The other day I stumbled upon this site and was instantly delighted. Ephemera and other everyday things around us are designed and when collected together provide rich insight into our daily life. They are a snapshot of our culture during a certain space of time.

Looking through the library of 45 labels took me back to when I was in junior high and collected 45's. I never really noticed the labels, but some of them were very cool.

Enjoy.

The MOMA does it again. A beautiful flash piece explores the depth and breadth of the Russian Avant Garde book.

The site is divided into three major sections:

A Slap in the Face of Public Taste 1910 - 1924
Transform the World 1916 - 1933
Building Socialism 1924 - 1934

There are tons of examples in each section of books shown with mulitple spreads and enlargements. The interface is easy to use and allows for exploration as well as linear reading of the historical information. There are explanations of terms, full bibliographic information about the book with listings of the author and designer.

In the Reading Room section - there are three books offered. Selecting one of them shows stills that you can page through as if you are reading the entire book one page at a time. This is a great idea to show flow of spreads, scale and length of the book. I wish the images were larger though for more detail.

One of the more interesting parts of the site is the Book index. Shown in various forms, the books are arranged on a time line with rollovers of mini covers that show a larger version on the right with it's bibliographic data. The time line has some bold call outs of political events that happened which in turn affected the work of the book authors and designers. In addition there is a pulldown with a complete list of all the book authors and another that lists all the publishers. Too bad there isn't one listing all the designer/artists as well since not all the authors were designers. This is a very innovative way to show a large matrix of information in a small amount of space. It is very beautiful, useful and usable.

This is a design history goldmine.

Jodi Forlizzi - of Carnegie Mellon - writes an interesting essay: Towards a Framework of Interaction and Experience As It Relates to Product Design

"Our goal is to make experience accessible to designers -- to make our theory of interaction design live in practice, by allowing designers to conceive of designing experiences rather than designing products."

I think it is great that there are people looking into how we can effectively design interactions and experiences. The great debate over whether our field should be called Experience Design because we can or cannot design experiences for a person will be further defined as we create and agree upon a common language, methodology and understanding of just what it means to design for these multiple dimensions that make an experience.

Check out my interview with Terry Swack and Clement Mok, the founders of the AIGA Experience design group. The interview for Boxes and Arrows coincides with the first AIGA/CHI joint forum that is going on right now in Minneapolis. (wish I were there)

This site is a flash version of the book Bembo's Zoo and is delightful. A-Z animals are created using characters from the name of the animal and is done from the alphabet in the type font Bembo.

Interesting collection of found typography. The collection is from photos shot by Nicole Ferentz and Amelia Luckett and is a survey of signs in the Chicago Metropolitan area.

The next South Bay cocktail hour will be next Thursday, April 11th at Kanisa. Anyone who went to the IA Summit in Baltimore is encouraged to join us and share your thoughts from the summit. We will also take a look at the role of research in the UCD process.

Let me know if you want to be added to the mailing list. Hopefully I got everyone who let me know last time.

Now we all know. Amazing isn't it?