Taco Lab is online

Last week we quietly deployed the new Taco Lab website, and we posted a revision today. If you remember anything about the old old placeholder page (think giant Helvetica text and a horrible hand drawn taco guy), you’ll agree this new version is overall an improvement.

Our key design imperative with the new site is to balance clarity of vision, sincerity of our business (we’ve been working together for almost a year now!), and a sense of play and humor that we feel fundamentally distinguishes Taco Lab from other design and technology firms. We are also seeking to show the wide variety of mediums and technologies we work in, and to provide some sense for the types of services we offer.

So please check out the site. We already have a laundry list of improvements we’d like to make over the next few weeks, and any additional ideas or feedback would be greatly appreciated. Also, as we’re just ramping up full time now, we have some spare cycles to throw at cool projects, so any hookups or suggestions would be most welcome.

Travel advisory: giant mechanical spider in Liverpool

Pretty incredible video and images of the latest project – “La Princess” – from the La Machine group who put together Sultan’s Elephant two years ago. See also Laughing Squid’s post.

The Last Guy trailer

From O’Reilly Radar, this new game’s satellite-style imagery is wonderful in its Google-like familiarity:

If only I still played video games, I would be all over this. And their website’s promo game is pretty great too…

Is it Sarah Palin?

(Created by Jeevan over the weekend)

Links for August 22nd through August 31st

Fleshmap: Studies of Desire this is a new art/dataviz project by martin and fernanda from ibm research. i gotta say i was a little surprised by the content, and design-wise it's a little, uh, cheesy. but the visuals and the data are still fascinating. totally press/blog/digg fodder, which is probably at least part of the intention. also cool they have evidently moved to javascript for a lot of the interaction here, which seems like a step forward. visualization sex psychology data information

Emotionally}Vague: A research project about emotion, sensation and feeling. via arikan and kjhollen. survey project asking people to associate colors, words, and self-depictions with various emotions. cleanly designed, and the results are interesting to look at and more touching than i expected. visualization emotion psychology color design survey statistics

Tech Making Traditional VCs Obsolete From huned, a cool Wired article on the shift from traditional tech VC to angel 'micro' investing. "classic V.C.'s simply have too much money under management, and too expensive a talent pool, to waste time looking at investing anything less than $10 million in a project. Meantime, no entrepreneur wants to give up equity by taking in more money than he absolutely needs. So, when it only costs a few million to get a serious new company off the ground, how can the V.C.'s really play?" article wired entrepreneurship business startup technology venturecapital microfinance

JSC Digital Image Collection great nasa photo/image archive. i like that it includes pictures of people plus images from orbit. space photos science nasa history reference

www.24postcards.co.uk music designed for ringtones. i want this. from the record label: "An attempt an exploration of the ringtone as a vehicle for music performance , ‘24 Postcards…’ is an experimental work made up of 24 classically-composed ringtones, set to be premièred in various gallery spaces. The première is intended to be in the form of a series of installations where pre-registered audience members switch on their phones to receive SMS messages, each message alert playing back one or more of the tracks, so making up the performance. In tandem with this release, will be a micro-website hosting 24 photographic images, one accompanying each track." music mobile art cellphone phone mp3 ringtone future audio

Brad Neely’s JFK incredible genius brady neely goodness video politics humor jfk bradneely history

Veer: Products: Type: Burgues Script beautiful script typeface. i like the opentype variations. typography design font script

SpaceCollective pretty incredible set of images, but i don't quite understand the site/collective. ffffound fodder for sure. technology images photos science

OpenCalais Heard about this from Dan Schmidt. This Reuters service analyzes text and parses out entities! if this works well this is huge. "The Calais Web Service automatically creates rich semantic metadata for the content you submit – in well under a second. Using natural language processing, machine learning and other methods, Calais analyzes your document and finds the entities within it. But, Calais goes well beyond classic entity identification and returns the facts and events hidden within your text as well." web api semantic service media tools xml rest development innovation

A Fundraising Survival Guide "There will be a tendency, as a deal progresses, to start to believe it will happen, and then to depend on it happening. You must resist this. Tie yourself to the mast. This is what kills you. Deals do not have a trajectory like most other human interactions, where shared plans solidify linearly over time. Deals often fall through at the last moment. Often the other party doesn't really think about what they want till the last moment. So you can't use your everyday intuitions about shared plans as a guide. When it comes to deals, you have to consciously turn them off and become pathologically cynical." advice web business venturecapital startup entrepreneurship

Links for August 11th through August 18th

blackaller on deviantART Luis Blackaller's deviantART page. Includes some of his OPENSTUDIO drawings. blackaller drawing art store

Dead Man Eating…Last Meals on Death Row a history of last meal requests of executed prisoners in the US. fascinating but sad. weird depressing prison food humor data

Mind Hacks: Digital drugs emergency - paging Dr. Beat hacking the brain into altered states. reminds me of the goggles/headphone setup kevin let me try way back when. potentially interesting medium to explore. drugs brain perception vision

http://thisisharrington.com/projects/nasa/index.html interesting, nostalgic photos of retro, decaying nasa jpl trailer equipment. i love the type. photos retro nasa space science design technology nostalgia

Escape to Detroit | Laughing Squid fascinating take on the emerging detroit renaissance, in particular the greening and gentrification of detroit. another sign of the urban/suburban shift? green detroit culture urban city future

Urban flight from Los Angeles | Straight outta Compton | Economist.com another article on the changing of suburbia, focusing on black flight. suburbia urban culture future

America’s suburbs | An age of transformation | Economist.com "America's suburbs are coming to resemble its city centres." Interesting economist article on the shift of suburbia. urban suburbia culture future

Software Studies social "control, communication, representation, simulation, analysis, decision-making, memory, vision, writing, and interaction" understood via study of software theory culture software code research programming design art blog ucsd

CultureVis received an email about this via swivel feedback. interesting new initiative by Lev Manovich at UCSD. visualization culture data graphics design

THE ORWELL PRIZE orwell's diary republished 70 years later as a blog. great project. orwell writer blogging

Dawn of the Taco

Taco Lab is a design and prototyping firm that I am co-founding with my friend and fellow Media Lab grad Jeevan Kalanithi. Our clients so far have included Hallmark, Panasonic, HandsOnToys, and Qixen-P. This week we’re settling into some studio space with our friends at Electric Works, and soon we’ll have a real portfolio up online, plus maybe even an occasional Taco fanclub newsletter.

I’m also happy to watch Swivel continue to make real progress after I change my relationship with them. With Swivel Business now in a public beta with real customers, plus a strategic redesign of certain key interactions in the works, Swivel’s future looks really bright. Plus the transition is happening on good terms for everyone, so I know we’ll all stay in touch and probably even continue working together.

Thanks to all you friends who bother to read this and who have supported me in this big change! You have an open invitation to come design, code, build, and dork around with Jeevan and me in our new TL office v1beta (which I promise will be way better than alpha), coming very soon.