I took the some time during an extended weekend to finally refine the design of this website. What started as the idea of giving it a fresh look ended up in creating a design solution that spans over multiple web properties, changing the domain name and building a new microsite from scratch.

Refine

The new design is based on the same grid as before. A new color palette and some small adjustments served the goal of creating a simple, elegant and friendly interface. To replace the characteristic Clarendon headlines I’ve used the excellent Netto by Daniel Utz — a simple and simply beautiful font. It’s also our corporate font at Interactive Things, thus creating a bridge between the two domains.

Unify

I applied the fundation of the new design to my Tumblr and Twitter account. The consistent look ties the three domains neatly together. Each one has specific requirements though, that I addressed in the design for the application at hand.

Rename

The domain Artillery.ch served as my brand for freelance work in times before Interactive Things. With the establishment of our company, the freelance times are gone and the name became superfluous. As I still need a space to share the things that keep me busy at daytime and up at night, I took the chance to get my personal domain BenjaminWiederkehr.com.

Allocate

Given the fact that my stuff on this site could be irrelevant to someone in search of me, I came to the conclusion that I need a central hub that helps direct the visitor to the right place to interact with me. This could be the corporate site of Interactive Things, my professional CV at LinkedIn or maybe my profile on Facebook. That’s why I built the tiny one-pager at benjaminwiederkehr.com and moved the site that you’re currently reading to blog.benjaminwiederkehr.com.

I goes without saying that changing the top-level domain (and my main e-mail address) takes some time and a lot of “Change Account Settings” link clicking. It’s a work-in-progress and if you see something quirky, please let me know.

I am thrilled to announce the launch of my own company Interactive Things. We provide design, production and consulting services in user-experience design, interface design and interactive media. For more details about us, the thoughts that led to this developement and our future let me point you to the related blogpost.

I’m very excited to announce the launch of a new website over at datavisualization.ch. As you can tell by the domain name the content is all about data and information visualization. It evolved from our research blog, we used to gather the resources for our bachelor’s project.

Beside our own continuing research in this field, we document the newest creations by some of the smartes people around. While you’re there be sure to check out the dashboard we’ve built to monitor this agile community and stay on top of the cutting edge of information.

Theinfo.org and the superb twitter scrape from infochimps are the newest additions to the datazoo.

The redesigned coundco wesite I’ve worked on just launched. I’m glad for all kinds of feedback.

After using the incredible powerfull Lifestream plugin on our new corporate website over @ coUNDco.ch I’ve decided to upgrade my “Elsewhere” stream to fully display my recent activities on the web. From Tumblr.com to Slideshare.com and from GITHub.com to Last.fm and back. Have a look, hopefully you’ll find something use- or joyful.

The public datasets over at Amazon are the newest addition the the DataZoo dataset library. The datasets are freely available and can be directly accessed for cloud computing. Big hat tip to amazon.com for these!

As I needed several instances of a timed javascript slider on the same page I modified the already excellent jQuery plugin jFlow 1.2 from Kean. He’s currently developing the version 1.3 of jFlow but if you need some timed sliders in the meantime – there you go.

Drew McLellan and Brian Suda from edgeofmyseat.com have nicely implemented the pressable links technique discussed by Peter Gassner over at refine.artillery.ch for this year’s design of 24ways.org.

On Monday 24th November Processing 1.0 was officially released.Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used in wide range of projects from data visualization to interactive software prototypes to art installations. With the official release of the 1.0 version the initiators Ben Fry and Casey Reas together with the online community have accomplished a big task.

Well done to all the contributors!