Wonderfully animated short explaining the current credit crisis designed by Jonathan Jarvis. Mostly built using Adobe Illustrator and After Effects.

Excellent points by Dieter Rams on what makes good design. Here are two of Rams’ quotes that I think are worth printing and hanging on your wall:

A product is bought in order to be used. It must serve a defined purpose – in both primary and additional functions. The most important task of design is to optimise the utility of a product.

Good design is as little design as possible.

Via @grainedit

Titan is the work of David Löhr was was created last year, over the course of several months, for his degree in visual communication at the University of Arts, Berlin. David is solely responsible for every aspect of this project and it’s visually stunning.

I’m mostly impressed with the concept art for the project. Not only are the sketches top-notch, but the more realised environment renderings are also fantastic. After looking at the sketches on the Titan site and some of David’s other projects you can tell that he has a great eye for all areas of storytelling. Reminds me a lot of the visual storytelling of Stanley Kubrick and aesthetic vision of Ralph McQuarrie.

The shots above are taken from the “Presentation Movie” on the Titan site. A synopsis for the project is provided, but the main focus I get from the movie are the visuals and their flow. It’s a short tale, but well produced and worth checking out by creatives of all types.

Screenshots emerged this week on what could potentially be the next version of Microsoft Office. The image above is an example of the new UI.

From what I’m seeing here I sincerely hope that this UI is either false or an early version of what will finally launch when Office 2010 ships. I think it leaves much to be desired. The nav elements in the “ribbon” at the top of the window are all over the place. Everything is crammed together and there is a severe need for whitespace to provide more context to each of those “Message” options and aid the eye in drawing distinctions between those options. You’ve also got text labels in multiple locations. Some are next to the nav icon, some below, and some just floating out by themselves.

The email header is okay, although I wonder why the “sent’ field is thrown over by itself on the right. The audio player, that I’m assuming features the voicemail that was sent to Ankur Kothari, is again in a weird spot. It also bumps down the entire message pane and creates some awkward negative space to the right side of the message window.

I’m not going to get into the spacing of the content in the message because it’s hard to tell if that’s being set by the application or by the user, but there’s plenty to mention in there too.

Again this is an early build and a lot of these issues could get resolved by the launch of the product. Hopefully that will be the case. Until then I’ll refer you to a wonderful quote by Steven Frank (posted on Daring Fireball) concerning these same UI problems:

This is impenetrable. It’s UI salad. I realize this is not (yet) shipping software, but my god. If you sat me down in front of this, I wouldn’t have the slightest idea where to begin.

“It’s UI salad.” Classic.

Run, don’t walk, to photographer Kim Holtermand’s site which features a whole new look and collection of work. I am a huge fan of his work and style.

I love this band.