Suissa.ca

Ecofont has a free font that is supposed to use 20% less ink than your traditional font.  It does this by leaving small holes in the colour within the font without losing readability.  Not a bad idea.  It would be cool to have a plug-in or something that allowed you to get this feature from all your fonts… I doubt that the printer manufacturers would like this, considering that they pretty much give away the printers and have you locked in to ink purchases… But who knows, perhaps all it takes is one upstart printer manufacturer to do it as a marketing ploy and everyone will have to hop on the band wagon.  I for one will be using this font for all my printing needs where Times, courier or ariel are the norm.

[slashdot, Ecofont]

Where the Hell is Matt?

The video above, I am sure has been seen by most if not all of you.  It went viral a little while ago, but like a few other things, the deep seeded notions and insight it creates cross the boundaries of culture and on a very deep level, not hidden in the actual item, give us something which in such a simple way helps us move forward in our design endeavours.

No matter what you design, how you design it or how people use it, the end result should be a smile.  If we as designers ask ourselves, ‘within the topic we have chosen for our design, what would garner a smile by the end recipient/user?’ and then use that simple thing as a starting point for our endevour, we might just find that we create enduring things.  As far as designs go, this video created by Matt is an outstanding design who’s purpose was to make people smile.  It is so simple in it’s design.  Do a silly dance.  Do it around the world.  Get people to dance with you for no reason other than there is a camera and acting silly for a moment.  Put it together and get over 14 million vies and nearly 50,000 comments on YouTube alone.  Clean simple design.

So try this the next time you design something.  I know I will.

This looks like it would be a great product to go with my rate of acceleration limiter idea.  University of Utah engineers have invented a wireless car key device to stop teenage motorists from talking on their cell phone or sending text messages while driving.  They got some provisional patents and a company hopes to have it on the market within 6 months at about $50 per key plus some monthly fees…  I’m not sure how this will work considering in Canada and the US it is illegal to use or even own a cell phone jammer.

You can get the full details and more info than you would ever want even if you were going to buy one on this device at Physorg.  If you want info on cell phone jammers, you can get it here from Wikipedia.

[Gizmodo]

Looks like there is a DUO for the laptop and for a regular monitor.  Have you ever wanted to be able to draw directly onto your screen?  How much of a pain in the butt is it, even with a large graphics tablet to use illustrator or Photoshop and have to go against everything you ever learned about being an artist and look somewhere other than the tip of your pen?

Well, with the DUO we have options.  I don’t know how precise it is but it looks like a great $44 place to start building your own  up to 22″ table top graphics lcd tablet.  Heck, go one further and also get the optional stationary clip for Note taking.

Given my wants, I’d put one of these on my note book, hook up a wicked handwriting recognition program, and make the whole notebook searchable through Google Desktop.  Woh!  How nice would that be?  Not having to flip through a hundred pages of scribbles looking for some little piece of information that was dotted down in the margin.

Either way, with some mad form hacking skills and a bit-o-bondo a pretty cool experiment could be right in your desk.  If you do manage to slam something together, shoot me an e-mail with pics.

You can get yours at PNF Pen And Free Co, Ltd. [Gizmodo, RedFerret]