Aside from being fun, educational and demonstrative of their skill, what our designers created just goes to show how the timeless principles of Bauhaus design still hold up after all this time.
Bauhaus is one of the greatest design movements of the 20th century. Founded in 1919, the famous design school has influenced all kinds of cultural fields with its revolutionary ideas and theories. Its indelible mark has been stamped on art, design and architecture. But you don’t need to be an artist to have heard about Bauhaus. We all have a feel for what Bauhaus design looks like, but can’t necessarily explain it. Until now…
We’ve put together this Bauhaus infographic to summarize everything you need to know about the movement. Scroll down and let us take you on a Bauhaus journey, from its principles and characteristics to the history, milestones and evolution of the Bauhaus movement in graphic design today.
This was a sensitive moment for one of the globe’s most prominent charities. The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) had long helped fund and equip Chitwan’s forest rangers, who patrol the area in jeeps, boats, and on elephant backs alongside soldiers from the park’s in-house army battalion. Now WWF’s partners in the war against poaching stood accused of torturing a man to death.
WWF’s staff on the ground in Nepal leaped into action — not to demand justice, but to lobby for the charges to disappear. When the Nepalese government dropped the case months later, the charity declared it a victory in the fight against poaching. Then WWF Nepal continued to work closely with the rangers and fund the park as if nothing had happened.
As for the rangers who were charged in connection with Shikharam’s death, WWF Nepal later hired one of them to work for the charity. It handed a second a special anti-poaching award. By then he had written a tell-all memoir that described one of his favorite interrogation techniques: waterboarding.
Shikharam’s alleged murder in 2006 was no isolated incident: It was part of a pattern that persists to this day. In national parks across Asia and Africa, the beloved nonprofit with the cuddly panda logo funds, equips, and works directly with paramilitary forces that have been accused of beating, torturing, sexually assaulting, and murdering scores of people. As recently as 2017, forest rangers at a WWF-funded park in Cameroon tortured an 11-year-old boy in front of his parents, the family told BuzzFeed News. Their village submitted a complaint to WWF, but months later, the family said they still hadn’t heard back.
After he delivered the report, Mwenge presented his findings in Yaoundé in front of top WWF staffers, including a senior manager from Switzerland. The meeting resulted in a series of draft recommendations, obtained by BuzzFeed News, for the charity to improve its relationship with the local community. One was to create and promote a new complaint system for locals to report forest ranger abuses; another was to thwart “corruption among eco-guards and establish harsh consequences.”
But a month after the report was filed, Lambertini, WWF’s chief executive, sent a strident letter to Survival International asserting that concerns the group had raised about indigenous rights were “most directly matters for the Government of Cameroon,” not WWF. He called the campaign group’s claims that WWF had “done nothing” for the local Baka people “untrue and insulting.”
Internal documents show WWF still supports rangers at Lobéké and continues to help park officials organize raids.
The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) told its European Union funders that indigenous people were “favorable” to a new national park despite an internal report highlighting fears of “repression” by forest rangers, BuzzFeed News can reveal.
The EU agreed to send WWF 1 million euros for the proposed new park in an area of the Republic of Congo, known as Messok Dja, on the basis that it would seek the consent of indigenous people.
But omitted from a copy of a WWF filing to the EU in 2018, obtained by BuzzFeed News under Freedom of Information laws, were passages of a consultant’s confidential report that found some locals vehemently opposed the park.
Other sections of that report were copy-pasted into the EU filing — but the document does not contain sections discussing how some villagers were worried the park would drive them off their ancestral land, prevent them gathering food for their families, and subject them to mistreatment by forest rangers, known locally as “eco-guards.”
Katie J.M. Baker & Tom Warren
Conservation is important. Every species that dies out makes our world less ecologically diverse and threatens to unbalance our biosphere. But human life is valuable too, and treating indigenous peoples as expendable in a war against poaching is not an acceptable course of action. I have to believe that there is a way to protect vulnerable species and vulnerable peoples at the same time.
Budget cuts have crippled the IRS over the past eight years. Enforcement staff has dropped by a third. But while the number of audits has fallen across the board, the impact has been different for the rich and poor. For wealthy taxpayers, the story has been rosy: Not only has the audit rate been cut in half, but audits now tend to be less thorough.
It’s a different story for people who receive the EITC: The audit rate has fallen less steeply and the experience of being audited has become more punishing. Because of a 2015 law, EITC recipients are now more likely to have their refund held, something that can be calamitous for someone living month-to-month.
by Paul Kiel and Jesse Eisinger Dec. 12, 2018
Put simply, budget cuts to the IRS have resulted in a situation where a program that was once meant to help the working poor now makes their lives even more difficult. Combine this with a recent bill that will effectively keep tax preparation privatized and expensive, and it’s yet another way we are failing our citizens who are the most in need.
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in the late 90s, he found a product line that was too confusing for most consumers, so he simplified things. At the 1998 MacWorld Expo, he shared a simplified product grid that would serve as the foundation for Apple’s product lineup for several years. It looked something like this:
Desktop
Portable
Consumer
iMac
iBook
Professional
PowerMac
PowerBook
The intended audiences were clear, and everything from the components to the industrial design reflected this approach. Of course, there were multiple choices in each category, but it was clear to potential customers which machine was for whom.
Over the years, Apple’s customer base has grown considerably, and their business model has evolved. The four-quadrant grid was never going to last forever, especially with the growing prosumer market and Apple choosing to move beyond computers as their primary hardware products. If you were to try to grid out their products in 2004, it might look similar to this:
Desktop
Portable
Lifestyle
Consumer
eMac
iBook
Prosumer
iMac
PowerBook 12″
Professional
PowerMac
PowerBook 15″
Everyone
iPod
The laptop line was already beginning to grow a little confusing, with the smaller PowerBook targeting a humbler audience than those who would buy the larger models. This approach remained fairly consistent over the next few year and saw Apple through the Intel transition, with the Mac mini replacing the eMac in the consumer category. Then came the MacBook Air.
The MacBook Air and a New Product Category
Steve Jobs at MacWorld 2008
It was one of the most memorable product reveals in recent history, even compared to the much-anticipated iPhone announcement from the year before. Steve Jobs held up a manilla envelope, the type you might see for old interdepartmental messages, and pulled a computer out of it. No one had seen a computer so thin or light before. It made compromises; it had almost no traditional ports; but it was cool.
Over the years, the MacBook Air had different places in Apple’s product lineup. For a time, it existed in its own category for early adopters. Then, it evolved into a replacement for the white plastic MacBook, serving as the only alternative to the MacBook Pro. Then Apple brought back the MacBook in a thinner, lighter form-factor, and the Air became its heavier, slower budget sibling. Now, the MacBook serves as the thin and light machine with compromises, the Air is the mainstream consumer/prosumer machine, and the MacBook Pro straddles prosumer and professional customers.
The 2019 iPad Air. Looks a lot like a 2017 iPad Pro…
The Air and the iPad Lineup
The word Air has had a similar journey in the iPad lineup. The iPad Air came our in November 2013 and completely replaced the iPad line. There was no iPad Pro yet, but there was an iPad mini. The iPad Air was thinner and lighter than previous iPads, and that’s where things maintained for a couple of generations.
In 2016, the iPad Pro came out; the very next year, Apple dropped the Air branding from any iPads, so now their lineup was iPad mini, iPad, and iPad Pro. The updated iPad had some concessions compared to the iPad Air, but it was still a good update and smoothed out a rather odd naming convention.
But now the iPad Air is back, basically reviving the 10.5″ screen of the 2017 iPad Pro, while that line has moved to 11″ and 13″ screens. The no-modifier iPad is still around with its 9″ screen and slower processor, and the iPad mini lives on with the faster iPad Air architecture and a 7″ screen. When Apple announced the new iPad Air and iPad mini, I felt they needlessly complicated the product line, but a pattern may be emerging.
Currently, Apple seems to be filling out a MacBook product line that moves from entry-level to mainstream to premium. Forget any notion of consumer, prosumer, or professional usage and think in terms of desirability instead. Yes, premium machines have better capabilities than the lower tiers, but they also come with desirable features — things like Touch ID and the Touch Bar. The iPad line seems to be taking a similar approach.
Tablet
Laptop
Desktop
Entry
iPad
MacBook
Mac mini
Mainstream
iPad Air iPad mini
MacBook Air
iMac
Premium
iPad Pro
MacBook Pro
iMac Pro Future Mac Pro
And now things start to make sense*. All of the entry level machines are for consumers who may not know what they want and will gravitate toward the most affordable option. (I expect the MacBook to see a price reduction in the near future to clarify its place in the lineup.) The mainstream machines are for most of us. They are good enough for most needs and don’t carry the sticker shock of the premium models, and those premium models are for those of us who want the latest and greatest innovations Apple provides.
When I started writing this piece, I began writing about an Apple that had lost its product strategy; now I see an Apple that may actually be in the final stages of solidifying of a new strategy, and I don’t dare guess what the last pieces of that puzzle will be. Whatever it is, Apple is always evolving, and they’re always thinking several steps ahead.
*The exception to things making sense, of course, is the Apple Pencil. That Apple sells two different devices with the same name that have different capabilities and compatibility is confounding.
Berners-Lee, who never directly profited off his invention, has also spent most of his life trying to guard it. While Silicon Valley started ride-share apps and social-media networks without profoundly considering the consequences, Berners-Lee has spent the past three decades thinking about little else. From the beginning, in fact, Berners-Lee understood how the epic power of the Web would radically transform governments, businesses, societies. He also envisioned that his invention could, in the wrong hands, become a destroyer of worlds, as Robert Oppenheimer once infamously observed of his own creation. His prophecy came to life, most recently, when revelations emerged that Russian hackers interfered with the 2016 presidential election, or when Facebook admitted it exposed data on more than 80 million users to a political research firm, Cambridge Analytica, which worked for Donald Trump’s campaign. This episode was the latest in an increasingly chilling narrative. In 2012, Facebook conducted secret psychological experiments on nearly 700,000 users. Both Google and Amazon have filed patent applications for devices designed to listen for mood shifts and emotions in the human voice.
For the man who set all this in motion, the mushroom cloud was unfolding before his very eyes. “I was devastated,” Berners-Lee told me that morning in Washington, blocks from the White House. For a brief moment, as he recalled his reaction to the Web’s recent abuses, Berners-Lee quieted; he was virtually sorrowful. “Actually, physically—my mind and body were in a different state.” Then he went on to recount, at a staccato pace, and in elliptical passages, the pain in watching his creation so distorted.
This agony, however, has had a profound effect on Berners-Lee. He is now embarking on a third act—determined to fight back through both his celebrity status and, notably, his skill as a coder. In particular, Berners-Lee has, for some time, been working on a new platform, Solid, to reclaim the Web from corporations and return it to its democratic roots…
Katrina Brooker for Vanity Fair
This is a great read. I can’t imagine having invested so much into a world-changing project only to see it derailed to such an extent by corporate greed and political hubris. It’s trite to say it this way, but the story of the Internet is a classic example of why we can’t have nice things.
Motherboard’s investigation shows just how exposed mobile networks and the data they generate are, leaving them open to surveillance by ordinary citizens, stalkers, and criminals, and comes as media and policy makers are paying more attention than ever to how location and other sensitive data is collected and sold. The investigation also shows that a wide variety of companies can access cell phone location data, and that the information trickles down from cell phone providers to a wide array of smaller players, who don’t necessarily have the correct safeguards in place to protect that data.
“People are reselling to the wrong people,” the bail industry source who flagged the company to Motherboard said. Motherboard granted the source and others in this story anonymity to talk more candidly about a controversial surveillance capability.
Your mobile phone is constantly communicating with nearby cell phone towers, so your telecom provider knows where to route calls and texts. From this, telecom companies also work out the phone’s approximate location based on its proximity to those towers.
Although many users may be unaware of the practice, telecom companies in the United States sell access to their customers’ location data to other companies, called location aggregators, who then sell it to specific clients and industries. Last year, one location aggregator called LocationSmart faced harsh criticism for selling data that ultimately ended up in the hands of Securus, a company which provided phone tracking to low level enforcement without requiring a warrant. LocationSmart also exposed the very data it was selling through a buggy website panel, meaning anyone could geolocate nearly any phone in the United States at a click of a mouse.
Joseph Cox on Motherboard
Put another way, privacy continues to be a myth in our new connected world. Location data should be sacred, but the complete lack of meaningful oversight with our carriers means they can capitalize on any and all data they can.
These are a great set of overviews from UnderConsideration’s BrandNew blog about some of the most notable brand refreshes that happened in 2018. Some surprises include:
Animal Planet’s controversial redesign. Personally I’m a fan. I think the new look is cleaner, clearer, and more immediately readable than the original. But some people have thoughts.
That DuPont rebranded at all. It’s just not one of those companies I think of when I think about design. It’s actually pretty nice.
Uber’s 180. Remember the complete mess of a redesign they went through in 2016? Well, they’ve hit the undo button and came back with something much more cohesive.
What really struck me about the worst reviewed designs isn’t that any of them are outright bad. It’s how remarkably unremarkable they are. For example, the Best Buy and Argentina updates make their brands look generic. In contrast, some outright confounding redesigns, like the Library of Congress don’t make the worst-reviewed list at all.
In a way, it makes sense. In today’s market, the last thing you want to be is forgettable. An unremarkable brand identity makes you forgettable. Generic is worse than bad.
I haven’t used Windows for ten years, since I was contractually obliged to at work. Perhaps all these features are there too. But they were not discoverable by Fabio, an intelligent person who uses a computer to do a job which is not a fancier version of “using a computer”.
I’ve been a Mac user since the IIsi. I know those features above inside-out, know which have been there since Classic days, which have just arrived, and yes, which can be flaky on occasion. But to see it through a new Mac user’s eyes is to see a vast enormity of mistakes not made. It is to perceive a clarity of intention through design, maintained over decades of updates.
I’m not an Apple pundit. I should probably listen to and read far fewer opinions from those who are. I will say, though, that no misstep today’s behemoth Apple has made, no product delay, no underperforming market, no dodgy spacebars – nothing leads me to believe that the company has lost focus on its principles of design.
I love my Mac, of course. But seeing someone else fall in love too, again, today? Pretty sweet.
As a longtime Mac user, it’s easy to point to numerous problems and flaws in the system; it’s easy to point at certain features and bemoan how I liked something from the past better. However, I also have regular and deep experience with Windows and Ubuntu, and coming back to my Mac always feels like a breath of fresh air after extended time in either environment.
There are so many basic things macOS just gets right. I take it for granted and even lose sight of it in the midst of being critical of modern Apple. But the simple truth is if you give me a choice between a modest Mac and a souped up Windows PC or Ubuntu workstation, I’ll pick the Mac every time.
The whole story is only seven paragraphs long, and one of them is devoted to explaining how to invoke Undo and Redo. This is — inadvertently on the part of the App Store editorial team — a scathing indictment of the state of iOS’s user interface standards.
Before reading a word of it, how much would you wager that Apple’s story on Pixelmator Pro for Mac does not mention how to invoke Undo and Redo? I would’ve bet my house — because even if you’ve never even heard of Pixelmator, you of course know how to invoke Undo and Redo in any Mac app: Edit → Undo and Edit → Redo, with the shortcuts ⌘Z and ⇧⌘Z. In fact, even their placement in the Edit menu is always the same, in every Mac app: the first two items in the menu.
Undo has been in the same position in the same menu with the same keyboard shortcut since 1984. Undo and Redo are powerful, essential commands, and the ways to invoke them on the Mac have been universal conventions for almost 35 years. (Redo came a few years later, if I recall correctly.)
iOS does in fact have a standard convention for Undo, but it’s both awful and indiscoverable: Shake to Undo, which I wrote about a few months ago. As I mentioned in that piece, iOS does have support for the ⌘Z and ⇧⌘Z shortcuts when a hardware keyboard is connected, and the iPad’s on-screen keyboard has an Undo/Redo button. So for text editing, on the iPad, Undo/Redo is available through good system-wide conventions.
But on the Mac, Undo and Redo are invoked the same way for any action in any app — everything from editing text, making illustrations, to trashing or moving files or mail messages.
Undo on iOS seemed delightful when it was first revealed, but I’ve found it a hassle at best in real-world practice. Undo and redo are foundational pieces of functionality. That iOS still struggles with these makes it a shaky computing platform. There are several ways iOS holds back the hardware it runs on, and Undo is one of the most glaring.
When you visually edit a Captivate file, it’s easy to lose track of where things fall on your timeline. However, keeping your timeline tidy provides a few benefits.
Accessibility
If you use auto-label for accessibility (which we do not on the my contracts), the screen reader will read the text captions from bottom to top on your timeline. Out of order text captions can make your slide sound nonsensical to someone listening through a screen reader.
Layer order affects tab order. When you tab through the slide, the default order is determined by the layer order. Like captions, tabbing will go from bottom to top. You will save yourself a lot of time by avoiding the Tab Order dialog box if you start with your buttons in a logical timeline order.
Maintenance
If you have a pattern you follow when putting your timelines together, it helps you find things more easily later. It also helps someone coming in after you. As an example, this is an order I try to follow.
From bottom to top:
Pasteboard elements, like color palettes or developer notes.
Decorative graphics and pictures.
Captions and groups with text in read order, bottom to top.
Buttons and other interactive elements in tab order, bottom to top.
Conclusion
Layer order in the timeline may seem trivial. In fact, the timeline is pretty hidden in the Captivate Classic view. I therefore keep the timeline on its own monitor when I’m working, so I don’t forget about it. If you have the screen real estate and want to do the same, just check the box next to “Enable custom workspaces” in the General Settings category of the Preferences window. Restart Captivate, and now you can move your panels around. This will help you keep the timeline part of your workflow and provide one more way you can deliver a well-maintained and more accessible product.
Simply Robert 