The elements of design are changing. Innovation is changing the design and planning process of everything from how you lay out a garden to the infrastructure of an industrial facility.
Designers and developers are looking to become more sustainable - ecologically and economically. Hence, design principles are changing the way they go about their business, with an eye to use technology to make the process more efficient.
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This content series is brought to you by Autodesk - Accelerating Better Design
Sustainable design tools can be simple or extremely complex. Simple tools are things that can be accessed through any computer, tablet or smartphone anywhere, like GPS. With GPS, the location of a garden, a building, a cultural or industrial park can be mapped to its precise location. That makes it possible to ascertain many different factors that could help in making design decisions.
For instance, designers can cross-reference a GPS point with an abundance of historical weather data. How much rain does the location get? What direction does that rain tend to come from? How can a building be positioned to maximize airflow, which could cut down on heating and cooling?
Software can help. If a designer has a dataset of building materials, for example, what are the most effective sustainable materials to build with in the location? Not all renewable building resources are created equal. Sustainable energy production can be quantified by harvesting data on wind and sun strength in the area to determine the precise location for turbines and solar panels to feed the location.
The Future of Sustainable Design
Sustainable design can make cities less cluttered. For instance, take a drive through midtown Manhattan and look for parking. Within the last several years, corner parking lots are increasing the efficiency of their physical space by using stacking principles (fork lifts essentially that keep your car a story up in the air). By stacking cars, buildings do not have to be repurposed for the inefficient use of being nothing but a parking lot.
Almost any industry sector you can think of will be affected by sustainable design and the new tools that developers are using to implement it. From agriculture that helps create more efficient irrigation systems to energy, water, furniture and on.
These are the concerns of the modern designer. Over the last 20 years, advanced computer technology has enabled them to not just do their jobs more efficiently, but also with precision that was not easily available to them before.
One of the highlights of Internet Week New York, the annual Internet festival in NYC, has been the Digital Archaeology exhibit. It charts the evolution of websites and web design over the past 20 years: from the first ever website in 1991, the CERN site by the Web's inventor Tim Berners-Lee, to the highly interactive 2010 HTML5 music video for Arcade Fire by Google. Each of the 28 websites in the exhibition was displayed on a computer and software of its time, which brought back a lot of memories for this old 1990s webmaster!
I spoke with the exhibition's curator, Jim Boulton, and Abbie Grotke, the Web Archiving Team Lead from the Library of Congress. We discussed how web design trends have evolved over the years, along with the difficulties of archiving increasingly interactive and social content on modern websites. Indeed, we touched on the possible extinction of websites within the next few years!
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Looking back on websites from the mid-1990s, you can clearly see the evolutionary link to many of the sites and apps from this era. For example, Razorfish's 1995 online art gallery The Blue Dot is an ancestor of Arcade Fire's Wilderness Downtown video - animation is a feature of both sites. The Blue Dot was one of the very first animated websites, according to Razorfish co-founder Craig Kanarick. Obviously the Arcade Fire site is much more advanced technologically, due to the software and hardware available today.
Another example is the 1995 e-zine Word.com, which can be seen as an ancient relative of the iPad app Flipboard. Word.com was a (very pixilated) multimedia magazine that, according to the exhibition curator Boulton, "bypassed the mainstream media and wrote in the voice of the people."
Websites Increasingly Difficult to Archive
The problems of archiving websites was highlighted by the very first website, Tim Berners-Lee's CERN site. The version on display was a copy from 1992, the earliest copy available. The 1991 version no longer exists and no screenshots were made. "The very first website, a historical moment in time, has been lost forever," lamented Boulton. "I think that sums up where we are with websites in general. It's such a transient media and so easy to publish, that people think of [websites] as disposable."
This has become an increasingly common problem, according to Abbie Grotke, Web Archiving Team Lead at the Library of Congress. She noted that a lot of today's interactive web experiences cannot be archived. Plus things like streaming media aren't crawlable, unlike static web pages of old.
Grotke's team collaborates closely with the Internet Archive, the non-profit site that runs the Wayback Machine. But even with their combined resources, the tools for archiving are always a step behind the newest Web technologies.
Will the Website Become Extinct?
So what does that mean for the future of the website?
"In a few year's time there won't be such a thing as a website," claimed Boulton. "With the rise of the social Web, now online experiences are built around the individual rather than around the organization."
So whereas websites are "destinations that you go to to find information," according to Boulton, the current era is increasingly about information coming to the individual and interacting with it on devices like smartphones.
As a Web publisher, I myself cannot see ReadWriteWeb.com as a destination site going away anytime soon. Although certainly it will become more and more important to offer mobile and personalized media experiences to readers.
What do you think, is the website as a media format heading the way of the dinosaur?
Creation of an attractive and compelling web app prototype is no small task, but a new startup called InVision offers a framework to do so that looks easy, fast and like a real pleasure to use.
The service lets designers drop image files into its web interface, then create clickable hot-spots on each page. The next page each spot links-to is chosen from a drop down menu of images uploaded and the end result is a stitched-together series of pages that can be shared publicly with a single URL and commented on. It looks really nice and is priced from free for a single small project through $75 per month for up to 25 simultaneous projects with unlimited collaborators. I saw one error in the account creation flow, but otherwise the service appears to work well as promised.
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It looks like a lot of hot designers are already excited about the service and the company says it's got thousands of signups already, despite getting very little press coverage in the week since it's launched.
Trying to create a free account resulted in an error message each time I tried to do so, but my account was in fact being created and I got verification emails each time I tried. Otherwise it appeared to work really well and was very fast and easy to get started with. Check out the demo video below.
Building to Learn
As Tom Hulme, Design Director at IDEO (designers of Apple's first mouse, Microsoft's second, the Palm PDA and much more), told BoingBoing in an interview today, "Building to learn is a really important part of our approach - it's the idea that we should prototype as quickly as possible to test ideas. Building stuff forces decisions, centers everyone on the idea at hand, enables valuable feedback from users."
A service like InVision seems likely to be useful in that kind of strategy.
InVision was created by Epicenter Consulting, an 8 year old firm in New York. There are already many app wireframing apps available on the market (see Balsamiq, MockFlow and iPlotz, for example) but InVision appears to be winning hearts early with its ease of use. Smashing Magazine's Editor in Chief Vitaly Friedman called it "very promising."
UX designer Rachel Anna Lehmansaid this morning that she's excited to do some wireframes with InVision and then user testing of them using Silverback. That does sound like fun.
"You can do a similar thing in Fireworks, but this makes it a lot easier," mobile UX designer Brianne Baker told me after looking at the service. "The service's resources section is cool too, they offer links to various wireframe kits and UI kits all in one place. Of course it depends on your workflow, not everybody prototypes like this. But it looks pretty awesome."
Freelancing is a tough life, no matter what your skills are. Writers, developers, and consultants all have to scout work, sell themselves, manage their own time and then shake down clients to collect their fees. Work is never steady and coffee keeps getting more expensive.
OneThing.com is a new directory for freelancers who want to advertise their talents and build a verifiable reputation. There are two things that are really cool about it.
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The first cool thing is the strong visual interface. Most freelancer directories are text-dense (or just ugly). OneThing uses a Google Fast Flip-like interface to display profiles of freelancers with an avatar, short description and website screenshot. It basically packages your personality and your work and sells it in one blink.
Freelancers using OneThing can also sub-contract work to and from each other when there is a surplus or a dearth of business.
And for the other side, OneThing speaks to that old gripe - "it's hard to find good people." You can put up an ad for a gig on craigslist and get 400 responses. But it's going to take a lot of work to figure out which 95% of them are crap.
Contrast that with typing in search terms to display compact, visually compelling results at a time, which you can filter by location or "area of expertise." It's more like flipping through a stack of resumes on a spacious desk - except at a glance these packaged profiles reveal information about a person than a resume.
You can also see who has left a positive reference for the freelancer, and filter for "recommendations" from people you know or trust.
The Menlo Ventures-backed startup is now in private beta but it has about 17,000 profiles. It's got a few drawbacks - the emphasis on visual flipping makes the search results harder to refine, and profiles of freelancers without websites display a massive warning sign in a giant white box with the words, "Something cool coming soon."
It'll be interesting to see if this site catches on - the Internet's freelancers surely need it.
It's not every day you get to watch the birth of an Internet meme, but yesterday, I was there at the moment of conception. I didn't give birth to it but I certainly played a completely inadvertent and circumstantial part.
Facebook and AOL had announced their partnership and I decided the news merited more than the two paragraph treatment I saw everywhere else. So I embarked on a diatribe about how Facebook was trying to be our "One True Login"- and unknowingly set in motion what has become the most epic comment thread ReadWriteWeb has ever seen. But how did this happen and why?
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Within a half an hour of posting, the number of visitors had skyrocketed. It looked like a real winner. An hour later, it had reached the number of visitors an average post might see in an entire day. I figured I'd hit a home run.
But then the comments started rolling in.
"When can we log in?" asked one commenter.
"I WANT THE OLD FAFEBOOK BACK THIS SHIT IS WACK!!!!!" complained the next.
At first we wondered if it could be a giant, orchestrated prank. We weren't sure who we might have offended, but obviously it was a premeditated assault. When we looked at our traffic, however, we didn't see any of the usual suspects, just two little words on a very big website: "Facebook login" and Google. The post had become the number two search result.
By the end of the day, the post had several hundred comments and our back-channel chat room was still debating whether or not it could all be real.
It was like we had unearthed a long-lost city, the Atlantis of the Internet. But instead of treasures and gold we'd found a steady deluge of confused and frustrated users who had tried everything they knew to do and just wanted to log in to Facebook, damnit. But how had this happened? It certainly wasn't that thousands and thousands of people had just started searching for "facebook login" yesterday. This stream of people has been there all along and something is broken.
Google had completely failed its users. It put us, with a post about how an AOL partnership foreshadowed Facebook becoming the de facto user database, above the most logical search result possible - Facebook's login page.
While for us this was completely random, other search results show that this is actually a space that is otherwise intentionally occupied by sites trying to siphon off this traffic and profit from it. I don't think the first search result for "Facebook login" was actually English, and the one that followed wasn't either, but those two key words are used over and over.
By the next morning, the scale had tipped. News of the epic thread had started making its way around the social web, being retweeted across the Twitterverse, posted by early adopters on Buzz and submitted to sites like Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, HackerNews and Fark.
"No, really," everyone seemed to be saying, "You GOTTA see this one."
Suddenly, the two worlds collided. The tech savvy ran head-on into the tech illiterate and mockery and disbelief started to overtake confusion as the general tone in the comment thread. As the post made its way around the web, other comment threads, like those on Reddit and MetaFilter, began mimicking the now infamous comments. I suddenly realized that we might be standing at that flash point, that moment where it begins - the immaculate conception of an Internet meme. I've always wanted to be there at that moment. I've always wondered about the first person that saw a lobster and said, "You know what? I'm going to eat that."
"I LIKE THE NEW ALL-BLUE FACEBOOK BUT CAN I JUST LOG IN NOW PLEEEEEZE?????!!!11" reads one comment on MetaFilter.
Another comment on Reddit reads, "IS THIS THE ARTICLE!!? ALL I SEE IS COMMENTS!!!!! HOW COME WHEN I TRY TO LOG IN I PEE ON MYSELF AND PASS OUT?!?? I LIKED REDDIT BEFORE THE PEE!!!"
One person has even written a sonnet, detailing the plight of the lost Facebook users.
While we mock those users, the simple fact is they haven't necessarily failed, something failed them. With all of our talk about the semantic Web and search engine optimization and tailoring search results to the individual user, there are thousands upon thousands of users performing the same simple search and following the same wrong road. If this were a standard traffic sign misdirecting this many people, it would have been pulled down long ago. There would have been outraged citizens at town meetings and special reports on the five o' clock news.
So, when five years down the road someone, somewhere, in a completely unrelated comment thread says "i need the old facebook this new one is very bad bbbbbbbbbbuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!" I will be happy to say that I was there - I was around for the birth of
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_your_one_true_login.php">that Internet meme. But I also hope that, by then, we've addressed the problem at the core. This is the Internet and these are its users.
If this many of them can't login to Facebook by typing that into Google and clicking on the first thing they see, it's probably not them that are wrong, it's Google.
Hi. My name is Dustin, and I’m addicted to notepads.
I first realized I was addicted when I found myself prowling office supply stores in the wee hours of the afternoon, trying to score a college-ruled composition book. Pretty soon, I couldn’t go anywhere without my works – a battered red Moleskine and a black Sharpie click-pen.
And it got worse. I started thinking, “maybe there’s a perfect notebook out there for this particular project.” My Moleskine’s 192 leaves bound in pocket-sized covers wasn’t enough to satisfy my growing need for specialty papers.
The worst part is, I liked it. And I stand here before you, still liking it. Loving it. Yes, my name is Dustin, but I”m not a mere addict. I’m a paper enthusiast, a connoisseur of the carnet, a gourmand of the grid line, a foodie of foolscap.
Let me show you a few of my more exotic finds.
1. Rollabind
Also marketed as the Levenger Circa system, the Rollabind (or just “Rolla”) is an infinitely customizable, assemble-it-yourself notebook made using a Rollabind punch and Rollabind discs. Basically, you take the pages you want to assemble, punch the binding edge with the special punch, and insert the discs into the punches to hold it all together. The holes are open on one side, so you can remove and insert pages at will, and the unique design allows the whole thing to be opened flat, making them easy to write on.
The system can be used to compile planners, address books, journals, or just about anything else you can imagine, using pages of your own design, pre-printed pages akin to those sold for Dayplanners and the like, or templates from the DIY Planner site. Both Rollabind and Levenger sell a range of kits with punches, discs, and covers (from simple pressboard to luxurious leather). Circa/Rolla notebooks are a bit pricey compared to off-the-shelf notebooks (though some of the expenses, like the punch and reusable discs, can be amortized over years of notebook-making) but are pretty comparable in price to organizer sets from DayRunner or FranklinCovey.
If you’ve ever, say, tried to photocopy something you wrote or drew, you already know one use case for paper with white lines. If you’re a creative sort who maybe needs some lines to keep everything at the same scale but would rather not have to compete with those lines when displaying your ideas, you know another. And Whitelines has you pegged, because they make paper with white lines.
So here’s the deal: Whitelines notebooks are made with a lightly toned paper lined or gridded with white ink, so you can definitely see the lines while you’re working (meaning you avoid the “over-the-cliff” curve you get when you write on unlined paper) but step away just a bit and the lines fade away. And there are bindings for everyone, from hard-bound Moleskine-like notebooks to perfect-bound paperbacks to glue-bound notepads (so you can tear sheets off),
Available in the US only through specialty retailers (mostly book stores), Canadians and Western Europeans can find them at your national Amazon stores as well as in several chains. Prices are comparable to Moleskines of the same size and format. Use the store finder to find out how to get yours.
3. Behance Dot Grid Book
Behance notebooks are beloved of creative professionals, and the Dot Grid Book and Dot Grid Journal are a pretty good indication of why. Designers want the precision of a grid, but they also want the grid to “disappear”, to get out of their way so they can work. In other words, they appreciate good design in notebook grids as in everything else.
And these notebooks from Behance are nothing if not good design. The “Book” model has a semi-hard “suede touch” cover that is spiral-bound to lay flat on a table or other surface; the “Journal” model is hard-bound like a Moleskine for portable knee-top use. Both have a super-light but functional grid of dots to guide without constraining so you can do layouts, tight design work, or whatever else strikes your fancy.
4. Aquanotes
The age-old problem of how to capture notes in the shower may have found a solution. No more messy bath crayons or grease pencils – here comes Aquanotes! Aquanotes are suction-cup-mounted notepads made of 100% waterproof paper that can be written on however wet they may be. So you always have a notepad handy at what experts say is our most creative time, shower time.
The only problem is, where do you keep your pencil?
5. Notepod
Got an idea for an iPhone app? There’s a pad for that.
Notepod is an iPhone-shaped notepad, with an unlined writing area where the iPhone’s screen would be and gridlines on the back, packed in 100-page board-backed notepads. The implementation is new, but like the iPhone itself, the idea goes back a long ways, to the original battery-less paper Palm Pilot. Of course, you don’t have to be an iPhone developer to use a Notepod – it works just as well for on-the-fly note-taking and jotting down phone messages or, for the real low-tech, replacing your iPhone entirely (though you need a really good arm for the text messaging function…).
Know any other cool, super-functional (or just super-neat) notepads out there? Let me and the other addicts- er, afficionados know all about them in the the comments!
The elements of design are changing. Innovation is changing the design and planning process of everything from how you lay out a garden to the infrastructure of an industrial facility.
One of the highlights of 
So what does that mean for the future of the website?
Creation of an attractive and compelling web app prototype is no small task, but a new startup called 
Freelancing is a tough life, no matter what your skills are. Writers, developers, and consultants all have to scout work, sell themselves, manage their own time and then shake down clients to collect their fees. Work is never steady and coffee keeps getting more expensive.
It's not every day you get to watch the birth of an Internet meme, but yesterday, I was there at the moment of conception. I didn't give birth to it but I certainly played a completely inadvertent and circumstantial part. 
