Archive for December, 2011
Google’s Ngram Viewer
Today I found Google’s Ngram viewer and raw data sets. Above is the frequency of the words “Jeffrey” and “Jeff” in all of Google’s scanned books from 1800-2000.
The query is insanely fast, considering the data that the viewer must have to read through. Also of note, the frequency is normalized to the number of books published that year.
Random Hexadecimal Colors, Sorted
Finished video based on experiments sorting hexadecimal colors. Watch on Vimeo here.
Sorting Hexadecimal Colors
I’m currently working on a poster/catalog for an upcoming curatorial project at the Bemis Underground and was thinking of using an image of sorted white noise on a television set. Grayscale white noise is actually pretty boring (so long as it’s actually close to random, the values will fall along a Gaussian curve), so I tried some other experiments.
Using hexadecimal color yielded some pretty interesting results. The above image is 1,296,000 random values that range from #000000-FFFFFF (0 - 16,777,215). A Processing sketch sorts those values numerically and fills the pixels of the image in order.
Click here, or on the image, for full-resolution.
Also of interest were Photoshop’s histograms of the color – I’ve not really looked at histograms much in the past, but these were really strange. Luminosity was, as I suspected, a Gaussian curve and RGB values were each close to a flat line. But overall “color” resulted in the above images. The top is the raw image, the one below after “Auto Color” correction: 8-bit fortress meets birthday cake.
Taking the Plunge…
You win, world. I can no longer resist…
Snow and Dirt
Tony Bechara
Tony Bechara’s noisy, minimalist paintings. This one above, titled August 7 (acrylic on linen/60×60″), is best viewed at a distance or with squinted eyes.
CNC Milling Vinyl
Skype Glitch
Another Skype glitch.
Good Design/Bad Design/Great Design
Thoughts on design, via Ralph Koster:
Good design is familiar.
Bad design is boring.
Great design is exciting.Good design embraces human nature.
Bad design exploits human nature.
Great design is humane and humanistic.Good design guides.
Bad design controls.
Great design invites.Good design drives habit.
Bad design drives frustration.
Great design drives passion.Good design teaches.
Bad design lectures.
Great design has you teach yourself.Good design is invisible.
Bad design calls attention to itself.
Great design calls attention to what you can do.Good design celebrates accomplishments.
Bad design loudly celebrates minor accomplishments.
Great design enables accomplishments.Good design does what the user wanted.
Bad design does what the designer wanted.
Great design does what the user didn’t know they needed.Good design is at the user’s skill level.
Bad design never asked the user.
Great design makes everyone think they can use it.Good design is intentional.
Bad design is planned (exhaustively, on paper).
Great design reveals itself while working in the materials.Good design gets people to pay for utility.
Bad design gets people to pay as quickly as possible.
Great design makes money as an incidental consequence.Good design makes companies.
Bad design can make plenty of money.
Great design builds legacies, cultures, and communities.Good design converses.
Bad design tells.
Great design connects people.Good design executes on the possible.
Bad design ships on time.
Great design reaches for the implausible.Good design has only the parts it needs.
Bad design is cluttered.
Great design has fewer parts than seem possible.Good design doesn’t fail.
Bad design fails a lot.
Great design fails even more.I have done good design.
I have done plenty of bad design.
I always want to do great design.
Hat-tip to Corvus Elrod – thanks for finding this!
