Design
Looking at Sketches from street level by Amanda Wood
Just received a really nice zine from Auckland, New Zealand from Amanda Wood. It’s 22 pages plus cover and is balanced between black & white images of cityscapes and text. While I do push the speed of technology on this blog, I have to admit that I really appreciate when someone takes the effort and time to create something like Sketches. When someone creates a pdf the thing can be as many pages as possible, infinitely colourful and any dimension. Looking at this... Read More
White Label Mobile Check In’s to Enhance Events & Outdoor Experiences
This post is half recap, half collection of a couple mobile apps that found out about last night and how I saw things take off. I came across a post from Bob Lefsetz who typically writes about the music industry though occasionally brings something else into the mix. He was talking about a ski resort that was thinking more into the mobile future than anyone in the music industry. There was a lot of good points plus the attached video of the ski resort implementing check in’s... Read More
A Bathroom Worth Noting
Sunday morning I had the opportunity to hang out with Randy J. Hunt, a smart design guy that I respect a lot. He has a habit of mentioning great places to eat so when he emailed me on Saturday wanting to meet up on Sunday I wasn’t going to say no. I had never been to Pulinos before but have walked by it quite a bit with Madison checking out what was going on Bowery. We ended up splitting a couple pizza’s. There was the Nutella (extra virgin olive oil, sea salt +... Read More
Back to the Future Automatic Lacing System
Usually patent diagrams aren’t that exciting. The above images are—they’re illustrating an automatic lacing system. A couple years back I had a post about the actual shoe here, here, and here. Now come the laces. More info about the laces at Street Giant and Nice Kicks. Read More
Playing Pandora vs Vevo on the iPhone, or better known as random things I might like vs start/stop of selected artist
Just as the title suggests I was curious to examen how these two on demand media types benefit and distract people that want to enjoy music. Pandora allows a person to search for an artist and stream music from their choice along with other that sound similar. In theory the stream will play as long as someone wants. If they want to advance to a mystery next track they can, but with the free version this can happen only for a limited period of times. Vevo on the other hand streams... Read More
Rain Inspired Sunday Afternoon Outside my Window
With the humidity at levels that I can’t really tolerate I’ve been spending most of my Sunday afternoon reading. I’ve also been keeping an eye on the clouds roll in and out, sometimes turning my view completely white. But things move fast and a couple moments later I had a new pointillism inspired view. Tons of clear raindrops turned my view into something that if I didn’t capture that moment would likely not be seen again. Here’s a couple of... Read More
Studying @StartupQuote
ATOMIC IDEA “Observe the world around you – everything you do, and especially everything you hate to do. - Aaron Patzer” Simple quote (likely less than 140 characters) in text. DISPLAY Visualize and personalize quote with the face of the person that wrote it, make type better to read HOST Show on website with single url that is part of a larger collection, give the capabilities to pass core unit via text (Twitter) LOOP Give away the text knowing that there’s... Read More
Why I Checked Out of #Foursquare
Last night I watched a live announcement from Facebook about what Foursquare had already done. Once the keynote presentation ended I watched Gowalla go up as the first partner and was sort of relieved. I had never used them because again I thought they were a blatent rip off of Foursquare. (For the record I think the design of Gowalla is gaudy and smudgy.) I felt Gowalla would sell me out data wise if the opportunity presented their company to advance up the social geo chain.... Read More
Can We Date—the Illustrative Guide
I like this story for a couple reasons. I found it via Twitter from the person that actually designed it. The illustration is perfectly balanced between narrative and visuals. I can look at it more than once and it is going to have the same consistent impact. I also wanted to post about it so I can have the .png in my own database. Just press (or click if you’re not on an iPad) to view it at full size. So here’s how I found it. Twitter from a friend so I rt’d... Read More
REVIEW COPY: From Here to There by Hand Drawn Map Association
I really enjoyed reading and looking through From Here to There: A Curious Collection from the Hand Drawn Map Association. The book is divided into six categories of maps: directional maps, found maps, fictional maps, artful maps, maps of unusual places and explanatory maps. Each map that is a category explains what is going on with the map, and typically a story. What I found enjoyable was reading the personal anecdotes of why a person needed a map or what they doing as... Read More
A Link Drop of Sorts, 3 things that really spiked today & their similar paths
Up until a couple months ago I’d collect a number of links over a week, look at what patterns tied them together and make a mind map of it. Things have been really busy and I haven’t had the time to focus on that type of post. I’m also looking at a huge magnitude shift in the number of things I can read during a week—it is really hard to take the time to stop reading and start posting. Today was strange in that I kept tweeting about three topics that most... Read More
Turning a Print Magazine into a Friendly iPad Version, Looking at Dazed & Confused
Now that the iPad has been out for a couple months I’m starting to see different types of clusters of functions happening for publishing. There’s the standard web version through a browser, stand alone mags like Wired that have to be designed twice to fit portrait and landscape formats, pdfs, feeds like Flipboard and now a light weight flipbook like device that is essentially the print magazine in digital format. While the tech fan in myself would prefer... Read More
A Couple Angles About Education During This Economy of Online Scale
This is one of those posts that came together after reading and viewing three different angles concerning education. It made sense to lump them together to show the spectrum of where education might be headed. I remember watching the video from Salman Khan first. My thoughts after that were if a person was really motivated they could really teach themselves more than a person that is unmotivated that is going to University. There’s a lot of other free online resources that... Read More
Inside vs Outside Info Gathering
Over the past couple of months I’ve tried documenting how my consumption of information has evolved with my iPad. I’m using a couple different readers like Reeder and Pulse News. I’ve also noticed that there’s sites that are filtering Twitter like TwitterTimes and the new app Flipboard that is using tweets as the starting point to gather headlines. Pulling from Twitter is both helpful and a hinderance at the same time. Those sites are great to catch up... Read More
Checking out the Os Gemeos x Futura mural at PS. 11 Going Up
This morning I found out from a tweet of MarcDSchiller that Os Gemeos and Futura2000 have a painting going up. After spending some quality time enjoying the great weather at Madison Square Park I decided to walk a couple blocks to check out the progress. The painting is going up on the side of a school at 320 West 21st street and looks to be titled the “giant project” according to a post from Os Gemeos website. UPDATE: Below is the press release for the mural. FOR IMMEDIATE... Read More
Jeff Bezos, Charlie Rose, Streaming Interviews, Stretching Media Types and Transcripts…
Originally I wanted to do a post about the interview Charlie Rose did with Jeff Bezos. I had planned to embed the video of the talk and make a couple points about the things that stood out. But to my confusion I when I went to the share button on the page all I could do was email a link to someone. What surprises me is that I used to be able to embed the entire interview and now I can’t. I did notice that there is a six minute clip on YouTube. However what I did find interesting... Read More
Looking at the Redesign of the @Nooka Website
I’ve been really lucky in 2010 so far. It has also been incredibly busy. While transitioning from Daylife and before starting at Behavior I had the opportunity to work with one of my favourite brands to design their new site in terms of UX. I’m not a huge fan of the word UX as I see it as part of the natural part of design, but I’ll save that discussion for a different post. Essentially I worked with Nooka to see what could be improved in terms of people... Read More
Some Ambient Themes about the #Flipboard iPad App
For those that have had the chance to read content displayed on Flipboard for the iPad, there is almost universal approval of the experience. Yeah there are people that weren’t able to download the app for the first couple of days, and they should have had better error messaging explaining why some Twitter lists and people weren’t able to be followed. But with that said there’s a lot to take note with how an app with content is dynamically choosing, sifting... Read More
Charlatan, Martyr, Hustler Poster by @joeyroth
You might know of Joey Roth because of his Sorapot for Tea and the ceramic speakers that he recently designed. As a designer who is constantly thinking about the bigger picture he’s made a poster of a concept that he did for 48 Hours magazine. I really liked illustration when he first mentioned it on Twitter and am happy to see it in a larger format. You can but the Charlatan, Martyr, Hustler Poster for twenty five dollars from his site. I’ll be buying on after I... Read More
Some Recent Press & Four Years in NYC
Bar codes get around town and get more useful Gizmodo: What’s Your Tech Setup to Watch the World Cup? Fast Company: World Cup: How Are You Watching? Perspective: Michael Surtees on User Experience within an Ecosystem of Screens I celebrated a small victory this morning. Four years ago was my first full day in NYC. I moved from Edmonton, Alberta Canada after setting my sights here for about six years. It has been a truly crazy and exciting time with lots of ups and higher... Read More
UX
Exploring Gesture Deficiency
Yesterday while working on a multi touch iPad UI issue with Chris Fahey, the phrase “gesture deficient” came up. We were looking at some of the iPhone swipe actions to multi delete and wondered how many people like or even know about some of the things a person can do to swipe. Essentially there’s features [...]
Information Design
Can We Date—the Illustrative Guide
I like this story for a couple reasons. I found it via Twitter from the person that actually designed it. The illustration is perfectly balanced between narrative and visuals. I can look at it more than once and it is going to have the same consistent impact. I also wanted to post about it so [...]
Hello
DesignNotes is published in NYC by multidisciplinary designer, writer and educator Michael Surtees. Michael tries to explore people's daily experiences and observations with design. When not typing early in the morning on this blog he can be found at Behavior during the day. He can be reached at michael at michaelsurtees.com 
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