Vahram Muratyan of Parisian design studio ViiiZ has been producing these terrific diptychs that contrast various aspects of Paris and New York. My father lives in Paris and so I go back and forth about twice a year, and so these visual observations strike me as charmingly canny.

See all the illustrations on his full blog here.

An audio interview (and transcript) with the former creative director at Digg who is now working on a gaming startup. By now it’s obvious to everyone that gaming is the next great frontier for user experience design. Burka has some interesting insights to offer on what this means for the field as a whole.

“I think the idea that Web applications are now becoming mature enough that we can start thinking about joy, and about surprise, and making a much more rounded experience than just one that’s usable, I think that’s really exciting… there are a lot of places we’re going to see game ideas put into applications in ways that we’re not going to see it and say, ‘Hey, that’s just like a game.’ So it’s going to be in much more subtle ways and much more disparate ways than building a full integrated game into an application.”

I think that’s exactly right. Read more here.

The author and mastermind of the whole Harry Potter universe uses plain old notebook paper and a ballpoint pen to develop the intricate plot structures of her books. Down the y-axis, she lists chapter numbers and a month-based chronology, and along the x-axis she lists various attributes of each chapter like title, events and even prophesies integral to each segment of the book.

I think this is fascinating and I’m so curious to know what other authors use similar, low-fidelity planning methods. Also, it goes to show that even in a multimedia age, most good ideas start with a pen and paper. More about the spreadsheets here.

Here’s another project that I’ve been involved with that went live this week — and this time I actually did some design work on it. Several months ago the awesome mailing list service MailChimp invited several designers to create premium templates for their paying customers. Aside from myself, there are designs from Jon Hicks, Veerle Pieters, Elliot Jay Stocks, Dan Rubin and several others. We each produced three templates: one for a newsletter, one for product announcements and one to promote an event. Here are two of mine:

Have a look at all of them here.

Here’s one of the several projects I’ve had my hands in over the past several months: the Design Observer iPhone app debuts this morning over on the App Store. The app lets users download a wealth of the world’s best design commentary on the go. I played a bit part in helping to guide the whole process, but the credit really goes to the good folks at Small Planet Digital in Brooklyn who designed and developed the app in conjunction with Betsy Vardell and (of course) Bill Drenttel over at Design Observer.

You can read more about it here or you can download the app on the App Store for the awesomely low, low price of free.

This 1987 James L. Brooks comedy is one of my favorite films of all time, and certainly one of the best movies about the news business ever made. It has a pitch perfect script loaded with hilarious, smart and memorable lines, not to mention three exceedingly fine performances from Holly Hunter, Albert Brooks and William Hurt. Criterion’s new, extras-laded, director-supervised restoration arrives on Blu-Ray and DVD in January (it would’ve surely been on my holiday list this year if it had been released this fall).

Find out more about the movie and pre-order it over at Criterion.com.

Australians and friends-of-the-blog Inventive Labs have just launched this awesome project: an HTML5 e-book reader that works on pretty much everything: iPhones, iPads, Kindle3s, even that antiquated technological mechanism known as a desktop Web browser.

Book.ish is based on the Monocle open source e-reader platform, meaning it requires no installation of any kind. Just point your browser there and start reading. You can even continue later whether you’re online or offline.

It’s pretty neat and will only get neater as more titles become available. Inventive Labs also have plans to build a publishing platform on top of Book.ish that will connect publishers and booksellers, so the potential is there for it to be more than just a reader but also a new distribution method for digital books. Read more and sample a handful of free books at Book.ish.

In 1981 animator Mike Patterson made this remarkable short student film in which thousands of hand-drawn cells were combined to create a distinctive animation style. Warner Brothers records hooked up the Norwegian pop trio A-Ha with Patterson, and together they created one of the earliest and most influential gems of the music video form. If you’re not familiar with the video I’m talking about, don’t worry. It was a long, long time ago. John Nack has the short film and a link to a BBC article here.

Along with Ruben Bolling’s Tom the Dancing Bug, I think my favorite running comic strip is Kaz’s Underworld, a sublimely disturbing series of riffs on classic cartoon tropes (strangely humanoid rodents, diminutive and bizarre sidekicks, and tough guys with balloon-like forearms, all engaged in short, almost banal slapstick gags) that makes you want to cry a little even while you’re laughing. Now Kaz has teamed up with The Comic Book Factory to produce a series of animated versions of his strips. There are eight of them so far and they’re entertaining enough to be worth a viewing (they’re each very brief). I have to admit though, as special as I think Underworld is, the effect of these is still a little like seeing most any other comic strip in animated form — it looks like the original, but it’s somehow less funny.

Watch all eight cartoons at mylittlefunny.com.

Artist Benjamin Lotan is offering a service where he can print a 20 x 40 in. poster of your Facebook friends’ avatars in a tidy grid on archival photo paper.

“The size of your friends’ photos are optimized to fill out the full space, so their dimensions will depend on the total number of friends you have. There are about 620 friends printed on the poster you see [below], but the code is optimized such that your poster will look fantastic whether you have 200 friends, or up to 2,200 friends.”

I’m not really much of a Facebook user but I think this is pretty neat in that it suggests that there will be interesting things that we can do within a social context where everyone is represented by a little photographic icon.

Find out more and buy one for yourself at PrintingFacebook.com.

I try hard not to just re-blog whatever John Gruber links to, but this one really deserves to be broadcast far and loud. Dating site OkCupid dug into their statistics (garnered from over 3 million users both straight and gay) to try and see if there are any truths to the stereotypes about gay sexual behavior. What results is highly readable and a remarkably calm and effective counter-argument to a raft of commonly held misconceptions. Also, it reaffirms for me the truth that politicians who use anti-gay rhetoric or who continue to oppose gay rights are on the wrong side of history.

Design student Joe Golike created this hypothetical festival of films by director Michael Mann for an assignment at the Academy of Art. The choice of Mann as the subject for this end-to-end identity design project was inspired in part by a blog post I wrote in 2009 about the director’s two most recent movies. Golike’s designed a whole slew of collateral including a poster, a catalog, schedules, DVD packaging, even a soundtrack. Be sure to see the process journal he created that describes the entirety of the project. Very nicely done.

See the project overview here.

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t agree that Apple’s workhorse media application iTunes doesn’t need to be fixed. It’s slow, clunky and suffers by embodying a vision of how people manage and interact with their media that’s becoming more and more painfully antiquated every day. Over at Macworld Kirk McElhearn argues that what’s needed is a server version of the software, something that can centrally manage all of a household’s media. He sketches a picture of how such a device would work that’s logical but probably never going to happen — mostly because it’s disk-based. I’m pretty sure Apple has no further interest in helping people manage their media through the use of hard disks located in the home. The next truly significant revision of iTunes, whether in server form or not, will surely be in the cloud. Read the article here.

My good friends at Weightshift have just launched this real-world directory for designers and developers. Log in with your Dribbble or Github accounts and identify your location in New York, San Francsico or Chicago (more cities coming soon). It’s pretty neat to be able to see who is physically near you, neighborhood by neighborhood, and will be even more useful if it achieves critical mass. Nice idea. Check it out and register your location at Interhoods.org.

I thought this was interesting. Luke W. writes up some notes on a talk given last week in Chicago at the Design for Mobile conference by Dan Mauney, Director of Human Factors and Research at design consultancy HumanCentric. The subject was a study Mauney and his team did on what gestures forty people in nine different countries intuitively and comfortably use when interfacing with mobile devices. One point was particularly interesting to me:

“The study didn’t find see a lot of variability between experts and novices — move and zoom had the biggest variability.”

If true, that’s a world of difference from the paradigm of desktop computing. Hopefully Mauney will make his presentation available in full, but in the meantime you can read Luke’s notes here.