Tag: Design
Scripturient: The Book of Knowledge: 2
Last post I mentioned I had rescued a set of encyclopedias from the dumpster at the end of this year’s Mother Of All Yard Sales (MOAYS; an Optimist Club event). I didn’t explain what I saved and why, but I’m here to explain, and to show. Bear with me. First,
Continue readingScripturient: Failures in Cwood’s Typography and Design
Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form. Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style (Hartley & Marks Publishers, 2001) I’m neither a graphic designer nor a typographer, but I spent many, many years working with design and type, as well as designers and typographers,
Continue readingThings Are Good: 5 Ways We Can Improve Cities During the Pandemic
IKEA’s research and design lab in Copenhagen released a book this month on ways we can improve our cities. They start by recognizing we’re presently facing two global crisis: a pandemic and catastrophic climate change. Their proposals to address these two issues within cities is titled The Ideal City and
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: Green Homes: The New Gold Standard (Beyond Net Zero & Passive House Design)
The newest Earthship green home design would seem to be the best performing home design overall, beating typical Net Zero or even Passive House designed homes. However, it would be even better if 50″ or 60″ thick straw bales were used instead of tires and rammed earth for walls. Firstly,
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: A Revolution In Green Homes: Systems Thinking Required
Or, Revolutionizing The Leading Edge Think outside the box – outside ALL boxes, including the club we’re in. This short video presentation (below) is the best summary I have seen so far as to the core principles of leading edge green home design and building construction. It still
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: Architecture & Home Design: Raising the Bar
This is my favourite home design so far. (Video below) Every home and building should be passive solar, and every home or building should be an Earth Home – meaning, it uses heating and cooling from the sun and the earth. Anything less is radically substandard, and in light
Continue readingThings Are Good: Gender Inclusive Design for our Built Environment
Architects generally want people to feel comfortable around their buildings or interior spaces; however, architects aren’t perfect and may overlook some simple design solutions that can put people at ease. The World Bank Group has released a handbook for urban planners, architects, and anybody shaping our physical environment to use
Continue readingThings Are Good: How Architects are Responding to the Climate Crisis
Architecture is all around us and most of us don’t even think about it. The built environment shapes how we think and provides (or denies) us with options on how to navigate the world and engage with it. This means that if we change the built environment we can change
Continue readingThings Are Good: Better Urban Design can Stop Drivers from Killing People
More people live and work in cities than ever before in the history of humanity, as a result the transportation pressures on these urban centres as equally increased. In North America, the last century focused on making cities for cars instead of for people and as more population density increases
Continue readingThings Are Good: How Good Policy Alongside Good Design Improves Lives
Tishaura Jones, the first female treasurer of St. Louis, set out to improve her city through good design. Through her own struggles dealing with the city’s bureaucracy she identified many problems with how information is presented, she noted she wasn’t the only one running into bad design. Jones decided to
Continue readingThings Are Good: Streetmix: Remix Your Street
Streetmix Let’s be honest, people are bad at conveying their ideas on what streets can look like. Thankfully there’s an open source project designed to help people remix their local streets and share it with others. The web based design tool Streetmix provides a simple drag and drop interface to
Continue readingTHE CAREGIVERS' LIVING ROOM A Blog by Donna Thomson: HOW CAN A SUPER-COOL BIKE CHANGE THE WORLD? HINT: IF IT’S A MOBILITY AID
Here’s a question: Who sets out to change the world by designing a mobility aid? Unexpected answer: Someone who spent years in Afghanistan building schools for girls.A few years ago I began reading about the Alinker Walking Bike and was intrigued. So last week, with the help of a mutual friend’s
Continue readingThings Are Good: Safer Cities Stem from Active Communities
In the 1990s former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani popularized the broken window theory which is a zero tolerance approach to getting rid of crime. At first it proved successful and the approach spread, only later was it revealed that other factors were at work. Today, the solution to fighting
Continue readingcartoon life: Trump and Kim Jong to talk.
It’s the age of Big Hair Diplomacy
Continue readingThings Are Good: Birds Provide Japanese Train Design
Yesterday a Japanese train company apologized for running 20 seconds ahead of schedule. How did Japanese trains get so fast? The answer for how their famous bullet trains move so quickly is thanks in part to biomimicry, the study of using animals as a source for design. The front of
Continue readingThings Are Good: Busting Urban Planning Myths
There’s a lot of misconceptions about how to make cities a better place to live that need to be cleared up. A popular belief is that adding more lanes for cars will help curb traffic jams – when the opposite it true. Some backwards-looking individuals think that adding bike lanes
Continue readingScripturient: Back to black
I had noticed of late that several websites are more difficult to read, that they opted to use a lighter grey text instead of a more robust black. But it didn’t dawn on me that it wasn’t my aging eyes: this was a trend. That is, until I read an
Continue readingScripturient: Designing Type
Karen Cheng’s 2005 book, Designing Type, is the third of the recent books on typography I have received*. Of the three, it is the most technical, appealing to the typophile and design geek more than the average reader. But it’s also a ref…
Continue readingScripturient: Reading Letters: Designing for Legibility
The human brain is truly a remarkable machine.* We can see a bunch of lines and in that same brain turn them into an M and know it’s not a V or an N or a K or W. Yet M isn’t a ‘thing’ – it’s an abstract representatio…
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