If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my mailing list on the right sidebar. Thanks for visiting!
Last week I learned about this motivational poster produced in 1939 by the Birtish Government! I thought I would share it with you guys. Doesn’t it just sum up beautifully the gentlemanship of the Englishman ?! It’s a brilliant poster with great design. It says so much, with so little. Apparently, it was intended to be used if the Nazis ever took control of the country during the war, but it was never displayed to the public (Read more about it here). Later found in 2000… it has now, obviously, been used in a ton of advertisements worldwide.
Yesterday I just watched another interesting HGTV show called Top 10 Outdoor spaces. The space that brought the title home was really amazing. It’s an house in Venice, California, designed by Steven Ehrlich in 2003. It’s referred to as 700 Palms Residence in his online portfolio.
Just an amazing space that uses the outdoor to extend the indoor space. As the designers put it in the HGTV show, what’s nice about California is that the outdoor square footage count just as much as the indoor square footage. So a 1500 square foot house can be extended to a 15,000 square foot mansion, simply by using the outdoor space well. This house is definitively a great example of how to do this well.
Here are a couple more photos I managed to find around on the web. I wish we could use the outdoor spaces like that in Canada, but with 6 months of winter a year, we would need to rethink the design a little bit. It’s still do-able though.
I came across this amazing house while browsing my 2008 Autumn issue of International Architecture and Design. This house was designed by Toronto architect Ian McDonald in 2002 and was awarded the 2008 Governor General’s Medals in Architecture. Simply stunning!
Comment from the Jury
This house gives the split-level bungalow type a whole new meaning. The strategy seems to erode and intertwine the domestic structure of street frontage, back yard and neighbouring setbacks within the modest volume of a vintage bungalow, where spaces are brilliantly mined from the site rather than added to the structure. The result is a sequence of compact indoor and outdoor “rooms” that unexpectedly unravel into exquisite grand moments of expansion.
I found myself wasting about 2 hours of my time trying to understand why only one of my pages moved about 16px to the left when switching back and forth between the different page. My problem is that I was using a template and that everything on the two pages were exactly the same. Here is an example of what I mean.
Using the famous divide-and-conquer problem solving method (ha ha!), I started to remove some text to find out the culprit paragraph, and realized that the problem was only present when I had a lot of content on the page. After a few google searches, I found a thread on sitepoint’s site that explains exactly my problem (titled: Web Page Wiggle Issue and Margin Auto Wiggles & The Vertical Scrollbar). The problem lies in the use of “auto” for centering pages, much like in the very popular “body {margin: 0 auto; width: 960px;}”. This causes the page to wiggle (move to the left) between pages where the vertical scrollbar is needed (longer content) and where it doesn’t appear (firefox adds the scrollbar as needed, whereas IE always keeps it!). From the website, I found two fixes for the problem:
You can easily fix this, using CSS, by adding this one line in your stylesheet:
html {overflow-y:scroll;}
Another fix, if you are using JQuery, is the following:
Today, I went out to Grand & Toys to get some office supplies. While there, I remembered that I could use a new pen, and so I go at the front of the store where they keep their pen display. To my dismay, I see that Grand & Toys offers about 60 different types of pens. One of every type, shape, and color! At first, you (and I) would think that so much choice was great for me. That I would now be liberated by the amount of pens to choose from. That I could finally pick up the best possible pen for myself!
In fact, I was completely paralyzed and ended up leaving without buying any pen.
It’s not the first time I am faced with this sort of situation (happened a while back with paper…), but a week or two ago, I watched the following talk, embedded from www.ted.com, which made me realized exactly what I was feeling. I was confronted with what Barry Schwartz called “the paradox of choice”.
According to psychologist Barry Schwartz, this paralysis is a consequence of too much choice, which he discusses thoroughly in his book Why more is Less. In this talk, Schwartz goes on to explain other problems caused by the wealth of choice in our western society, namely, anticipated regret, opportunity cost, escalation of expectations, and self blame.
In just about 20 minutes, Barry Schwartz goes from explaining what some think is the biggest culprit (I do) for the rising depression and suicide rates in our society to giving away the secret to living a happy life. Well worth the 20:22 minutes! I hope you enjoy it as much as I did:
