design - page 12

Touchable design and tablet computers like Apple’s iPad are revolutionizing the way companies brand. This new platform demands a new way of thinking and designing and a radical shift in customer experience and understanding.

Cult of Mac got these exclusive excerpts from iPhone photography and design guru Dan Marcolina, also the author of iPhone Obsessed. His thoughts about where the world of iPad design is headed are part of the forthcoming fourth edition of  “Designing Brand Identity”  by Alina Wheeler. The book will be published in March, 2012.

Our HTML5 Crash Course has less than 14 hours left before the deal expires! Get it now before it’s gone.

Is one of your New Years Resolutions to build a website? Well our newest deal is here to help you achieve your web development goals. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, founder, dev ninja, creative, or web geek, this HTML5 Crash Course will only help you enhance those skills to get after your next BIG idea or project in 2012. With more than 3 hours of detailed instruction you can’t go wrong with this expert course taught by Robin Nixon, author of Learning PHP, MySQL and JavaScript – one of the most POPULAR books on web development worldwide for over two years.

Learn everything you need to know about HTML5 and how to use it with this highly informative and popular course, already taken by over 1,000 people. Learn the tricks on how to use the power of HTML5 to create highly dynamic websites.

And because it starts with the first principles of HTML, you need no prior knowledge of the subject.

Remember that stunning iPhone designed by Antonio De Rosa that we brought you last week? It’s called the iPhone SJ and it’s a tribute to Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs. It looked pretty great in the photos we published, but it looks even more awesome when brought to life in this new video.

Are you just now coming out of your holidays hibernation and venturing back into the real world? Some of us are still struggling with that too, so we wanted to remind you guys about our Ultimate Designer Toolkit bundle that will be expiring in less than 16 hours. Head over to Deals.CultofMac.com to get it before it’s gone.

If you’re a creative looking to upgrade your ammo, we’ve found just the designer toolkit for you. For just a moment, try to imagine the capabilities you as a designer will have with over 60,000 premium design resources! Yeah, it gives us the butterflies too. Adding something like this to your designer quiver will just make you that much more dangerous out there in the designer world.

Think about the capabilities… we’re talking 27,000 Photoshop Gradients, 18,000 Photoshop Layer Styles, 2,986 Photoshop Brushes, 1,290 High Resolution Textures, 1,129 Vector Elements, 1,454Vector Illustrations, 1,105 Adobe Add-ons, 815 Photoshop patterns, 340 Seamless Vectors, and thousands of other cool designer toys all for only $49.

Here’s a fun idea from Kickstarter: hip headphones with built-in housing for your iPod shuffle.

Over the course of the past year, Samsung has shamelessly stolen Apple’s design on everything from the iPod touch, the iPad 2 Smart Cover, iOS’s homescreen, and more. Heck, they’ve even poached the actresses who star in Apple’s current iPhone 4S commercial!

Having apparently run out of new Apple products to rip-off, Samsung has decided to examine Apple’s past portfolio of devices for new designs to flagrantly plagiarize. The latest? Meet the Galaxy Ace Plus, Samsung’s new entry-level Android phone that looks just like the three year old iPhone 3G design!

This is just beyond parody at this point. Next up? Samsung announces the Galaxy Tab 8.5 Noir, which shamelessly violates the design of the 1993 Apple Newton.

There are only 16 hours left to purchase our deal on the UX Course for Founders from Udemy. 

Steve Jobs held the belief that great design and user experience provide a significant competitive advantage. Apple’s products reflect this mantra and I think we’d all agree – it’s working. We’ve recently brought you some amazing instructional courses on how to build your dream startup ideas. Much of what those courses teach are the core mechanics or the “back-end” of projects.

Our newest deal is an instructional video course that focuses on the art of moving from the idea stage through the various steps of designing the user experience. But it doesn’t stop there, it goes on to provide you with specific actions to follow at the end of each stage. No creative skills needed, and no design tools required. Just a pen and paper or a whiteboard and markers, and you’re all set to go. Sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know and this course put that on display for me personally.

So you wanna be the next Zuckerberg, eh? But, let me guess, you’re a “business guy” who doesn’t know how to program? You’ve thought about it, but you don’t even know where to start, or you just “don’t have time”. Stay on this path and you may end up finding yourself seeking out a code monkey! Trust us, nobody wants that.

Here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re going to help you out by introducing you to the HTML/CSS guru himself, Mark Lassoff. The man is energetic, skilled, and a dynamic online presenter; plus, he’s provided programming instruction to some of America’s largest corporations.

This course is a stellar opportunity to learn the fundamentals of HTML and CSS you need in order to whip up that creative, high-quality website you’ve been mulling over for years! Normally this course costs $49, but we negotiated a sweet deal with Mark. For only $29, you’ll get Mark’s HTML and CSS expertise jam-packed into nearly 4 hours of video instruction that includes highlighted lab exercises, so you can apply the very skills taught from the course.

Jan-Micheal Cart has made quite a name for himself designing impressive new concepts for the iOS operating system, such as the dynamic icons concept you see above, and an awesome system for implementing widgets which we covered back in May.

However, it seems it’s not just iOS users who have been impressed with Cart’s work. The Apple camp in Cupertino has also picked up on it, and they’ve hired him as an intern.

Apple recently requested that Samsung start designing its tablets differently. Why? So as not to infringe on the iPad’s precious design.

What would Samsung’s next tablet look like if Apple had its way? The answer: really, really bad.

Which phone would fictional advertising genius Don Draper from AMC’s Mad Men use? No surprises here: as this picture of Jon Hamm from the set of the hit television proves, only the phone with the best and most convincing advertising campaign on Earth, an iPhone, would do for Draper.

[via iSource]

Reading the news on the iPad is one of the absolute best experiences you can have on Apple’s magical tablet device. So when news hit yesterday that our two favorite iOS news reader apps came out with updates, we were pretty stoked. While you probably heard a great deal about the other reader app, we wanted to tell you about the awesome news reader you might be missing out on. It’s called Flud, and it was just completely redesigned yesterday.

Besides sporting a major facelift, what’s spectacular about Flud is its new ability to make reading the news a social experience. Rather than relying solely on an app to recommend websites and content to you, Flud users have the ability to see what their friends are reading in the app and share content back with them rather than spamming their Facebook or Twitter feed with the 15 news stories they’ve read throughout the day. Giving each user the ability to create a “news personality,” Flud aims to change the way we consume news much in the same way that Spotify and Rdio have changed the way we listen to music, by allowing users to inspire and be inspired by others based on what they consume.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then this Chinese imitation of the MacBook Air is the biggest compliment that Apple has received in a long time. Cleverly called the “AirBook,” this feat of design plagiarism looks exactly like Apple’s MacBook Air.

Costing only $499, the AirBook possesses many similarities to Apple’s notebook, but there some crucial differences. Did we mention that it runs Windows?

On Friday, Google opened a new Android store with Androidland in Melbourne, a place to hawk Android tablets and phones made by various manufacturers. So how’s it stand up against the Apple Store? Let’s see! (click to enlarge)

Apple Store (left) — Brightly lit, thronged with customers, tastefully designed with the finest materials and well-staffed with bright, enthusiastic employees at the top of their field who are constantly moving to help people with questions.

Androidland (right) — Dark and dimly lit, with a design more evocative of an early 90s Chuck E. Cheese arcade pit than a high-end retail store. Staffed by two disengaged lunkheads, who expertly manage not only to ignore the only customer on the floor, but to be at least fifty feet away from him.

Amazing.

Don’t miss Apple Store vs. Microsoft Store. It’s just as funny.

I’ve always had a little crush on Susan Kare, the graphical interface pioneer who designed most of the original Mac OS icons and also designed the first proportionally spaced digital font, but this incredible piece on her over at PLOS had me wooed all over again, especially when I saw her incredible original sketches of the Mac OS icons we all know and love, which Susan laboriously designed on graph paper.

Check out some of her work on icons both familiar and foreign below, it’s the best thing I’ve seen all day.

Developer Jean-Christophe Naour has released an app for the iPad called Poly. Inspired by mathematician Boris Delaunay, Poly lets users create intriguing, colorful self-portraits with the iPad 2’s front-facing camera.

Poly creates geometric images that are complied by averaging color data within triangular fields that you trace with your hand. The artistically inclined will undoubtedly find Poly mesmerizing, while the rest of us should be content to just sit there and create shapes out of our faces on the iPad’s screen.

It’s not set to open for another hour yet, but the curtain’s already been pulled back on Apple’s redesigned 5th Avenue store, which sees the iconic cube pared down from 90 panes of glass to just fifteen, and the architectural cruft needed to support them eliminated in favor of a new “seamless” design.

The end result is quite lovely, and makes the 5th Avenue location even more of a wonderful contradiction: how ironic that New York’s most photographed landmark is also its most invisible! More pictures below.

Apple is finally unveiling its seamless glass cube entrance to the Fifth Avenue store on Friday, according to MacRumors. Apple’s Fifth Avenue retail store is one of the most recognized Apple stores in the world and a main tourist attraction in New York City.

$6.6. million in renovations to the Fifth Avenue store will finally be revealed to the public on Friday, November 4th. Since June, there have been a series of temporary walls hiding the work that has now been done to the glass cube entrance of the store.

That’s right, folks — that downtime earlier today wasn’t to introduce new products, but to update the online store instead. Apple has made purchasing the iPad 2 a much nicer experience, and seems to have tweaked things behind the scenes to make its online store a lot snappier.

Have you ever attempted to read the whole iTunes Software License Agreement after installation? No, me neither. And there’s one good reason for that: it’s so dull it makes me want to gauge out my eyeballs and smash up my Mac. But one grab student has transformed the endlessly boring body of text into a pain-free masterpiece that even Apple itself would be proud of. 

Someone get Steve Jobs and Jony Ive on the iPhone, because, Houston, we have a problem. An iPhone/iOS design flaw has been uncovered. And by “design flaw,” we mean something so minute that only the folks at Cupertino would cringe.

Thirty two years ago, a UK office furniture manufacturer called Hille International wanted a new design for an office chair, something that would pry loose the white-knuckled fingers of American design duo Charles and Ray Eames from their death grip on the office furniture market.

The line of chairs that resulted was called the System Supporto, and not only is it a masterpiece of design… it is Apple designer Jony Ive’s favorite kind of chair, widely used within Apple. According to our own source, it probably even inspired the design of the MacBook Pro!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nE8PvsRqjkg&feature=player_embedded

Apple’s magical device is at work in the Magic Kingdom. This video gives a look behind the scenes where engineers — or “imagineers”  as Disney calls them — are at work on a New Fantasyland using iPads.

MacRumors had a really bright idea: why not take those iPhone 5 case designs that have been knocking about and hire a design studio to turn them into rendered mockups?

The results are stunning, and our best look yet at what Apple might have envisioned for the iPhone 5: a slimmer design, a larger display and a wider capacitive home button. I’m not personally so sure about the iPod Touch like silver back, but even so, these are just great…

In OS X Lion, Apple redesigned iCal with a new faux leather look that resembles a physical calendar binding. This type of design choice is called “skeuomorphic,” because it was, “deliberately employed to make the new look comfortably old and familiar.” Lion’s version of iCal takes the old look and feel of a physical calendar and ports that to a virtual application.

While some may like the new look of iCal in Lion, many have raised complaints. If you’d like to make iCal look like it did in Snow Leopard, we’ve got just the trick to return iCal back to its monochromatic glory.