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With the continued penetration of smartphones into the mainstream market, QR codes are becoming more of an option for designers to prompt interaction. The two-dimensional barcode can easily be generated from text, including a website link, and printed on materials in magazines and conferences. An artist in Paris found an unusual use for the black-and-white squares: to animate a tattoo.

OS 4.2 is a free update for every iPhone, iPod or iPad device available now. This new release provides some major changes on HTML5 and W3C future standards support, like WebSockets and Accelerometer support, print support, new JavaScript data-types and better SVG support.

Accelerometer & Gyroscope support through the DeviceOrientation API WebSockets API from HTML5 Updated HTML5 Form Support Partial XHR-2 Support Print Support New JavaScript data types New DOM events Enhanced SVG and Canvas support

Smart Education will change how we perceive textbooks,” South Korea’s Minister of Education, Science and Technology, Ju-Ho Lee, told the BBC. “The transfer from the traditional paper textbooks to digital textbooks will allow students to leave their heavy backpacks and explore the world beyond the classroom.”

Not only is the creative services software shop closing down the Creative Suite version numbers and branding; it’s getting rid of the entire paradigm of old-school, cereal-box* software.

No more waiting for your design software’s features to catch up with what the web guys have been doing for six months

new purchasing paradigm for the entire creative industry. Every ad agency, every magazine, every indie design firm and print shop — they will all be transitioning from bought-and-owned software at $200 or $700 or $2,000 a pop to the Creative Cloud subscription model, which can cost as little as $20 per mont

Earlier this year, OLPC workers dropped off closed boxes containing the tablets, taped shut, with no instruction. “I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android,” Negroponte said. “Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android.”

Children there had never previously seen printed materials, road signs, or even packaging that had words on them, Negroponte said.

“If they can learn to read, then they can read to learn.”

“If print culture shaped the environment from which the Enlightenment blossomed and set the scene for the Industrial Revolution, participatory media might similarly forge the cognitive and social environments in which 21st-century life will take place.”

the “literacy of participation,” and I guess this consists of the social norms of social media. What are they, and why are they so important?

Digital Cosmetic Mirror by industry giant Shiseido can be used to test make-up and recommendations without even having to pick up a mascara brush

Using augmented reality to do sampling is a novel way to involve consumers, and can be a useful technology for saving on waste

The terminal then gives you tailored recommendations. Pressing a few buttons on the touch-screen paints make-up onto your image in realtime, allowing you to see the results instantly. You also try out make-up that is currently making waves, along with printing out before and after photos with product information for you to go make the purchase of whichever colors caught your eye the most.

Blog > Putting Together an Effective Portfolio Putting Together an Effective Portfolio

most freelancers with a decent body of work nowadays will also have an online presence, used, in the main, to display their work. Take as much care with your online portfolio as you would your physical one. Strive for a uniformity and dynamism in your photography of projects, and make sure that images and pdfs saved from the computer are of sufficiently high and consistent resolution. Write concise, foolproof explanations to accompany the work and organise it all in an intuitive level-based fashion, much as you would a website. Sites like Flickr and View Creatives go some way to aiding the freelancer in this professional-feeling endeavour, but you’ll still need to pour energy and vim into the whole enterprise to create the right appearance.

Useful Top Tips Keep things small. A portfolio any larger than A3 is really too big Keep things clean & uncrumpled Loose-leaf sheets are better than ring-bound sleeves Assembling a portfolio should not be a one-off exercise, but a dynamic and continual process Request and absorb other people’s comments and allow this information to flow back into the way you maintain your portfolio Interleave your loose-leaf sheets with a bold and dazzling substrate, though choose something that doesn’t overpower the work contained within If you choose to carry your portfolio on a laptop, for pity’s sake avoid using Powerpoint in your presentations!

The book is presently under a last quality control review prior to public release and it should be available by the end of March 2010. The book will be downloadable with no cost from Lulu.com, and it will be also available for printing on demand as a paperback in colour and in B&W, from Lulu.