The Best And Worst Design Details Of Nintendo’s Wii U

It’s the worst kept secret in tech: 2013 will be the year of the console refresh. Microsoft will announce the Xbox 720 (which may have augmented reality glasses), and Sony will inevitably debut the PS4.

With the Wii U, Nintendo got a head start on the next gen. And after playing with a review unit for more hours than I’d like to admit, here are my thoughts on the system.

THE GOOD

Wii U’s Interface Juggles Old And New Paradigms Well … Mostly
You can’t underplay this accomplishment, even though most have: The Wii U has a new touchscreen controller with a bajillion buttons on it. Yet its main menus are just as navigable with the classic Wiimotes. Thanks to a clever button layout (similar to the Wii’s), it’s just as intuitive to tap the screen as it is to aim and click.

Unfortunately, you can’t use the Wiimote in apps like Netflix or YouTube. In fact, the Wiimote won’t even turn on in these modes. Will future updates bring more Wiimote control options? I’m guessing no but hoping yes. The Wiimote still works.

It’s The Simplest Universal Remote Ever
When you set up the Wii U, you’re asked what your cable provider is and if you have a dedicated box. You’re whisked through a few questions about the make and model of your TV and suddenly, you’re controlling your TV inputs and cable box with the Wii U GamePad. You can even pull up this TV remote at any time with a dedicated hard button on the GamePad.

CONTROLS ARE LIKE ONE OF THOSE BIG-BUTTONED REMOTES FOR SENIORS, IN A GOOD WAY.

The controls are absurdly basic. (Onscreen controls are like one of those big-buttoned remotes for seniors in a good way, allowing you to change the channel and volume and view your program guide, but not much more.) All the same, I can’t stress how liberating it is to use a D-pad or analog stick to look through shows, swapping between playing games and watching TV without ever putting down the controller.

Drawing On TV Feels Right
MiiVerse is like a mega messageboard on the Wii U, where bored players can chat about games or whatever else is on their mind. It’s like any other message board, with one fantastic trick: You can use the Wii U pad (which comes with a stylus) to draw messages instead of just typing them. These drawings permeate your welcome screen, too, where avatars from other players fill a public space (and frankly, the drawings are so good that one can’t help but wonder if Nintendo is curating a bit behind the scenes). Even still, I can’t help but wonder, in five years, if we’ll think it was absurd that we couldn’t always draw on our computer screens and TVs so simply.

THE MIXED

Gaming
What’s it like to play on the Wii U GamePad? It really depends on the game. Super Mario Bros. U actually asks up to four players to use Wiimotes, with a fifth person optionally holding the Wii U GamePad only to add blocks for others to jump on or stun enemies. The touchscreen controls feel tacked on and, frankly, pretty boring compared to really playing as a character. You can also play Mario single player, using the Wii U GamePad with full character controls. The screen mirrors the game so you can even play with the TV off, but you lose all the touchscreen components you get in multiplayer.

THE WII U GAMEPAD IS A DIGITAL SIMULATION OF DIGGING THROUGH YOUR BACKPACK.

ZombiU, on the other hand, uses the new remote at its core. This personal screen serves as a map and your inventory. It’s actually often quite frustrating to juggle two screens, never sure if a zombie is sneaking up on you—and that’s part of the fun. In a gaming world full of convenient HUDs, the remote is a digital simulation of digging through your backpack with your eyes down and a zombie at your back. In multiplayer, the Wii U gamer gets to place zombies tactically on a map to attack friends, which is an equally fun, innovative use of this second screen.

Controller Juggling
Above I mentioned that the Wii remote doesn’t work in some menus. It’s annoying. But the Wii U Pro controller, which is Nintendo’s take on the Xbox/PS3 controllers, isn’t supported in many games for reasons that simply don’t make sense. Super Mario Bros. U won’t support it, for instance. Why not? It has a D-pad and A/B buttons. What’s missing? Nothing. Just support.

WHEN NINTENDO ENABLES INPUTS, THE WII U’S DISSONANT CONTROL SCHEMES MAKE JAZZ.

Make no mistake about it, the Wii U is absurdly designed. It’s built with physical buttons, a touchscreen, occasional motion controls and even a stylus. But there are occasional payoffs to this everything-for-everyone approach: You can often control the system on your terms, unrestricted to a single UI. Heck, you can play Mario from the bathroom. When Nintendo enables every sort of input you can imagine, the Wii U’s dissonant control schemes make jazz. When Nintendo (or its developers) restrict its controls for no good reason, any semblance of reason or flexibility is lost.

THE BAD

It’s Also The Most Confounding Universal Remote Ever
Wait, I just said it was the best remote above! Well, that’s the stock remote. There’s also a newly released alternative called TVii, which we previewed before. TVii is like a funnel for your media content, allowing you to set your favorite shows and explore them with a thumbnail view. It will dig for your shows through your cable subscription or services like Amazon (Netflix is coming soon, too). You can even set a reminder to watch something, and the Wii U GamePad will change the channel for you at that time. Then, while you watch the show, you can surf IMDB to learn more about the actors. There are a lot of great ideas here.

TVII HAS 36 BUTTONS, IT SPINS, AND IT’S TOO LARGE TO REACH WITH MY THUMB.

The problems are twofold. TVii is perpetually, stutteringly slow, and no UI can feel like a joy unless it’s fast. (I’d sacrifice the pretty thumbnails for clean, quick text any day.) The other problem is its crazy, radial virtual remote for when you just want to change the channel. It has 36 buttons, it spins, it’s too large to reach with my thumb and I still can’t use it to dig through my DVR library or swap my inputs for some reason. TVii also disables the D-Pad and analog remote controls, which are so satisfying for gamers to use. Ultimately, the TVii remote is a magnitude more complex than that basic, senior-friendly remote we mentioned above, but it actually has less functionality. It’s unusable.

The Battery Life Actually Limits Use Cases
This is a design publication, so it’s rare we’d even mention battery life. But in this case, the 4-hour (or less) run time of the rechargeable Wii U GamePad severely limits functionality. It can’t be your go-to media device for TV and games when it can’t make it through a single evening binge ofBreaking Bad. My iPad is great because it feels like it always has power—I think of my iPad whenever I think of relaxing on the couch. With the Wii U, I’m always tense that the controller isn’t charged enough for me to play.

The good news for Nintendo is that most of these complaints are firmware-fixable (though sluggish speed and lousy battery life are likely here to stay). At the end of the day, the company has, yet again, built a seemingly absurd controller that has a surprising amount of ergonomic flexibility. And while Microsoft, Sony, and Apple are all trying to sell us on closed-system media content, it’s revelatory to have Nintendo do something as simple and thoughtful as enable us to swap an input to just watch TV. That is, assuming anyone out there other than me is still watching TV.

The Wii U is out now starting at $299.

iOS devices are becoming mainstream as avid technology buffs are playing with Apple’s latest technology. The release of the iPad tablet computer along with the HD iPhone 4 retina display has shown an impressive year for company branding.

We’ll be going over a few tips for designing a simple iOS interface in Adobe Photoshop. Out of the graphics software available Photoshop or a similar platform is the easiest option for UI design. With easy access to layers and project icons things become much simpler.

This process is similar to the artist or graphic web designer in that application prototyping requires strong creative energies. To put together an entire storyboard of app screens takes time and patience. With the tools we use today the process is much quicker and simpler than ever before.

Starting Off Generic

Designing for iOS isn’t much different than designing for the web. In fact it’s a bit easier since you’ll be working on a smaller screen with specific access points. Practicing with the native iPhone graphics is the easiest path for newbie designers.

Included is a small list of bells and whistles native to the iOS interface. These are the buttons and toolbars you see most commonly around the App Store.

These elements are commonly found inside Apple’s Interface Builder, which is software used to design resources for iPhone and Mac OS X apps. This is the software application developers can use to connect iOS graphics to backend Objective-C code.

Below is a small list of interface elements. This is not an exhaustive collection but should give you an idea of the basic starting points.

• status bar
• navigation bar
• tabs/tab bar
• sliders and switches
• input fields
• table lists

Many of these are available for free as iPhone and iPad UI kits. They will include layered documents for Photoshop and Fireworks containing all icons and page elements possible. Most developed UI templates will also include a graphic relating to an actual iPhone, screen sized to 480 x 320.

App Prototyping

Before opening Photoshop it can be handy to spend some time sketching out your idea first. This could be on a simple piece of paper or laid over an entire spread. This step all depends on your hand-drawn artistic abilities and how comfortable you feel.

Illustrators will generally sketch out frames for each piece to an iOS application. These are also known as views and can immensely help the app developers down the line by having a contained set of templates. If you are less artistically gifted and wish to jump right into the technology then check out a sample iPhone UI kit. Working from the newest releases Teehan+lax has a fantastic iPhone 4 GUI PSD release for free.

The file includes everything you would expect to find inside a standard application. Once downloaded I’d recommend saving the initial template in a new directory where it can be used as a reference point.

Prototyping is much simpler when you can work through a diagram similar to the iPhone design, included in portrait and landscape. The same goes for iPad kits which include the same framing style.

Best Practices

The suggested practices towards creating individual app prototypes is to save separate view states into a new directory. As an example you could create a new directory labeled myApp and inside create a folder named views.

Within here you can save individual .psd files labeled after which content they contain. This could range to include home.psd or settings.psd. After a bit of work you’ll notice creating complementary views becomes easier once the initial design is set.

Also it’s important to save copies of each file as a .jpg or .png. This alternate is beneficial to those who do not use Photoshop or would be too confused to mess around with layered files. When working on a project with many developers and closing deadlines this can become especially time efficient.

Example iOS UI Sets

Below are just a few examples of some great starter kits. These will include all of the core functionality which lives naively in Interface Builder. Note iOS3 and iOS4 do contain differing graphics as the screen resolution has been updated.

iPhone GUI PSD Version 4

iPhone WireFrames & Stencils

Fireworks toolkit for iPhone UI

iPad GUI Kit(PSD)

iPhone PSD Vector Kit by Smashing Magazine

iPad vector GUI Elements

These are just some of the best tips towards getting into iPhone app design. There’s a large world of mobile graphics out there and iOS is a hugely popular operating system. As the mobile app market advances there will be a huge spike in demand for mobile app UI and icon designers.

Getting started is always the hardest step but returns the greatest rewards. Pick up a few of these PSD kits and mess around for an hour or two to see what you can create. Often times practice does make perfect and designing for the iOS platform can be not only fun but a truly fulfilling learning experience.

Copied from: WDL - Posted by Jake Rocheleau on Jan 11, 2011

The Converse mark thought this called interesting installation “Canvas Experimental”. While assembling a wall made up of shoes on 2 sides and being able to swivel, those react to the music for one made original. A vidéos of the concept is to be discovered in the continuation.

Copied from: fubiz

This guest post is by Jon Morrow of Copyblogger.

After all, that’s the dream, right?

Forget the mansions and limousines and other trappings of Hollywood-style wealth. Sure, it would be nice, but for the most part, we bloggers are simpler souls with much kinder dreams.

We want to quit our jobs, spend more time with our families, and finally have time to write. We want the freedom to work when we want, where we want. We want our writing to help people, to inspire them, to change them from the inside out.

It’s a modest dream, a dream that deserves to come true, and yet a part of you might be wondering…

Will it?

Do you really have what it takes to be a professional blogger, or are you just being dumb? Is it realistic to make enough money from this to quit your job, or is that just silly? Can you really expect people to fall in love with what you write, or is that just wishful thinking?

Sure, it’s fun to dream about your blog taking off and changing your life, but sometimes you wonder if it’s just that: a dream. This is the real world, and in the real world, dreams don’t really come true.

Right?

Well, let me tell you a little story…

How I quit my job

My van

In April of 2006, I was hit by a car going 85 miles an hour.

I didn’t see him coming, and I don’t remember much about the accident, but I do remember being pulled out of my minivan with my shirt on fire. The front end of the van was torn off, gasoline was everywhere, and my legs were broken in 14 places.

For the next three months, I had nothing to do but endure the pain and think about my life. I thought about my childhood. I thought about my dreams. I thought about my career.

And overall, I decided I didn’t like the way things were going.

So I quit.

I sold everything I owned. I stopped paying most of my bills. I turned in my letter of resignation, worked my two weeks, and then disappeared without saying goodbye.

Hearing about my insanity, a friend called and asked me, “Well, what are you going to do now?”

“I don’t know,” I told him. “Maybe start a blog.”

And so that’s what I did.

For the next three months, I didn’t just tinker around with blogging. I dedicated myself to it. I started work at 8 AM in the morning, and I kept going until 11 PM at night. I didn’t watch television. I didn’t see my friends. From morning till night, I was writing, reading, and connecting with other bloggers. Nothing else.

Within a month, I had On Moneymaking off the ground, and within two months, it was getting 2,000 visitors a day and Performancing nominated it for the best business/money blog of the year. A couple of months after that, Brian Clark asked me to become the Associate Editor of Copyblogger, and so I sold On Moneymaking for five figures and went to work at one of the most popular blogs at the world.

And amazingly, that’s just the beginning of the story.

How I moved to paradise

Have you ever woken up one day and realized you secretly despise everything about where you live?

The weather is horrible. Your neighbors are jerks. You don’t like inviting anyone to your home, because it’s always a wreck, and you’re ashamed of how it looks.

Well, that’s exactly what happened to me in January of 2009. I was sitting in my pathetic apartment, wrapped up in blankets to keep warm, trying to get some work done on the computer, when it struck me how monumentally stupid it was.

I was a full-time blogger, for God’s sakes. I could do my work from anywhere in the world. Why on Earth was I living in this hellhole?

The only problem was I had no idea where I wanted to go, but a couple of weeks later, the telephone rang, and it was an old friend who had retired to Mazatlan, Mexico. As usual, he was calling to gloat about the weather and the food and the general superiority of the Mexican lifestyle, but instead of just suffering through it this time, I stopped him and said, “No, don’t tell me any more. I’m moving there.”

My office

“What? When?” he stammered.

“I don’t know exactly when,” I told him, “but I’m starting right now.”

Two months later, I took a one-week trip to scout it out and look for places to live. When I got back, I started selling all of my stuff, packing the rest of it into storage, and saying goodbye to friends. Almost one year to the day after our phone call, I hopped in the car and drove just shy of 3,000 miles to my new beachfront condo in the finest resort in Mazatlan.

As I write this, I’m sitting on my balcony with my laptop, watching (no kidding) dolphins jumping out in the Pacific. It’s a sunny day, there’s a nice breeze, and I’m thinking about ordering a piña colada from the restaurant downstairs.

Lucky me, right?

Well, what might surprise you is I left out a piece of the story. It’s the part where I have a fatal disease, I can’t move from the neck down, and yet I essentially get paid to help people. Let’s talk about that part next.

How I get paid to change the world

You know what’s funny?

Yours truly

The worst part about having a disease like SMA isn’t how everyone treats you like a charity case. It’s not the frustration, anger, or depression. It’s not even the inability to reach over and pinch a cute girl’s butt when you want to (although that’s pretty bad).

No, the worst part is the freakin’ bills.  The doctors. The medication. The nurses.

I added it all up, and the total cost of keeping me alive in the US was $127,000 a year. That’s not rent. That’s not food. That’s just medical expenses.

Granted, I didn’t actually have to pay all that. I had private insurance, Medicaid, other government aid programs, but all that support comes at a price: they control you. The government allotted me only $700 a month to live on, and I had to spend every single cent above that on medical expenses, or they would cut me off.

So for years, that’s what I did. If I made $5,000 one month, I set aside $700 for living expenses, and I spent the other $4,300 on medical bills. Nothing was left. Ever.

And eventually, I got sick of it.

I wanted to make money without having to worry about losing my healthcare. I wanted to take care of my family, instead of them always having to take care of me. I wanted to actually live somewhere nice, not some ratty little apartment built for folks below the poverty line.

The only problem was, it just wasn’t possible for me in US. No matter how I played with the numbers, I couldn’t make it work. So, I did something crazy:

I quit Medicaid. I moved to Mexico. I stopped worrying about myself at all and started a business based on one simple idea:

Helping people.

I found up-and-coming writers who wanted a mentor, and I trained them. I found businesses who wanted to cash in on social media, and I developed their strategy. I found bloggers who wanted more traffic, and I created a course on how to get it.

In exchange, they paid me what they could. Some folks gave me $50 an hour and others $300 an hour, but I treated them all the same, and I dedicated myself to making their dreams a reality.

The results?

Within two months, I was making so much money so fast PayPal shut down my account under suspicions of fraudulent activity. Today, not only am I making more than enough to take care of myself, but a couple of months ago, I got uppity and bought my father a car.

Do you understand how precious that is? For a guy who can’t move from the neck down to buy his father a car?

And the best part is, I’m not making money doing mindless drudgery. I’m changing people’s lives.

Every day, I get emails from readers who say my posts have changed their thinking. Every day, I get emails from students who say my advice has changed their writing. Every day, I get emails from clients who say my strategies have changed the way they do business.

I can’t really believe it. Normally, a guy like me would be wasting away in a nursing home somewhere, watching television and waiting to die, but here I am speaking into a microphone and essentially getting paid to change the world. If my fingers worked, I’d pinch myself.

And here’s the thing:

I don’t want it for just me. I want it for you too.

The reason I told you this whole story wasn’t just to brag but also to convince you of one incontrovertible point:

YOU CAN DO THIS!

You want to quit your job and become a professional blogger?

You can.

You want to travel around the world, living life to its fullest?

You can.

You want to dedicate your every hour to helping people and making the world a better place?

You can.

Because listen … I know it’s horribly cliché, but if I can quit my job, risk the government carting me off to a nursing home because I can’t afford my own healthcare, convince my poor mother to abandon her career and drive my crippled butt 3,000 miles to a foreign country, and then make enough money to support myself, my mother, my father, and an entire nursing staff using nothing but my voice, then what can you accomplish if you really set your mind to it?

My guess: pretty much anything.

No, it won’t be easy. At some point, I guarantee you’ll want to quit. I guarantee people will treat you like you’re insane. I guarantee you’ll cry yourself to sleep, wondering if you made a horrible mistake.

But never stop believing in yourself. The world is full of naysayers, all of them eager to shout you down at the slightest indication you might transcend mediocrity, but the greatest sin you can commit is to yourself become one of them. Our job isn’t to join that group, but to silence it, to accomplish things so great and unimaginable that its members are too awed to speak.

You can do it.

I believe in you.

So get started.

Right freaking now.

Jon Morrow is Associate Editor of Copyblogger. If you’d like to learn more about what it really takes to become a popular blogger, check out his free videos on guest blogging.

Copied from: http://www.problogger.net/archives/2011/05/18/how-to-quit-your-job-move-to-paradise-and-get-paid-to-change-the-world/

The new logo is both bold and cost effective, using design-world standards to maximum effect.

The Guggenheim Bilbao, San Francisco’s DeYoung, New York’s Whitney — all are museums that have identities inextricably linked to their buildings and the architects who gave them shape (Frank Gehry, Herzog & deMeuron, and Marcel Breuer, respectively). You may know squat about art, but odds are you can pick Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic Guggenheim out of a lineup. Can you say the same of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston? Unless you live in Houston, probably not. That isn’t stopping the CAMH from trying to remix the building, as the basis for its rebranding campaign.

Although it never made it into the architectural cannon, the stainless-steel-clad structure, designed by Latvian-born Gunnar Birkerts in 1972, is a standout work, especially for Houston. (Birkerts, the father of the literary critic Sven Birkerts, is better known for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, 1973, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, in Kansas City, 1994.) Various views of the building yield four distinctive geometric shapes, which the New York-based firm AHL&CO layered on top of each other like a CMYK collage. (The previous logo was a flat, literal representation of the museum.) The mark can be used separately or in combination with the acronym in Helvetica Bold and all caps.

Detractors immediately seized on the logo when it began making the rounds on the Interweb, slamming it for the color palette (unimaginative!) and the typeface (Helvetica? Snore.). The designers answer their critics thusly: “In terms of the Helvetica and CMYK — it was a simple matter of economy,” Peter Ahlberg writes in an email. “That meant there was no budget for new/customized type, spot color, etc. We felt that Helvetica Bold was malleable enough to accommodate any art (style, medium, etc.) paired with it.”

We’ll leave it to the graphic designers to debate the finer points. Regardless of the logo’s merits, we applaud the museum’s appreciation of its home, even if it hasn’t achieved landmark status. And the mark just may encourage people to investigate their built environment from all angles, and there’s no downside to that.

[Hat tip to Brand New]

copied from: fastcodesign

The Child’s Play bed envisioned by Yusuke Suzuki looks just like every child’s dream. Ever tried reading a book and falling asleep half-way through it? Well, this time, you can actually sleep on it.

 The bed looks big enough to accommodate two children in its comfortably and cushy looking blankets. Crack the bed open during nap time and fold it shut to save some space when the kids are up and about.

Child’s Play isn’t just for sleeping; it’s also for playing. The key to a world of fun and imagination is literally within reach with the turn of a page. This is definitely at the top of my list for the Best Book of The Year.

It’s not yet available commercially but I hope it will be soon.

(Via Buzzfeed)

Copied from: http://www.geekalerts.com/childs-play-storybook-bed/

I’ve been Brand museum at the hidden place in London 2 weeks ago.

When I arrived there, well unfortunately I just only had less than 30 mins to look around because I was too late, I felt I was at an amazing amusement park! It was absolutely  fantastic.

I do like modern and simple design stuff but can’t stop loving vintage design. It is impossible. Especially after moving to London, more and more I love vintage design.

I would like to visit there again def. I would like to know more vintage design and brand and share with you. If you know or find more, please share here with me :)

I found this design through this site article: http://abduzeedo.com/vintage-label-designs

For more from Wallace Design House visit their website wallacedesignhouse.com

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