The debate in 1991: digital or hand-crafted type?
"Metal setting is practised today by only a handful of specialists, but it continues to provide the standards by which good typesetting is judged. Photosetting, and the computer setting which has largely displaced it, are criticised for being too perfect and lacking the character of hand-crafted type. Now, increasingly, designers are using desktop publishing systems such as the Macintosh to do their typesetting. The technology has matured considerably over the last two years and the time is ripe for a reassessment: is good typesetting possible on the Macintosh?"
(Andy Benedek, 1991)
Andy Benedek (1991). "The craft of digital type" Winter no. 2 vol. 1, Eye Magazine.
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Neil Young Expands Pono Digital-to-Analogue Music Service
"Beginning next year [2013], Pono will release a line of portable players, a music-download service and digital-to-analog conversion technology intended to present songs as they first sound during studio recording sessions. In his book out this week, Waging Heavy Peace, Young writes that Pono will help unite record companies with cloud storage 'to save the sound of music.' As Flea raves to Rolling Stone, 'It's not like some vague thing that you need dogs' ears to hear. It's a drastic difference.'
Pono's preservation of the fuller, analog sound already has the ear of the Big Three record labels: Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group and Sony Music. WMG - home to artists including Muse, the Black Keys, Common and Jill Scott - has converted its library of 8,000 album titles to high-resolution, 192kHz/24-bit sound. It was a process completed prior to the company's partnership with Young's Pono project last year, said Craig Kallman, chairman and chief executive of Atlantic Records.'"
(Patrick Flanary, 27 September 2012, Rolling Stone)
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Dara Ó Briain's Science Club: The Story of Physics
"Balls, pendulums, apples and magnets all played their part in the story of modern physics, but then things got weird. And when Albert Einstein combined time and space, things got even weirder - step forward quantum uncertainty, black holes and the Big Bang."
(BBC Two, UK)
Fig.1 this animation is from Episode 2 of 6 of Dara Ó Briain's Science Club, Tuesday 13 November at 9pm on BBC Two, voiced by Dara Ó Briain, animated by 12Foot6, Published on YouTube on 13 Nov 2012 by BBC.
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Computer History Museum: Selling the Computer Revolution
"The brochures selected here (just a fraction of the Museum's holdings in this area) show some of the more important technologies, companies, and applications in computing from 1948 to 1988. This covers the period from mechanical and relay-based computers to those based on the microprocessor - a remarkable transition that occurred over only 25 years. We hope you enjoy browsing through these historical documents."
(Computer History Museum)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Welcome to the Era of Design
"All businesses, no matter what they make or sell, should recognize the power and financial value of good design.
Obviously, there are many different types of design: graphic, brand, packaging, product, process, interior, interaction/user experience, Web and service design, to name but a few. ...
You see, expecting great design is no longer the preserve of a picky design-obsessed urban elite - that aesthetically sensitive clique who'd never dare leave the house without their Philippe Starck eyewear and turtleneck sweaters and buy only the right kind of Scandinavian furniture. Instead, there's a new, mass expectation of good design: that products and services will be better thought through, simplified, made more intuitive, elegant and more enjoyable to use.
Design has finally become democratized, and we marketers find ourselves with new standards to meet in this new 'era of design.' To illustrate, Apple, the epitome of a design-led organization, now has a market capitalization of $570 billion, larger than the GDP of Switzerland. Its revenue is double Microsoft's, a similar type of technology organization but one not truly led by design (just compare Microsoft Windows with Apple's Lion operating system)."
(Adam Swann, 5/03/2012, Forbes)
Fig.1 "Mille Miglia" bicycle by VIVA [http://www.vivabikes.com/].
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
