Acts of Volition

A designer asked his five-year-old daughter to comment on a series of corporate logos. The results are adorable and fascinating. It’s a powerful machine that can make a child look at a bright sunflower and say “Gas.”

From the delightful 99% Invisible podcast, I learned today that many televised sporting events use pre-recorded audio samples to fake a sense of realism. When you watch at least some sports on television, particularly those that cover large areas, the swoosh of a cross-country skier, the splash of …

Google’s new Music service is so simple, it doesn’t have any links or buttons. They didn’t even need a period at the end of the second sentence:

Reporting today on location in sunny Mountain View, California and the lovely Mozilla headquarters.  •  I’m doing a talk in the Mozilla lounge about the history of the mozilla websites called A Brief History Mozilla.com (and .org) today (April 12, 2011) at 12:30PM Pacific time (4:30pm Atlantic … read more »

Stephen Horlander over at Mozilla is doing great work on the visual appearance and functionality of future versions of Firefox. See his latest Windows Theme/UI Update.  •  Pixel nerds may remember Stephen from his significant contributions to Firefox 1.0 with the Winstripe and Pinstripe themes.

Today I watched footage of a fatal plane crash and all I could think was, “Did YouTube redesign their search box?”

Our beloved little web development company, silverorange, was incorporated ten years ago today (August 11, 1999).  •  I’m looking forward to the next ten years.

A quick tip for those designing web interfaces with an “X” icon for a “Close” element. Rather than the letter “x” (or capital “X”), use the multiplication (U+2715) or heavy multiplication (U+2715) symbols.  •  There’s no semantic advantage as neither the letter X nor the ✕ symbol have the …