Drawn.ca has posted 2 interesting sources of atypical imagery which, I realized, can be great design inspiration:
First, Dogfoose uses close-up images of produce in his illustrations. The sample below uses broccoli as treetops for a kids magazine illustration:
What an amusing way to channel the miniature look (achieved through tilt-shift photography) for infographics purposes! Is this is a subliminal technique to get children to eat their veggies? Or just a quirky case of nonsequitur?
It doesn’t matter if these questions get answered or not; what matters it that these questions were asked because of the design.
Next, we have Dark Roasted Blend’s otherworldly microscopic images. This one’s from the Olympus BioScapes competition, a photo of Drosophila larva eye neurons:
We’ve gotten so comfortable with tiled textures, but why not take an asymmetrical, unpredictable image as a cornerstone for your design concept?
Why not make trends like photographic backgrounds your own and experiment in unchartered waters? These unusual sources should be a good starting point.
Mozilla Labs, already releasing innovations that hint at the Web in the coming years, has launched the Concept Series. This is an initiative that pushes for the “development of the online experience” where everyone can contribute.
We’re hoping to lower the barrier to participation by providing a forum for surfacing, sharing, and collaborating on new ideas and concepts. Our goal is to bring even more people to the table and provoke thought, facilitate discussion, and inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Web as a whole.
Concepts may take the form of Ideas, Mockups or Prototypes.
The Concept Series starts strong with several concept videos from Adaptive Path, Wei Zhou, and Aza Raskin.
Aurora Concept Video by Adaptive Path
Lifestream - Redesign history and bookmarking by Wei Zhou
Firefox Mobile Concept Video by Aza Raskin
Of the three, Aurora is clearly the most ambitious as it demonstrates with 4 videos how future web browsing will be completely intuitive and pervasive. Websites can share information with one another so that a user can extract relevant information. The Web will continue to act as information provider regardless of location or the real-world objects and situations he is dealing with.
Multitouch technology is also gaining traction as the ideal way to interface with the Web. Specially assigned gestures will become especially convenient on small mobile devices. Mimicking a 3-dimensional space is another popular concept which also addresses space constraints. And of course, aside from advances in software, hardware will also play a major role in the interactions onscreen.
What’s your idea for the future of the Internet? Contribute to the Mozilla Labs Concept Series and have your say. Remember, the best way to be prepared for the future is to make it ourselves!
The Wisdump redesign concept I posted previously have been updated. It still follows the same basic premise, but is now populated with more content, and the sidebar top isn’t as heavy.
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