design

There's something beautiful and futuristic about bright neon lights against a natural background.

In a stunning series of images called "Neon Luminance," San Francisco multimedia group From the Lenz used long-exposure photography to capture glow sticks traveling down a waterfall. The resulting pictures look straight out of a science fiction movie featuring a strange new world unlike our own. … Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- "FireWriter" is a far sexier way to describe an inkjet printer.

- What do gangsters do on the Internet?

- New Brad Paisley, LL Cool J song "Accidental Racist" sparks controversy.

Bathroom break video: Slacktory Supercut: The best fake Web sites from TV shows.… Read more

You might not know who Albert Shum is, but it's a pretty good bet you know some of the products he helped design.

He was among the group of designers working in Nike's famed Innovation Kitchen that created the earliest prototypes that would ultimately become its Nike+ performance monitoring product line. When Microsoft hired him five years ago, he and a team cooked up the tile-based interface that was centerpiece of the company's Windows Phone debut.

Shum is a new breed of Microsoftie, a creative type that the company needs as it works to win over consumers … Read more

Earth -- unlike perhaps any other planet out there -- provides a mostly hospitable home for humankind. Yet we seem to have opted for unsustainable growth instead of preservation.

At least that's the message in photographer David Thomas Smith's "Anthropocene" exhibition, which Smith describes as a visual examination of global landscapes transformed by the actions and activities of humanity. Each of the 12 prints in the collection derives from thousands of screenshots, which Smith captured from Google Maps and metamorphosed in Photoshop.… Read more

A company's logo can mean the difference between success and failure. Jeta Logo Designer will help you make your own using thousands of designs and templates. However, with the program's very steep price tag, you might be better off hiring someone to do it for you. You'll get a more professional result that way.

You can play with the program for free. To save anything, you need to pay $69. Even then, the program tries to make you save in its proprietary format, .jeta. Support for more popular formats is almost mandatory for a professional design program. … Read more

As Apple continues to work on kinks and bugs in iOS 6, rumors are already flying about a possible iOS 7. The latest chatter suggests that Apple is running behind schedule in its development of iOS 7 but that the software will have a whole new display.

According to Daring Fireball's John Gruber, development for the possible operating system is so delayed that Apple has pulled engineers from the Mac OS X 10.9 team to work on it. This rumor suggests that Apple may be readying the operating system for its Worldwide Developer Conference, which is in the … Read more

Siri could be getting a lot better at her job.

Apple posted 12 new Siri-focused jobs over the weekend, according to Fast Company. The open positions include software engineers, operations engineers, and interaction designer. This means that Apple's speech recognition personal assistant may be getting an overhaul.

The job description for Siri software engineers says, "The Siri team is looking for an exceptional engineer to help build out new areas of expertise for Siri, expanding the product's capabilities for millions of users," while the description for Siri interaction designer says, "The successful candidate will contribute … Read more

Secrecy at Apple is alive and well, though there's less of it going on between its hardware and software groups, a new report says.

Citing unnamed sources, The Wall Street Journal says Apple's industrial design team now lets the company's software teams in on plans for future devices earlier than ever before, a process that was once made more secret with the use of "stealth software developers."

The change come some four months after a change within Apple's top ranks that more closely tied Apple's hardware and software teams. Jonathan Ive, who was … Read more

Ever wonder what the iPhone would look like with a dash of color? Dutch industrial designer Martin Hajek created a series of stunning images that visualize a colorful budget iPhone with rounded corners.

Hajek -- who originally created the images for Dutch Web site iPhoneClub -- based his vision of the budget iPhone on consistent rumors that Apple could debut a colorful low-end version of the smartphone (with a mixture of fiberglass and plastic casing) alongside the expected iPhone 5S reveal this summer.… Read more