John Maeda of Laws of Simplicity fame has created an official theme for iGoogle. iGoogle constructs a homepage for your browser much like yahoo provides. It is an interesting theme of shapes and colors that change each time you access it. Probably too much color for me but I am going to live with it for a while to see if it grows on me. Thanks to Len Accardi of my University of Pennsylvania HCI class for calling my attention to this.
One suggestion on studying Maeda's Laws of Simplicity . Although the web page is a great place for discussion and listing of the laws, you have to read the book with Maeda's commentary to get the full impact of his study of simplicity. One particularly discouraging comment of a student in one of my classes was why not just list the laws rather than requiring the book. One really has no chance of getting what Maeda's is trying to accomplish without reading his book and commentary regarding the laws.
His book will definitely make my Valentine's Day list of books to suggest to your significant other as potential Valentine's gifts for yourself.
Later!
As i experiment with the theme a bit - it changes according to the time of day - anxious to see what it will be tonight.
Posted by: Gregg Vesonder | January 24, 2008 at 11:05 AM
Sounds similar to RedHat/Fedora's new (as of core 8) desktop background theme, which changes slightly once per hour to reflect time time of the day, transitioning between colors evocative of dawn, day, dusk, and night. You can see the images here:
http://people.redhat.com/duffy/artwork/infinity-24/
Or read a bit more on the effort:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork/F8Themes/Infinity/Round3Final
Posted by: jmoiron | January 28, 2008 at 06:10 PM