serial consign

This has been a very strange week. I've heard rumours that I'm on vacation but I'm too busy working on web projects to notice. I've been revisiting some writing from earlier in the year which has inspired a week-long obsession with all things GUI. To that end, I thought I'd fill the bloghole with a trio of interface related links. What follows is an assortment of material that I've been looking at recently - make of it what you will.

Igor Eskinja's Untitled (pictured above) is a play on the rank and file of desktop space. I love the ghostly reflections cast by his floating folders and the tension of the trash can interrupting the base of that wall as if to remind the viewer "this is indeed perspectival space". Eskinja has a real knack for creating illusionary scenes and his archives contain some very clever work. [via vvork]

Long before the world of pre-fab, modular video mixing software there was Jitter, and before that there was nato+0.55. A few months ago, Create Digital Motion contributor Vade posted the the above video and a brief summary of the legacy of nato+0.55. His reading of the software is bang on and the idiosyncratic interface and aesthetic of this tool are still relevant a decade later.

To continue our interface nostalgia, this promotional video for the Xerox Star has recently been making the rounds. Introduced in 1981, the Star was the first commercial application of the "desktop" computing metaphor. The Star, and the earlier Alto were key influences of Apple's Macintosh and all personal computing thereafter. Watching this video drives home the point that the workspace of the digital desktop really hasn't changed that much over the last quarter century. [via JS Sheffield]

Pictured above is a screen capture of Intersections 2, a flash sketch by interactive designer Jonnie Hallman. Launching this mini-application yields a simple workspace that contains three adjustable circles. Each of these circles has a pair of white sliders (vertices) that allow you to pivot and scale the entity. You can also create new points with which to generate vectors that run across the canvas. This all sounds simple enough, but what is so engaging about this application is the manner in which the interface tracks the interaction between geometric entities. Each intersection is represented by a yellow marker that highlights the point in question - if you pivot a circle "through" another, the point(s) of contact will slide along to trace the movement. Modulating the arrangement of these shapes feels like calibrating an abstract instrument of some sort. This experienced is no doubt enhanced by the sharp visual language of the piece.

Jonnie Hallman has a variety of experiments, including more "intersection" pieces in his archives. Hallman also authored the recent DestroyFlickr application, which is a widely noted alternative interface for the photo-management service.