Japanese retailer's roughly 7,000 products.

A green city blooms in the desert

Abu Dhabi, which reckons the world will wean itself from fossil fuels, is building a city that runs on solar power, recycles all waste, and bans cars. How will it work?

10 Futuristic Concept Laptop Designs

Technology grows too fast and to keep ourselves synchronized with the modern trends, we must take into account every progress whether that may be of past or of the future.

Compiled below is a list of the most futuristic concept laptop designs, some of which have won achievement awards while the rest are just too cool to know about.

10 Top Social News Sites Ranked by Design

Digg, Reddit, Mixx, Slashdot, and so on. They are all great social news and media websites, but how do they rank in terms of how easy they are on the eyes?

Creative and Unsual Bike Designs

Collection of creative and unusual bicycle designs from around the world.

Mobile Optimized Websites, More Harm Than Good?

Many websites automatically redirect iPhones to mobile versions of their sites. Many of these sites often deliver limited content, wasting space, and eliminate zooming.

2008 Masters of Design

A Dutch superstar, an unyielding architect, a force for good, a style soothsayer, a digital visionary and 71 perfect products. That’s what you’ll find here in our fifth annual report on the intersection of business and design.

2008 International Design Excellence Award

Out of 1517 entries, 35 were awarded the coveted Gold award, while 77 received Silver awards and 93 won Bronze awards. For the first time this year, 389 finalists were named in addition to the winners. For the first time in the history of the competition, the expert jury bestowed two “Best in Show” awards: one to SizeChina, a design research project that assembled data from a representative cross-section of people from mainland China to create the first-ever digital database of Chinese head and face shapes; and the other to Apple’s now-iconic iPhone.

Beautiful and Expressive Packaging Design

Packaging design has the primary goal to attract customers’ attention. For this purpose, package designs can not simply inform the customers, but also provoke feelings and communicate emotions. An effective packaging looks attractive, impresses with its creativity and is just nice to have on the shelf.

DzineBlog

Founded in December 2007, Dzine blog Is all about designs. Here you can find inspirational designs and some good tips in logo, graphics and web designing. The goal of this site is to share quality graphic design resources, graphic design tips and much more good inspirational designs and useful information in designing, precisely and regularly.

Packages You Won’t Need a Saw to Open

A number of retailers and manufacturers have a gift for holiday shoppers: product packaging that will not result in lacerations and stab wounds.

Blog Interface Design 2.0

Blogs have permeated just about every corner of human interest from arphids to zoology and continue to grow at a furious pace. Despite their popularity, many blogs suffer from interface design shortcomings. Unlike issues of spam and authority, these problems have relatively straightforward solutions that could considerably increase the utility of blog content.

Are Digital Marketing + Social Design Compatible?

Social media and marketing is no longer an 'emerging media' buzzword, but a discipline that nearly every marketer has embraced. What tactics are smart marketers eyeing? Where does the discipline lie within an agency? What kinds of new social media models will emerge in 2008?

Music on your arm

Now you can carry music on your arm.

Design Matters

Go here.

Eco-gems

Seven Habits of Highly Effective Green Cities
What all greening cities -- and we use the word "greening" as no city, not even Portland, is yet truly green with a capital "G" -- have in common is vision and policy plan for smart growth. After that, the other important factors seem to be:

• Good streets for bike and pedestrian traffic
  
• Robust transit
  
• Lots of green canopy
  
• Expanding and connecting of open spaces
  
• Natural storm water management techniques
  
• Renewable energy for metropolitan power generation
  

NOTCOT

NOTCOT Inc is a growing network of design sites currently including NOTCOT.com and innovative community contributed sites NOTCOT.org + NotCouture.com + Liqurious.com (+ previously TasteSpotting.com).

NOTCOT is a visual filtration of ideas + aesthetics + amusements. NOTCOT's two sites have become the daily sources of inspiration for creatives everywhere, fighting the good fight against "creative block" since 2005 with visually stunning imagery, the latest in international trends, and a passion for all things well designed.

Miami Dade College is a Super Building

Located at Biscayne Boulevard and NE 5th Street in downtown Miami, the Campus Center for Miami Dade college looks like something out of OMA’s handbag.

Are Designers also Marketers?

Bokardo is a blog about interface design for social web sites and applications.

20 cool interaction design concepts

Here are twenty interaction design concepts, both 2D and 3D concepts. Every interaction designer out there should have a look at these concepts to get inspired! As the products are totally different they have not been ranked, just numbered, enjoy!

Shanghai and Industrial Design

Waikit Chung, born and grew up in the Netherlands and graduated with a Bachelor and Master Degree in Industrial Design from the Delft University of Technology. This is his blog on design.

Currently, he's designing experiences for all kind of people at Asentio Design in Shanghai, China.

What makes IDEO so... IDEO?

Want to see what makes a firm like IDEO an almost magical appeal when you're a design student -- what makes it so successful at continually turning out concepts that not only answer design questions, but answer them in ways that are often so far off the beaten path that they create entirely new product definitions? Read on

Part 2

Quito 1: Paisajes Emergentes

In August of this year, a design competition was launched to generate ideas to repurpose Quito's Mariscal Sucre International Airport after its planned closing in a couple of years.

IDSA

The Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) is the voice of the industrial design profession, advancing the quality and positive impact of design.

Industrial Design Sandbox

Here's a neat blog site I've discovered regarding thoughts about industrial design, its future, and present.

Compressed-Air Cars Planned for Airport Test, US Launch

If Luxembourg's Motor Development International gets its wish, the next wave of alternative-energy vehicles will be a real bunch of windbags.

50 Strange Buildings of the World

Here are some rather odd and different building designs.