Since the introduction of boarding passes (and train tickets), their design hasn’t changed much. This mainly because of the printing technique that is used. It’s not really printing, but colouring letters by locally heating the paper. This also implies that only preprogrammed shapes can be produced, or with more ‘modern’ shapes are build using a pixel grid of about ~5x5mm. Tyler Thompson made a website called Pass Fail that started a very interesting discussion among readers and (graphic) designers. It shows many different approaches and (technical) limits of the boarding pass.
Tattoos are pretty quite popular these days, but most people don’t beyond a marine tattoo or an “Arschgeweih“. But one specific group of people tends to take tattoos to a next level. Scientists. As the Science Tattoo Emporium shows, the subject of their research is reflected in their tattoos. The picture above is the most conventional tattoo in a scientific form, it’s a heart
Sad day, the Swiss print magazine “das Magazin” stopped publishing their entire magazine online due the launch of their iPad app. Single issues will cost CHF 1,10 (about € 0,80). That’s a very fair price, but I guess 99% of the online readers don’t have a iPad. Furthermore, ‘offline’ subscribers have to buy the iPad version when they want to read it online or reread an article in the archive. Hopefully NZZ Folio won’t adopt this business model too and will continue to publish their wonderful magazine online
I’ve had to do a large amount of writing lately, mostly business correspondence and study reports. I already tried to minimize distractions, virtual (no IM, no email) as well as physical (tidy desk). But Oliver Reichenstein’s article about Information Architects new iPad app made me realise that common writing application aren’t designed to make you write. The only thing you really need during the writing process is a basic text editor. No formatting tools. No reflection of how it will look on paper. The Windows application that meets these requirements best is Q10. It’s fully customisable, only works fullscreen. Only disadvantage is that it can only read .txt files.
