Week #587
We continue to work on some small icons for a design project. These are small line-art glyphs which represent aspects of Iceland. We are showing them to people and getting feedback. We tweak some, add others and repeat the process. We’re up to 40 or so and we’re finalizing the design for this first print project.
The hyperion project continues to roll on, but we’ve taken that concept and are reapplying it in a new medium for a new purpose. We started a web-based prototype and sped-up the process a bit to see how things ‘feel’ and work out the kinks. We’ll then scale back our time-frames closer to what we’d ship and continue to iterate. This is the kinda of project we enjoy: Web-based, quick and dirty prototype to get feedback and verify (or not) an idea for something much larger. Most of what is built won’t be used, so we are less concerned about all the details, security, errors, etc. and more focused on trying different things quickly, internally.
On Tuesday, 🇮🇸 Iceland got through to the Eurovision final, but didn’t do so well on Saturday. The two stars of the show were the 🇬🇧 UK entry, but the obvious winner was 🇺🇦 Ukraine.
We also published our article about the combinatorics of choosing a PIN. PIN Security Scheme is a short 5 minute read (~850 words) about a surprising trick to improve (slightly) the security of your PIN.
Week #588
We continue to work on the hyperion spin-off project. We’ve now been using it for a few days and starting to get the ‘feel’ for what needs changes. As more of the team use it, we’ll find issues, questions and way to improve. That’s what we mostly did this week.
We then left for a short trip to Venice for the biennale.
Week #589
Back to the grindstone after a short trip abroad. We sent out s01e05 of the Good Morning Newsletter on Tuesday.
For another prototype project, we’ve been deep into the world of word games. As a test, we created a few scripts to play scrabble. Taking a page from the AI for the original Pac Man ghosts. Inky, Pinky, Blinky and Clyde each had their own ”personality” of how they played. We made a few scripts that have different tactics. One only just tries to add suffixes or prefixes to words already on the board. Another only plays on the edges making a word of random length. A third tries to play one or two letters around an existing tile in an attempt to back-fill the board. It works, but it still has some kinks to work out for sure. But it has served it’s purpose and we’ve learnt a bit from the process.
Thursday was a bank holiday, Uppstigningardaginn (Feast of the Ascension). That broke the week up and friday was pretty much just for loss-ends rather than focused work.
We booked some flights for meetings the first full week of June back in San Francisco. This should be an exciting trip that we certainly won’t be able to talk about (maybe some day).
Fluxcapacitor
This week in 02010, the PaperNet Boarding Pass was big on our mind, and it still is. Technology is great, until your battery runs out. Paper still has lots of great aspects too it, and when we can embue the Internet into it, it becomes even more powerful. We’ve been one of the lucky few who have actually designed an printable boarding pass for a real airlines that was used in the real world.
This week, back in 02013, we wrote Gestalten: A Map of the World. One of the companies we shared the co-working space with 9 years ago, had several of their maps published in a Gestalten book about maps. We helped them get several of these online as interactive maps.