I was recently in Hawaii and visited Shangri-La – the Doris Duke estate on the East side of Diamond Head in Honolulu. If you don’t already love Doris for her wealth, beauty, eccentricity, or athleticism, love her for this: she imported an all marble prayer room from a palace in Damascus in the 1930’s and cleaned the entire its entire surface with nothing but Q-tips for two years.

Shangri-La is an incredible testament to Islamic Art. Ms. Duke was its collector, curator, visionary and laborer for roughly 40 years. Enjoy the pics!

A few weeks ago I needed a kitchen timer. Loathe to over cook yet another dish, I went to Williams-Sonoma on my lunch break confident there would be ample selection. What I wanted was the basic, simple timer. You know the one – turn it, it ticks and when the timer runs down it buzzes. To my shock Williams-Sonoma only had one model – the iTimer.

Well, that’s not its official name. I made it up and I’m certain you can see why. Standing in the store staring down at the timer all I could think was, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” I put the timer back on the shelf and looked for something a bit more basic. After an exhaustive search, I was forced back to the iTimer. I caved in and bought it deciding that a properly cooked meal was worth braving this bizarre technological hybrid. Plus I knew the blatant design rip-off would bother my husband and that might lead to some good jokes.

When it comes to interface usability, there is a vast difference between the iPod and the iTimer. Although visually they are nearly identical, functionally they are worlds apart. As everyone knows the dial at the front of the iPod lets users cycle through their digital media collections. Technically the iTimer also has a “dial” but it does not cycle or turn in anyway. Instead there are 4 buttons at the north, south, east and west points of the dial. To activate the timer you must first hit the clear the button, then hit one of the directional buttons, then set the time (don’t ask me how). And the real advantage…you can set up to 3 different timers at once. As if I’ve ever wanted to do that.

To this day neither my husband nor I know how to work it properly despite reading the manual. Luckily, I hear Anthropology makes an old fashioned turn, tick, buzz timer….I’m headed there now.

If you want to know what it was like at the Moscone Center last week, read this list as quickly as possible

Twitter
Flickr
The Cloud
The Mesh
Love Apple – Hate Steve
Open ID
Oauth
Fire Eagle
Dopplr
UX
No more waterfall methodologies
Fix inbound links with poor language
Schema
“A Poem to my father on his deathbed (?!)”
Max Levchin is adorable
Flexible
Adaptive
Agile
Iterative

That’s one way I could sum up my experience attending the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last week. Another way I could sum it up is to say that if any of the items on the list above look unfamiliar, you might be falling behind. Save the deathbed poem, this list encapsulates just a small portion of the topics, people and websites discussed during the conference.

Noticeably missing from the list—at least to me—is graphic design. Although there was one presentation about graphic design, most of the design discourse focused on user experience design or the user interface. In some ways this makes sense since these two design specializations are critical in the creation of good online products and services but not necessarily more or less critical than good information and visual design. So I was left wondering why is it that at an industry EXPO—a moment where all disciplines are meant to convene together—graphic design was left out of the equation?

What I do know from Jennifer Pahlka, the conference manager and coordinator, is that the multi-disciplinary web world is open to hearing from designers. Jennifer said that there were a low number of submissions in the area of graphic design. I got a sense from her that the selection committee would have liked more submissions around front-end development and in specific visual design.

My suspicion is that graphic designers are struggling with how they can add value to emerging web technologies. By staying on top of new technologies graphic designers can learn how to leverage them creatively and take them further through visual design. Graphic designers must actively engage with web technologies – coding, blogging, tweeting, and mashing just as much as they make through visual form. We really have no excuse not to try these tools for ourselves since 3rd party applications and open source tools are accessible and easy.

I’m not entirely sure why graphic design didn’t have a larger presence at the Web 2.0 Expo, but whatever the reason, designers need to seize opportunities to understand, meet, collaborate and communicate with other disciplines in the web community.

We recently redesigned the identity for Media Hog. We love this little orange hog so much we couldn’t wait to put it up on our site. Hope you like him as much as we do!