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In terms of design, the minimalist aesthetic is the visual representation of this concept. Even if in the early days of this style it was very difficult for the designers to achieve its simplicity and clean lines, they have learned to “declutter” the visual to the point of it being the second nature. However, some of the designers take it a step further and cut out almost everything from the design.
Indeed, even if the latest web designs with loud color, trendy headers, and stunning imagery are really attractive, sometimes, it’s nice to see and admire the everlasting minimalist style. The ultra-minimalist websites in this list focus on composition and typography to create clean and simple visuals, and the naked designs are as beautiful as those full of glamour.
The scale of the internet is so great, that it doesn’t make sense to look at the information on a monthly basis, or even to use daily figures.
Via John Evans
ON FRIDAY EVENING, inside an old-movie-house-cum-art-gallery at the heart of San Francisco's Mission district, Google graphics guru Blaise Agüera y Arcas delivered a speech to an audience of about eight hundred geek hipsters. He spoke alongside a series of images projected onto the wall that once held a movie screen, and at one point, he showed off a nearly 500-year-old double portrait by German Renaissance painter Hans Holbein. The portrait includes a strangely distorted image of a human skull, and as Agüera y Arcas explained, it's unlikely that Holbein painted this by hand. He almost certainly used mirrors or lenses to project the image of a skull onto a canvas before tracing its outline. "He was using state-of-the-art technologies," Agüera y Arcas told his audience. Neural networks are not only driving the Google search engine but spitting out art for which some people will pay serious money.His point was that we've been using technology to create art for centuries—that the present isn't all that different from the past. It was his way of introducing the gallery's latest exhibit, in which every work is the product of artificial neural networks—networks of computer hardware and software that approximate the web of neurons in the human brain. Last year, researchers at Google created a new kind of art using neural nets, and this weekend, the tech giant put this machine-generated imagery on display in a two-day exhibit that raised roughly $84,000 for the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, a San Francisco nonprofit devoted to the confluence of art and tech....
It’s the age of machine learning, they say. Thanks to algorithms, we can finally eliminate bias. There was no subconscious prejudice -- the decision was made by a computer. After all, computers don’t have a subconscious. Except, of course, they do.We can know what you are likely to do based on what you’ve done before. We can know what is likely to trigger you. We can build models that replicate existing outcomes. But our existing outcomes haven’t always been great. Our world is rife with historical biases and systemic injustices. And when we build machine learning algorithms using historical data, we effectively build these biases and injustices into the model....
Japanese architect Kengo Kuma has completed the façade and interior design of a 10-storey hotel near Tokyo’s Skytree Observation Tower. conceived as an ‘art exhibit’, ONE@tokyo is located in Oshiage — an area which combines the historic feeling of the country’s Edo era with a lively sense of Tokyo’s modern metropolis. at ground level, Kuma and his team have installed a dynamic lattice of timber planks that refers to the factories found in the region’s downtown district.
Have you always been on top of all the new, viral words young people say?
Great. Of course you have. But even the trendiest among us now struggle to understand how words that definitely have real meanings don't seem to be used properly anymore. It used to be enough to Google "What are the new slang words?" but slang itself is pretty irrelevant these days.
Are you ready to be relevant AF?
You may notice that many of these words lack a certain je ne sais quoi, and that is because they have no “quoi.” They are, for the most part, a bunch of silly, goofy words. But they're so damn fun to use.
So live a little, and indulge your inner Vine star. We're not getting any younger, and the wild world of viral words is not one to be afraid of — it's one to embrace. Let's get to it. We've got a lot of ground to cover.
If a 150-million-year-old Brachiosaurus could talk, what would it say?You can find out at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, where many of the exhibits will soon tell their own stories using local voices, thanks to an initiative from local museum advertising specialist Leo Burnett. The agency wrote more than 100 short scripts, each a paragraph or two long, designed to capture the “voice” of various plants, animals and minerals in the museum’s permanent collection. The write-ups combine history and humor. For example, the Brachiosaurus bemoans its girth while also discussing the contributions of paleontologist Elmer Riggs. Everyday Chicagoans are invited to record the first-person monologues in a special pop-up audio booth that is traveling around the city this summer. (It visited Chinatown this weekend.) Ultimately, the best voiceovers will be accessible via smartphone for Field visitors to enjoy on audio tours....
There are several nifty ways to go about pairing fonts for your design projects, including this machine learning-based tool and this Tinder-style app. But if you just want to see some great combinations, you’ll want to check out this excellent guide by designer Lou Levit. It features 50 top-notch pairings that draw from Google’s extensive web font collection – so you can grab all the typefaces you like for free, and use them on web design projects – and they’re matched with beautiful classic art. The pairings are organized and navigable by font style and mood (choose from Modern, Striking, Eccentric, Classic, Minimal, Neutral, and Warm). That’s handy for quickly finding a combination that suits your needs, whether it’s to professionally present information or announce an event. Plus, you can download the entire guide as a PDF. Find the guide, as well as tips on pairing fonts and the handy PDF, over at ReliablePSD.
Named ‘the iron fairies’, the mysterious interiors of this bar conjures up scenes from a fairytale book or Lord of the Rings. With three locations: Bangkok, Hong Kong and Tokyo, the underground den is reminiscent of a blacksmith’s workshop; reflected in the iron, timber and leather materiality and the curious decorations all across the eclectic interior. Created by designer Ashley Sutton, a distinctive element of the iron fairies is the ceiling enveloped with 10,000 preserved butterflies that suspend over the main ‘workshop’ room furnished with low seating and circular tables. Rooms branch out to form individually designed ‘furnaces’ and ‘casting rooms’, offering private spaces for smaller groups. The element of enchantment is distilled into every detail of the bar interior, with the concept itself deriving from sutton’s days working in the underground iron-ore mines in Western Australia. With this, the décor follows a fantasy imagined by the designer where ore miners stumble upon little winged spirits, mixing roughly hewn wood, massive rusty cogs, rickety piping, and walls lined with vials of fairy dust....
I’ve written plenty of content in this vein, including posts (and infographics) to help you generate video marketing ideas, infographics, and lead magnets, such as eBooks.
In this post, rather than GIVE you content marketing ideas, I’m going to tell you how (or where) to GET them.
Mostly, you “steal” them. But as I hope you know, I don’t mean you plagiarize the content other brands publish. That’ll get you nowhere. What I mean is marketing ideas are inspired by a myriad of resources—online and off.
The long list that follows explains exactly what I mean. I rely on these resources and you should too.
Spirits snobs may chuckle over “crazy” flavored spirits like pumpkin spice whiskey and bubblegum vodka, but those don’t have a patch on these stomach-turning ingredients. The offending distilleries claim these shocking ingredients have actual flavor merits (they never dreamed of getting attention on a gimmicky list like this, they swear!), but regardless, they deserve a spot on your booze bucket list. Here, 10 of the most insane liquors you need to try once—if you dare.
Traditional advertising went after “share of mind”–the idea was to get you to associate a brand with a single idea, a single emotion. Volvo: safety. Jaguar: speed. Coke: happiness. The Economist: success. Bang, bang, bang, went the ads, hammering the same idea into your mind every time you saw one. Advertising briefs evolved to focus the creatives on a single USP and a single message. Tell them we’re the Ultimate Driving Machine. Tell them in a thrilling way. It worked when you saw ads infrequently on television, in a Sunday magazine, or on a billboard on your morning commute. It hasn’t worked online. Audiences have stopped engaging with advertising. Big brands like Pepsi and P&G have slashed investment in Facebook spending. The agencies’ response has been to create new formats of ads that take over a page, dominate our mobiles’ screens, and generally scream at us. And when somebody screams at you for long enough, you put in earplugs and ignore them. Or, in the case of the online world, you install an ad blocker, as much of the U.K. population has now done. Yet there are many brands online that people don’t want to block. We asked over 5,000 people around the world to tell us about the brands whose content they actively sought out, then analyzed what those brands did. The results were surprisingly consistent. Popular brands had multifaceted personalities. They could make you laugh, or cheer, or lean forward and take notes. They’d stopped hammering away at a share of mind, and were expanding to achieve a share of emotion....
“When you tell people you work at National Geographic, you get incredible reactions. It’s revered, trusted, and stands for quality. And, they’ve been at the content game for close to 130 years,” she says. On the other hand, Cress says her role feels more like being at the helm of a one-year old company. “National Geographic Partners is a joint venture between 21st Century Fox and the National Geographic Society. We’re like a well funded startup, working on reinventing and reinvigorating the brand,” she says. But with so much history to rely upon, however, the brand is hardly resting on its laurels. Instead, it’s continuing to push the boundaries of innovation and technology, just like it did back when Alexander Graham Bell was the president of the National Geographic Society. He was the one to make the then-controversial decision to start including photography in the magazine, something that was considered to be a lowbrow, tabloid way to sell magazines....
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...But to help you narrow your search, we've done a bit of our own curation of the best Instagram accounts to follow for design inspiration. We've broken the list down by category: illustration, graphic design, pop art and installation, color palettes, street art, photography, typography, and calligraphy -- although, you might notice that some of the work below could fall onto more than one list. Check out how these artists are sharing their work with the world -- we're sure you'll find them as inspiring as we do....
"Between two such beings as he and I, the one a perfect volcano, the other boiling too, inwardly, a sort of struggle was preparing." In February of 1888, a decade after Van Gogh found his purpose, he moved to the town of Arles in the South of France. There, he exploded into a period of immense creative fertility, completing more than two hundred paintings, one hundred watercolors and sketches, and his famous Sunflowers series. But he also lived in extreme poverty and endured incessant inner turmoil, much of which related to his preoccupation with enticing Gauguin — whom he admired with unparalleled ardor (“I find my artistic ideas extremely commonplace in comparison with yours,” Van Gogh wrote) and who at the time was living and working in Brittany — to come live and paint with him. This coveted cohabitation, Van Gogh hoped, would be the beginning of a larger art colony that would serve as “a shelter and a refuge” for Post-Impressionist painters as they pioneered an entirely novel, and therefore subject to spirited criticism, aesthetic of art. Van Gogh wrote to Gauguin in early October of 1888:I’d like to see you taking a very large share in this belief that we’ll be relatively successful in founding something lasting. Despite his destitution, Van Gogh spent whatever money he had on two beds, which he set up in the same small bedroom. Seeking to make his modest sleeping quarters “as nice as possible, like a woman’s boudoir, really artistic,” he resolved to paint a set of giant yellow sunflowers onto its white walls. He wrote beseeching letters to Gauguin, and when the French artist sent him a self-portrait as part of their exchange of canvases, Van Gogh excitedly showed it around town as the likeness of a beloved friend who was about to come visit.Gauguin finally agreed and arrived in Arles in mid-October, where he was to spend about two months, culminating with the dramatic ear incident....
Barack Obama just made Twitter history. The former president tweeted a Nelson Mandela quote on the day of violent chaos in Charlottesville. He included a photo taken of him in 2011 on a visit to his daughter Sasha’s school in Bethesda, Md. With more than 2.8 million likes already, it’s the most liked tweet in Twitter history. A spokesperson for Twitter said the tweet broke the record just after 7 p.m. Pacific on Tuesday....
For as long as I’ve been writing books, I’ve been in a constant battle with the design of word processing software.Just the phrase “word processor” itself is soul-sucking. But the real problem lies in the common interface conventions almost all word processors share, locked in a framework that took shape in the early days of computing, when software was almost exclusively oriented around the business market. These tools are undoubtably well-engineered for producing an inter-office memo, or a short business plan that follows a conventional structure. But they are almost comically unsuited for long, complex, and structurally open-ended documents like non-fiction books or novels. To understand why, you need to consider the entire the life cycle of a book, from the early ideas to the completed project....
Daily Design Inspiration from selecting photography, architecture, graphic design and more. Our goal is to simply inspire your day and be creative!
The idea pops into my mind almost immediately. For weeks, amid my dad’s barrage of doctor’s appointments, medical tests, and treatments, I keep the notion to myself.
I dream of creating a Dadbot—a chatbot that emulates not a children’s toy but the very real man who is my father. And I have already begun gathering the raw material: those 91,970 words that are destined for my bookshelf....
Many stories are told via emojis, but Twitter and London’s Royal Opera House are taking it to the next level on Monday, July 17, in honor of World Emoji Day, using them to tell the story of an entire opera. This isn’t the first collaboration between these unlikely partners: They first joined forces to tweet an opera in August 2009. On Monday, the Royal Opera House will be tweeting all day long using emojis—and only emojis—to share the story of famous operas and ballets. There will be a new tweet every 30 minutes....
In a few short years, house paint might be able to do more than simply brighten your walls. A team of researchers in Australia have created an experimental paint that attracts water molecules from the air and chops them up to produce hydrogen, a clean-burning fuel that can be used to generate electricity. “Our new development has a big range of advantages,” Dr. Torben Daeneke, a research fellow at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology School of Engineering in Melbourne and leader of the team, said in a written statement. “There’s no need for clean or filtered water to feed the system. Any place that has water vapor in the air, even remote areas far from water, can produce fuel.” If the technology is perfected and the paint can be made commercially available, it could find widespread application in sunny places. It would generate only a fraction of the power generated by conventional solar panels, Daeneke told NBC News MACH in an email, but it could supplement panels on homes and other buildings. The paint could be used on walls and other surfaces where it’s not feasible to use solar panels....
Overlooking the gisselfeld klosters skove forest, south of Copenhagen, EFFEKT’s spiral treetop experience allows visitors to immerse themselves in the stunning danish nature surrounding them. The observation tower is nestled in a luscious forest characterized by a hilly landscape, with several natural elements such as lakes, creeks and wetlands. The 600 meter-long walkway is connected to a 45 meter-tall observation tower, creating a unique opportunity to meander above the trees. both the tower and the walkway function as a seamless and continuous ramp, making the forest accessible for all.
Renowned rock climber Alex Honnold on Saturday became the first person to scale the iconic nearly 3,000-foot granite wall known as El Capitan without using ropes or other safety gear, completing what may be the greatest feat of pure rock climbing in the history of the sport.
He ascended the peak in 3 hours, 56 minutes, taking the final moderate pitch at a near run. At 9:28 a.m. PDT, under a blue sky and few wisps of cloud, he pulled his body over the rocky lip of summit and stood on a sandy ledge the size of a child’s bedroom.
Honnold began his historic rope-less climb—a style known as “free soloing”—in the pink light of dawn at 5:32 a.m. He had spent the night in the customized van that serves as his mobile base camp, risen in the dark, dressed in his favorite red t-shirt and cutoff nylon pants, and eaten his standard breakfast of oats, flax, chia seeds, and blueberries, before driving to El Capitan Meadow.
As we become more submerged in beer culture, it's a given that some untruths can slip into your hop-soaked consciousness. It's all good. It's not like you're one of those people who believes the Earth is flat just because you read it on Facebook (or are you?!). You can be forgiven for thinking that the fast-talking neckbeard with the cellar knows everything about aging. But maybe, just maybe, he's full of crap.In the interest of making your world more well rounded, we hit up a handful of Certified Cicerones, beer writers, and even scientists to debunk some of the most pervasive beer myths....
Donald Trump says a lot of things that aren’t true, often shamelessly so, and it’s tempting to call him a liar. But that’s not quite right. As the Princeton University philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt put it in a famous essay, to lie presumes a kind of awareness of and interest in the truth — and the goal is to convince the audience that the false thing you are saying is in fact true. Trump, more often than not, isn’t interested in convincing anyone of anything. He’s a bullshitter who simply doesn’t care. In Trump's own book, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again, our now-president describes himself in a way that Frankfurt could hold up as the quintessential example of a bullshitter. Trump writes that he’s an "I say what’s on my mind" kind of guy. Pages later, he explains that doesn’t mean he’s necessarily an honest guy." If you do things a little differently," he writes of the media, "if you say outrageous things and fight back, they love you." The free publicity that results from deliberately provoking controversy is invaluable. And if a bit of exaggeration is what it takes, Trump doesn’t have a problem with that. "When," he asks "was the last time you saw a sign hanging outside a pizzeria claiming ‘The fourth best pizza in the world’?!"...
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Beautiful minimalist designs to admire.