A Source Of Inspiration

Interesting article at Colour Lovers, with an historical perspective on the use of color and education degrees.

They start by referring the portuguese University Of Coimbra as the first record of connecting academic practices to color. This was a topic that always confused me when i was a student, as sometimes i met colleagues from other universities that had different colors but were studying for the same degree.

Help me out (and Colour Lovers) to find out the right color degree.

International:

(w/ Sergio edit @ 22:05, 2007/11/11)

Portugal

Many books have been written based on blogs, but few actually receive my respect. Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design is the result of many writings by Michael Beirut at the outstanding blog Design Observer, with 272 pages discussing design with no pictures at all (only 79 different typefaces).

Michael made an interesting point on why to write (a book or a blog) :

“I’ve found that writing is a way to slow things down again, to question my own premises, to force myself to pay attention to things I might otherwise file away after the quick glance. (…)  I discovered that putting the words on paper changes the claim those words make on your attention. Is it better? Is it worse? The answer may be different for every reader. As a designer, I am very grateful I’ve been given the opportunity to let you see for yourself.

I’ve just attended a conference by Guillaume Van Der Stighelen at the 9th Festival of Portugal’s Creative Club.

He is one of the founders of Duval Guillaume, one of the most acclaimed European advertising agencies, and in his speech he focused on how to become a advertising S.TA.R. It goes a bit like this:

• Start with a big idea: but don’t just start running looking for ideas; instead let them find you, go out for a beer with friend or let some tune on the radio spark the creativity
• Terrorist action:after you get the idea, you have to really act like a terrorist so others don’t grind you down and kill the idea. Don’t be afraid to fight against the status quo.
• Admirable Agreeable: have a nice attitude with clients and do your best to understand their point of view.and be receptive to other points of view
• Respectable Respect the others : let other earn their share of success, and understand that we are all human beings craving for acceptation .

Other than this precious acronym gem, he also showcased his agency work and shared some great stories, specially the closing note with a scientific explanation of why society needs advertising, based on the works by Geoffrey Miller. (Buy at Amazon UK / US).

Here’s one of Duval Guillaume commercials:

Tomorrow i’ll be speaking at Take Off, a tech event on entrepreneurship and innovation. Alcides from ideias3 had the kindness of inviting me and i’m delighted to meet such an inspiring audience, with some fellow bloggers from Planeta Asterisco, and learn from the other great speakers.

I’ll do my best at the panel “Advertising 2.0″, trying to close the gap between marketing and technology, and looking forward to get some positive feedback since the event is set a bit like Barcamp.

So here’s the schedule, in Portuguese:

For those of you who’d like to take off on a inspirational Saturday, come to Coimbra and let’s share some great insights.

- More info at http://takeoff.ideias3.com/

The same problem that search engines faced in the early days when searching text, we now begin to experience in other media such as images or video. While sites like Flickr or Blinx do a very good job at finding relevant results, they are mainly based in captions, tags or metadata, prone to human interpretation and ambiguity.

This was until i found last week the work of a portuguese working at the UCSD School of Engineering, with a interesting research in the fields of media search. Nuno Vasconcelos, a former member of the research staff at the Compaq Cambridge Research Laborator, and now Professor at USCD, explains his research on Supervised Multi-class Labeling in the video below (5 min) .

© University of California

He was also kind enough to answer me a few short questions that i’ll transcript here:

Armando Alves: Are the applications of your research mainly scientific ( i.e, medical diagnostics) or are there any plans to release it under commercial license?

Nuno Vasconcelos:Right now, we are still in a research stage, and not thinking about commercial deployment. But, in the long run, it should be possible. I am certainly investigating the possibility of applying this technology to medical imagery, but we are still in the process of learning exactly what we can do.

Armando Alves: Would it apply only to images or do you plan to extend it to video as well ?

Nuno Vasconcelos:Could and will be extended to video. That is one of the areas that we intend to address sometime soon.

Armando Alves: How do you address the semantic relationships between 2 different sets of images?

Nuno Vasconcelos:The idea is to learn vocabularies that are large enough to build generic systems, which do not have to be re-trained across different datasets. There will always be a limit to this, since some domains (e.g. medical imagery) can be very specific. But, at least for regular users (Google style queries), we hope to be able to package the vocabulary with the retrieval system, which you would buy as a piece of software. But we are not there yet.

Portugal does have a slight problem in keeping their brightest minds, but it’s always rewarding to find fellow citizens that are being recognized for their work.

Many thanks for your attention Nuno, and best of luck on your research.

Poynter Online just published their 2007 study of reader behavior .

Watch the video below:

Some interesting facts:

• People read a high volume of story text in both print and online.
• People read two ways: methodically or scanning.
• Alternative story forms – like Q&As, timelines, short sidebars and lists – help readers understand.
• Bigger heads and photos attract print readers; but directional elements draw online readers.
• Photos get a lot of attention in print.

Finally, “the book” is available for order. It’s a bit expensive, but considering that the Casey Reas and Ben Fry are the fathers of Processing language it surely is worth all the cents.

If you don’t have a clue what i’m talking about, go to Processing.org and check some amazing interactive/netart/visual experiments  of the century (it has been around since 2001).

I’m beginning to find some new uses for comics. Besides being an essential tool for storyboarding, they can be used to communicate effectively a complex message or user scenario.

If you’re interested, one of the essential tools to translate your message into comics are Wally Wood’s panels, that you can find at Joel Johnson or Peter Veneables‘ blog.