Its nice to finally read an article about the design scene in a relatively obscure place like Mozambique, a place where most people wouldn’t consider looking in to.
Barbara Alves is a communication designer from Portugal who visited Mozambique in 2009 to teach design to students. Read the article here.
Turning the sidewalks into recreational spaces. Image from Design Observer
What I found most interesting was the reaction and views the students have to design. According to Barbara, “Their main concern is learning software”. Its very similar territory to the situation we have in the UK, particularly with design graduates who are looking for their first step in the design industry. UK students are taught about design thinking and conceptualising ideas, but they will always think that if they don’t know Photoshop or Flash, then they will have no chance getting a job. This is true to an extent, but design thinking and concepts always beats software skills
Anyway, interesting article, and definitely worth a read.
Since every man and their dog now talks about html5 it’s a good idea to know about it even if you’re not a developer.
Mark Pilgrim has written a book called ‘Dive in to html5‘ and he’s also publishing it online. It’s lovely laid out with great typography, illustrations from the public domain and beautiful initials. Just look at this bad boy right here:
Schooloscope, a very neat site plotting UK’s schools on a map making it easy to see how they’re doing according to Ofsted. Great way to get a brief overview of the schools in your local area.
Beautifully executed by BERG with a very nice map made with CloudMade.
Interesting article over at Mashable about some new trends happening in the online news arena. There appears to be a paradigm shift from ‘global to local’ as far as some news-based sites go, with journalistic responsibilities shifting to members of local communities. No surprises that this trend coincides with increased uptake of smartphones offering location-based services.
Jack Dorsey, co founder of Twitter is now set on a new revolution, and has created Square. A mobile payment start up that allows iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, and Android devices to take card transactions.
So if you want a coffee but have no cash on you, you’ll be able to pay for your espresso with your card. Square will be an easy cheap way for coffee shops and other retailers to accept card payments.
IOGraphica is a simple application which runs in the background and tracks your mouse movements. If you run it while you’re working you can get some pretty cool visualizations, and some useful usability feedback if you’re working on Photoshop or something all day! Will post my visual at the end of the day.
Panic, purveyors of the best ftp app there is, has not only a drag and drop shop, but also a very nice blog built in html5. Impressing to see how well the browser, well at least Safari and Chrome, handles the slight rotation.
They also have an Apple e// that can play music videos. Can we have one too please?
