I noticed this very cool ad when I was passing through the Orlando Airport and was immediately taken by the stunning hand art as well as the clever way the message of the ad was communicated. I was curious if there were more like this and it turns out that this is part of a larger series promoting international access with AT&T wireless - click here to see some of the other painted hand images representing other countries around the world such as India and Zimbabwe. It turns out that AT&T isn’t the only one whose used this technique, however, I think that their painted hands are the best of the bunch in terms of detail and expression.
Archive for the 'Design' Category
The other day I was designing a web site for a cardiovascular research group and I needed a simple graphic image for the site that would take up a good chunk of horizontal space without being two distracting. I choose to use this image of an EKG - a graph of the electrical voltage in the heart - for it’s graphical nature as well as the fact that it is a symbol that most people have come to associate with the heart.
I showed the design to the client yesterday, and needless to say I was shocked to find that that the EKG I had selected was that of a person on the verge of death. Oops! Turns out that that numerous peaks represent someone who is suffering severe cardiac arrest that would most likely kill them and apparently a normal EKG has far less of those. Luckily the client saw the humor in the situation and has since provided me with a healthy EKG so that visitors won’t be greeted by a graph of someone having a heart attack on their next visit the site.
I just came across this interesting quote while reading an article on knowledge work. The quote is from The Social Life of Paper by Malcolm Gladwell (published in the New Yorker):
“But why do we pile documents instead of filing them? Because piles represent the process of active, ongoing thinking. The psychologist Alison Kidd, whose research Sellen and Harper refer to extensively, argues that “knowledge workers” use the physical space of the desktop to hold “ideas which they cannot yet categorize or even decide how they might use.” The messy desk is not necessarily a sign of disorganization. It may be a sign of complexity: those who deal with many unresolved ideas simultaneously cannot sort and file the papers on their desks, because they haven’t yet sorted and filed the ideas in their head. Kidd writes that many of the people she talked to use the papers on their desks as contextual cues to “recover a complex set of threads without difficulty and delay” when they come in on a Monday morning, or after their work has been interrupted by a phone call. What we see when we look at the piles on our desks is, in a sense, the contents of our brains.”
As I take a look at my work area - both my physical and virtual desktop - I realize that it does in a sense represent my current state of mind at work. Spread out are the files and papers that are on my mind both at the conscious and unconscious level - the things that need to get done and things I’m not sure how to do yet. The charts on the wall and the files on my desktop are there not because I need them right away, but because looking at them every day and having them in my peripheral view helps the ideas percolate and eventually come into focus.
Originally published June 10, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.