➕ The Conditions 100
Illuminating dark mode, AlphaFold publishes catalogue, designing climate heat maps...
+Issue 100
Conceived as a lockdown project, I created this newsletter in an attempt to stay better informed and more connected to the design community. When the pandemic started many of us left our communal studio spaces, and with them the informal cultural conversations that happened as part of our everyday life.
Almost two years of this newsletter later and many of us have not fully returned to studio life, and therefore I’m still compiling The Conditions weekly.
I’d love to hear your thoughts about this newsletter so I can improve it. I’ve put together a very short survey, if you could spare a couple of minutes…
User Experience
Instagram is walking back its changes for now — Adam Mosseri explains why
Say goodbye to the TikTok-style feed and at least some of those recommendations
Illuminating dark mode
A detailed guide to designing a dark mode [via Figma’s blog]
A brief history of the numeric keypad
AI & Machine Learning
AlphaFold reveals the structure of the protein universe
“AlphaFold has launched biology into an era of structural abundance, unlocking scientific exploration at digital speed. The AlphaFold DB serves as a ‘google search’ for protein structures, providing researchers with instant access to predicted models of the proteins they're studying, enabling them to focus their effort and expedite experimental work. From fighting disease to developing vaccines, AlphaFold has already enabled incredible advances on some of our biggest global challenges, and this is just the beginning of the impact that we will start to see over the next few years. Our hope is that this expanded database will aid countless more scientists in their work and open up completely new avenues of scientific exploration, such as metaproteomics.”
– Demis Hassabis, Deepmind founder
Artists Are Using AI To Imagine Cities Without Cars
Amateur urban planners are using DALL-E to visualize what cities might look like if they were built for pedestrians and cyclists, instead of cars.
GFP-GAN is a New Free AI Tool That Can Fix Most Old Photos Instantly
A newly-released artificial intelligence (AI) model called the “Generative Facial Prior” (GFP-GAN) can repair most old photographs in mere seconds, and it can do it for free.
Digital Trust
Tesla on autopilot kills motorcyclist Dead at the scene
A motorcyclist in Utah was killed after a Tesla driver crashed into him from the back — while the car's Autopilot system was turned on.
Metaverse & Web3
Members-only metaverse community The Row unveils digital properties by artists
The Row launches as a virtual community featuring distinctive real estate design by acclaimed creatives including Daniel Arsham, Andrés Reisinger and Misha Kahn
Design
Won’t address climate change for yourselves? How about for the guy who designs heat maps?
A perspective on climate change from someone that designs weather heat maps – what happens when global temperature exceed the scale with which you design your colour palette?
“I did not anticipate that we would be operating in this range of temperatures, and I don’t know what happens after red.”
“The main reason so many were quick to draw attention to illustration when Dall·E 2 came out is the nature of the AI, a text-to-image neural network. What is illustration, if not a transformation of texts (articles, briefs, ideas) into visuals? The comparison seems perfect, a 1:1 version of what illustration is, but made more efficient, and without the annoying buzzing of an illustrator’s voice reminding you to pay them. The issue is, the mere “translation” of text into images is the degree zero of illustration. It might be part of what we do, but it’s a minuscule one.”
Typography
Calibri: the font that avoided cult status
Despite being once a Microsoft default, how did it avoid fame or infamy?
Ellen Lupton: celebrating 30 years of thinking with type at Cooper Hewitt