Browse by Tags

For all the talk about building cars that are more connected, what concerns Windows Embedded Automotive more than anything else is making them safer. It’s really all that experience designer David Walker focuses on. Before coming to Microsoft, David was a captain for Air Canada, and the airline...

Not Microsoft related but I have design on the mind this week so wanted to share this beautiful video of Mike Friton , a freelance shoemaker, weaver, paper sculptor and Nike alumni. I have a few friends in design at Microsoft who are ex-Nike I’m hoping to bring to the blog over the coming weeks...

  Over the last year, I’ve been a big proponent of design at Microsoft – there are a ton of amazing designers here doing beautiful work on products such as Xbox, Surface, Office, Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 as well as PC hardware such as the Wedge Mouse and Wedge...

The Surface Windows 8 Pro hits the shelves tomorrow and a lot of people have been talking about it. So it makes perfect sense that the Surface team would want to get in on the conversation. Yesterday, they did. For the initial post of the Surface blog, general manager Panos Panay talked up the hardware...

On Tuesday the Bing team added video to the type of results it will return in the Bing for Windows 8 app. The Bing Search blog describes the experience and if it’s anything like the News app then it’s sure to be a winner. There’s a team within Bing that develops all of the group...

  Anyone who’s read this blog for long knows that I’m a bit of a fanatic for great design. I love listening to designers talk about their craft-- whether it’s designing hardware such as the Arc Touch Mouse , or a user experience like the one found in Fresh Paint...

One of the goals of user experience design is that the technology fades into the background, so the only thing a person sees or experiences is the content and the message it conveys. I saw a great example of this recently in a browser experience of the AIDS Memorial Quilt – each panel commemorates...

As an member of the Design Museum in London I tend to keep tabs on what’s going on at the Shad Thames enclave of all things design. This week saw the Design of the Year 2012 award announced and the Olympic Torch won top honors. In the digital category our very own Kinect and Kinect SDK won and...

I’m a big fan of design – of all types – architecture, product design, graphic design and more, and I've been spending a lot of time with the design community at Microsoft of late. I’ve learned a lot from them about what goes into designing products like the Arc Touch Mouse of...

You’ve probably heard the phrase “digital memories” many times and like me, you likely think of this as digital photos and perhaps emails or other personal information that reside on a computer somewhere. Ask most people and I think they’d generally think this meant photos. I...

Another beautiful video in the design series from my friends in Microsoft UK’s developer evangelism team . As you may know, the Metro style that you see in Windows Phone, Xbox and Windows 8 is heavily influenced by way-finding graphics from airports, railway stations etc. I was in London recently...

Forza Motorsport 4 was released in the US today (Europe later this week and rest of the world next week) and as you may have seen, I’ve been featuring the game, and its creators from Turn 10 Studios, here on Next for the last few weeks. If it’s not obvious, I’m a big fan of Forza...

In this second post about Forza Motorsport 4 , I thought it’d be interesting to talk about how the team at Turn 10 Studios creates, and recreates, tracks for the game. I say “creates” because the tracks roster in Forza Motorsport 4 features a mixture of fictional tracks created from...

I’m back in Seattle after a few weeks on the road and wanted to share a few quick posts of fun things I spotted while traveling – traveling on the web that is. The Touch Mouse that I posted about a few weeks back is now eagerly awaiting the arrival of it’s newly announced brethren...

Until now, Moulinex always conjured up images of household appliances – food processors, irons and the like. Add in another “L” and you have Moullinex. From today, I will have a new image in my mind…the video above, conjured up by some interesting adaptation of what a Kinect...

Ask most computer users what they think of the Verdana font and you’ll typically get a “meh” type response. The big daddy of fonts (or typefaces) is Helvetica – much loved by designers and until last week, it was the only typeface in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art...