Tag Design

A better UK power plug

Stu­dent design for a fold­ing UK power plug. Clever.

Photo of Min-Kyu Choi's UK folding power plug

Time lapse of building going up

This a time lapse I put together of a social hous­ing pro­ject I worked on in Lon­don. The pho­tos were taken over a period of two and half years with vari­ous cam­eras by a friend from his canal boat moored in the adja­cent basin. Each photo had to be cropped and straightened by eye before being stitched together to form the video.

Con­tinue read­ing for the video.

Last Straw’s new design and a note to email subscribers

As some of you may have noticed I’ve been hav­ing a bit of a tidy up around here recently. Last Straw now has a classy new grid-based design called Basic Maths by Khoi Vinh. I’ve also blown a few cob­webs out of the backend involving cat­egor­ies and what­not. All of which should make brows­ing my rants end­less pearls of wis­dom infin­itely more pleas­ur­able. Stay tuned in the com­ing weeks for a new photo/video gal­lery too.

As email sub­scribers will have already noticed I’ve also over­hauled the mail­ing list sys­tem, switch­ing to MailChimp. Note that this will now come as a weekly digest instead of indi­vidual emails.

While switch­ing I was reminded of how many friends and fam­ily I’ve sur­repti­tiously sub­scribed over the years. Not the most polite thing to do. Hon­estly, unless you really want to receive these emails, please unsub­scribe. There are other more mod­ern ways to fol­low a blog these days anyway.

In the mean time you might like to check out another web­site over­haul I’ve been work­ing on recently.

Why so many things are badly designed

Jason Snell of Mac­world on why Apple excels at product design: Apple excels at cre­at­ing products that the gen­eral pub­lic likes because the com­pany is driven by design, not by engin­eer­ing. Most tech products  —  heck, most products in gen­eral  —  aren’t as good as they can be because they’re put together by the people with the tech­nical knowledge […]