Emilio Vedova, una vita d’arte

A un anno dalla scomparsa, una mostra alla Galleria d’arte moderna di Roma fino al 6 gennaio ripercorre l’intera opera dell’artista veneziano. L’antologica è il compimento di un antico progetto, di un rapporto iniziato con la Gnam nel lontano 1941 e coltivato negli anni, ma mai consacrato con un’esposizione personale. Servizio di Monica Rubino

 

Original post by L’espresso - Style & Design

Countdown: Bush’s Hissy Fit

On Tuesday’s Countdown, Keith Olbermann looks once again at proof that the world’s last remaining superpower is being run by a petulant child prone to temper tantrums when he doesn’t get his way.

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Vespertilium, mollette da bucato in tema Halloween

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Details Revealed: Google OpenSocial To Be Common APIs For Building Social A

a Netvibes UWA for social networks?

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Mattia Viviani

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acsys

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Kindo

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Pedrazzini Design

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Pay.PerClick

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zedmo

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Ripped In Space — Sadly and Unexpectedly!

High-resolution NASA photo (snapped on October 30, 2007) of the damaged P6 4B solar array wing on the International Space Station.

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PC Magazine ‘Leopard is “by far the best operating system ever written’

In his 4.5-star (out of 5) review of Leopard, Edward Mendelson (pcmag.com) maintains that Leopard is “by far the best operating system ever written for the vast majority of consumers, with dozens of new features that have real practical value.” Mendelson “found Leopard to be startlingly fast, brilliantly streamlined, and packed with conveniences an

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Smoked Glass Dock for Leopard - Much Nicer!

By simply replacing 4 files you can completely alter how the dock looks. Try out this dark dock, it’s much nicer.

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Pro|Click Mobile il mouse ambidestro per notebook

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Calice da vino Swing di Gumdesign. Non solo un bicchiere

Il lato ludico del design contribuisce spesso in maniera decisamente elegante a rendere gli oggetti meno anonimi. In fondo come dicevamo qui, un oggetto non è solo un oggetto. Attraverso il gioco si ha un dettaglio in più, e non solo questo. Dietro alla ricerca di originalità, anche attraverso l'uso del lato ludico, c'è infatti la capacità di un oggetto di creare emozione.

Con Swing per esempio, il calice da vino per la degustazione creato da Gumdesign per Cristalleria Vilca, non si ha un semplice bicchiere.In questo caso il designer è il primo a giocare con il piede del bicchiere, alzandolo verso l'alto per eliminare la classica forma piatta e circolare. Il risultato è un calice a dondolo. 

In pratica l'estro creativo ha pensato ad un piede ricurvo, che da un lato ha una funzione ben precisa (una migliore decantazione del vino versato, che già al momento di entrare nel calice impone un movimento oscillatorio) ma soprattutto  sarà sufficiente appoggiare un dito per riproporre il movimento anche durante il pranzo:un aspetto ludico che sottende un aspetto funzionale.

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The 82 Most Fuel Efficient Cars in 2008

Sometimes, it just isn’t easy trying to figure out which car to buy. If fuel economy is one of your primary selling points, then you should head on over to the fueleconomy.gov website to get the latest fuel economy (and emissions) from the EPA….top> Toyota Prius….

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Vienna Design Week: il Chain Carpet di Adrien Rovero

Una catena cade sul pavimento e i suoi anelli attaccati l’uno all’altro si dispongono casualmente. Invece di raccoglierla, il designer svizzero Adrian Rovero si dev’essere fermato ad osservarla e,  ispirato, ne ha fatto un tappeto.

Tra gli oggetti più curiosi visti alla Vienna Design Week, è in lana neozelandese ed è in vendita nella parigina Galerie Kreo.

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David LaChapelle l’iconoclasta 

Una grande retrospettiva dedicata al fotografo dei divi. Una serie di ritratti dissacranti e profetici.  Al Palazzo Reale di Milano fino al 6 gennaio 2008. Servizio di Claudia Spiti

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The rise of secular America

The number of Americans who say they are atheist or agnostic, or choose not to identify with a religious tradition is increasing, albeit from a very low base. The most secular Americans are those 30 and younger - 19% of whom do not identify with a religious tradition.

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5 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Apocalypse Could Actually Happen

Our culture is full of tales of the undead walking the Earth, from our religions to our comic books. But, some sort of zombie apocalypse isn’t actually possible, right?Right?Guys?Actually, yes. It’s quite possible. Here’s five ways it could happen, according to science.

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Vinyl May Be Final Nail in CD’s Coffin

As counterintuitive as it may seem in this age of iPods and digital downloads, vinyl—the favorite physical format of indie music collectors and audiophiles—is poised to re-enter the mainstream, or at least become a major tributary. Talk to almost anyone in the music business’ vital indie and DJ scenes and you’ll encounter a uniformly optimistic…

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Ars Technica review of Leopard!

Here it is, John Siracusa’s review.

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Ubuntu 8.04 to finally get a new default theme?

“Every LTS cycle should represent a concise design direction which evolves over the course of the cycle in a well planned and managed way…As we create the theme this will have an impact on other parts (like compiz effects, etc). All of this should be inline and use the same design principles.”

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Fixing OS X Leopard menu bar transparency!

For some reason Apple decided to make the menu bar in Leopard transparent. With my background image this means that the menu bar will be in a shade of blue. It doesn’t look good and makes my computing environment less comfortable (I’m picky, I know…); Here’s how to fix the problem.

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Zara Home è (finalmente) online!

Aveva annunciato che in ottobre avrebbe aperto il suo negozio online. E si è salvata per poche ore - compresi noi che vi abbiamo riportato la notizia e vantiamo attentissimi lettori - mantendo la promessa: dal 28 ottobre le collezioni di Zara Home saranno a portata di click per Italia, Francia, Portogallo, Spagna, Germania e UK.

Per ora sul sito appare solo un conto alla rovescia. Riuscirete a pazientare fino a domani?

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ixwa

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Jung von Matt

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Vienna Design Week: il lampadario Fringerie di Dottings Design

Chi l’ha detto che la passamaneria è roba superata? Nell’epoca del vintage non si butta via nulla, tutto rivive e il passato diventa fonte d’ispirazione.

Come per la designer Christina Heusler che si è ispirata ai vecchi fiocchi per chiavi che ancora penzolano da antichi cassetti per creare un lampadario suggestivo dal sapore squisitamente antico.

Visto alla Vienna Design Week, maggiori informazioni le trovate sul sito di Dottings Design.

Original post by Beatrice

Un aperitivo con Depero

Al Mart di Rovereto, fino al 2 febbraio, in mostra la produzione pubblicitaria del grande pittore futurista. Ancora attualissime alcune sue intuizioni, come la bottiglia del Campari. Servizio di Claudia Spiti

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Vaso per fiori “Eau”

Via| youngdesigner

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9rules

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MB Dragan

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Hella Music

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Comment on Marius Roosendaal by Colin Cameron

Damn fine.

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Online auto-tracing tool (converts bitmaps to vector art)

Stanford University research project on converting bitmap images to vector art, aka “auto tracing” or “automatic vectorization”. Similar to Adobe Illustrator’s Live Trace and CorelDRAW’s PowerTRACE but works better in many cases. Upload image and get a converted result (EPS/SVG) in a few moments.

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Comment on Marius Roosendaal by jamie calabro

Love the color scheme! Great work!

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Mojobaby

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CSS Remix: A Fresh Blend of the Best CSS Web Design

Get a 6 Month permanent link on CSS Remix for just $30 for a limited time!

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GE

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CSS Remix: A Fresh Blend of the Best CSS Web Design

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Help Me Rent

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I am America

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Trevor Saint

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Chyma

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Marius Roosendaal

Marius Roosendaal’s design portfolio features work he’s done over the last few years. What strikes me most about this site, however, is the level of details in the interface. The two themes (night/day) are both superb. This is one of the most striking designs I’ve seen in a long time. And it’s all done so understated.

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“Il rame e la casa” concorso dedicato agli oggetti in rame per la casa

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Urban design a Vienna con Solar Tree di Ross Lovegrove

A proposito di urban design, è stato presentato in anteprima l' 8 ottobre a Vienna, Solar Tree il rivoluzionario (e con un design sorprendente stile futuristico) il sistema di illuminazione urbano creato da Ross Lovegrove e prodotto da Artemide.

Di fronte al Mak (museo d'arte contemporanea) e situato in una piazza, si innalza proprio come un albero, Solar Tree un' illuminazione dalla tecnologia avanzata per il rispetto dell'ambiente, un sistema che celebra design, arte e natura insieme.

Un progetto  insomma che, come afferma Lovegrove, dimostra che è possibile creare cose molto belle, attraverso l'uso della tecnologia più avanzata. 

Continua a leggere Urban design a Vienna con Solar Tree di Ross Lovegrove…

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Comment on Assassin’s Creed Experience by juice box

Yep it’s a nice all right, but I’m not too sure if it’s me connection or what, but the load time seems pretty ridiculous. Other then that, two thumbs way up.

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Il MoMa su SecondLife con gli Humble Masterpieces

Gli Humble Masterpieces, ovvero umili capolavori di design, sono quegli oggetti-icona di cui ci serviamo quotidianamente, dal costo irrisorio o quasi, che hanno rivoluzionato silenziosamente la nostra vita. Come la penna Bic, il Post-it, il lecca lecca.

Nel mondo “reale” questi oggetti sono stati raccolti in una mostra che ha avuto luogo nel 2002 nel celebre museo newyokese, riscuotendo grande successo. Perchè non replicare allora nel mondo virtuale? E così che il MoMa si guadagna il posto di primo museo al mondo ad approdare su SeconLife, arcipelago virtuale abitato da un numero sempre crescente di avatar.

Inaugurata il 18 ottobre, l’esposizione virtule resterà su SeconLife per due mesi, sull’isola di Style, il mensile del Corriere della Sera. Per accedervi occorre ovviamente munirsi di avatar e digitare Stylemagazine nella barra deglii strumenti; oltre a navigare tra i masterpieces in versione 3D, gli aspiranti designer potranno lasciare il loro progetto in bacheca. Quale modo più democratico per arrivare direttamente alla curatrice del MoMa?

Da: Corriere.it

Original post by Beatrice

Log coffee table

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PizzaKobra, la lampada di Ron Arad per iGuzzini

Unico neo, il nome. Poco elegante per questa lampada dalle forme fluide che si snoda in più pose fino a richiudersi su se stessa, in una spirale cromata.

A dispetto della sua linea esile, la lampada di Ron Arad è estremamente flessibile e riesce ad illuminare perfettamente qualsiasi punto, grazie a 6 LEDs da 1W ben mimetizzati che emanano una calda luce.
Presentata a Milano a settembre, si trova nei punti vendita iGuzzini.

Original post by Beatrice

Pragmatic reporting for your web apps

Reporting is perhaps one of the biggest business deliverables for enterprise IT. Being able to say how many widgets were sold in month seven in year XX, sub-divided by customer ABC grouping, is one of the easiest ways to make management happy. But when building a web app, reporting is the last thing on many feature lists. Clear reporting is vitally important for the long term success of your web app and managing your growth. However, if you’re still in the beta stage, we’ll explore some ways of building simple reporting fast.

Why reporting? Because it helps you know the numbers. You need to be able to take data from web analytics, your own system stats (how many sign-ups per month, what’s this month’s revenue?, etc.) and be able to render that visually in some sensible way for you to be able to understand it and make the correct business decisions based upon it.

Big business style

If you’re a large multi-national with large IT budgets, you’re going to looking for a reporting system that can query multiple data warehouses with hundreds of users and multiple output formats. You’ll also want it as near real time as possible. Packages like Crystal Reports and Jasper reports provide large scale interfaces to data sources and provide nice tools to create easy to read reports. But being as we’re bootstraping upstarts, we need a solution that can pull together the data we need into one place and export it how we want.

Super simple (nearly) real time reporting

I’m not going to go into depth about database replication, load balancing your queries, redundancy or the technological challenges you face in getting your web app’s data out. I am going to assume that you have a database of some sort, a web analytics package and clear objectives for what you want to measure. The most important of those is the objectives. What is it that illustrates growth and successes of your web app? This question in itself could fill thousands of articles, but for the sake of getting to some useful examples we’ll look at the following:

1. Number of unique visits to your site: last 24 hours, last month, ever
2. Number of new subscribers to your rss feed: last 24 hours, last month, ever
3. Number of sign ups: last 24 hours, last month, ever
4. Number of adds of your f8/widget: last 24 hours, last month, ever
5. How much downtime: last 24 hours, last month, ever
6. How much revenue have you generated: last 24 hours, last month, year to date

If we look at the list above as our starting six key performance indicators, lets look at some ways of getting the information into a format we can use. For the web analytics based targets (1,2) we can within most analytical packages, create custom reports and get them emailed to us in a variety of formats. We’re going to use XML and reformat it for our needs quickly in PHP5. Having setup our goals and metrics in Google analytics, for example, we can then set them to be emailed every morning. We then have the attachment written to a log folder. Whenever we refresh our reporting dashboard we check for the latest file in the folder and process it, then store the processed data as a small HTML fragment which we include into our dashboard. This limits the amount of processing we have to do to a minimum and keeps our dashboard quick to refresh for the more real-time metrics.

For number 3 (number of sign ups) we’ll make a query of our users table, requesting the number of users created in the last 24 hours, last month, ever. As you start to get bigger, these queries will start to become very long, taking valuable time away from your production database. You can attack this problem either by using aggregates or by moving all your data to a non-production environment purely for reporting. There is a danger in this in terms of replication lag and out of date data, but facing tables locks and the problems they cause traditional LAMP based web applications, it perhaps is a risk worth managing.

For number 4 (widget adds) we can do a variety of things. If we’re looking at new Facebook subscribers then we can use the CSV download from Adonomics (formerly Appaholic). For example, the Gaping Void app, is accessibile via the url: http://adonomics.com/csv.php?mode=daily&display=4703559265 We can thus make a CURL or wget call to get this data every morning:

 wget http://adonomics.com/csv.php?mode=daily&display=4703559265 

If we’re looking at a widget, say embedded into MySpace or a blog, then we could set-up a download goal in an analytics package and measure it just like we did the unique visitors or you could get a feed from a log analyzer crunching the server logs for requests for a key component of your widget.

For number 5 (downtime), we need to define what downtime is in regards to your web app. Is it not only when the server is down but also when the database is locked or when traffic causes it to go slow? Or when disk space runs out or the load is massive? However, we don’t need that granularity. For our purposes we just care if it’s been usable and if not how long it wasn’t usable for.

The best way of doing the more in-depth testing is to monitor the system externally via a package such as Mon, Ganglia and Nagios, all of which are beyond the scope of this article. We shall assume that you care when your service or application can not be reached. Thus we need to use Synthetic monitoring, a form of monitoring that checks a particular web app action every minute or so.

For example, you could set-up a check-out every minute to check that your basket works. Or perform a site search for a particular phrase and check the response contains a link to a certain page. If we a large corporation, we’d go and buy something like Sitescope from HP However yet again we’re bootstrapping a we need a super simple solution. We can again use CURL to simulate an action, check the response for what we expect and then log the data for further analysis. If you were looking to run this in production you’d have to look at using a server in a different location to do the polling, perhaps just a cheap VPS with a cron job that runs every minute. It’s left as an exercise to the reader to think of what actions are triggered by a downtime event. (SMS Alert? email? Jabber?)

$test1 = curl_init("http://www.ourapp.com/action1 ?search=bob“); try { $buffer = curl_exec($test1); curl_close($test1); if (strpos($buffer, “Bob Jones”) === false) { throwAlert(”App Down, Server Up”); } else { // Let’s log a good search - so we can track the timeline of when things go bad. // We could also log how long the action took to complete - an interesting // metric to compare against system resources over time. logGoodSearch(now()); } catch (Exception $e) { // Having caught the error do something useful with it, including both logging and alerting }

For number six we need to do a query in your database. If you work with a Payment Services Provider, such as Metacharge or SECPay you’ll probably interface via an API or payment page where you post in the amount and other details about a transaction. You should log the transactions in a database somewhere, taking note of the time, amount and other related metadata. You can’t however store any of the card details unless you are PCI-DSS compliant as enforced by your merchant account provider. If we assume you use a table called transactionsSuccessful we can query it thus:

 SELECT SUM(value) FROM transactionsSuccessful; # Total revenue ever from online transactions SELECT SUM(value) FROM transactionsSuccessful WHERE time > NOW() - 86400; # Total revenue in the last 24 hours SELECT SUM(value) FROM transactionsSuccessful WHERE time > NOW() - 2419200; # Total revenue in the last month

We can do that query in real-time (dependent on database size and whether you’re sharding, etc.) which means we can add that to your web app reporting screen.

Displaying your data

When displaying statistical data, there is a belief that more “data porn” is better. While that may give you a false sense of knowing the real picture, what we really need to be able to understand is what actions need to taken based upon the data. Is our disk space creeping up slowly or suddenly filling up? Do we need more disks? Are people who come from blogs to our site more likely to sign-up versus general traffic? If they are, what are you going to do about it? The brilliant O’reilly book, Information Dashboard Design goes through the many pitfalls of designing dashboards for management information systems. Visual metaphors such as speed dials don’t help explain or enrich your data. They just decrease the signal to noise ratio. Edward Tuft’s work on design is worth studying in this field, if only for his examples of how to display information with the lowest amount of visual noise.

Conclusions

In this brief article we’ve looked at some examples of how to produce reporting, how to provide it in a useful form and how to look at the data over time. This is a huge field - one in its infancy. However, I hope that I have at least got you thinking about how you produce internal metrics and how you can use that business data to make better business decisions to help build and grow your web app.

Original post by contact@thinkvitamin.com (Carson Systems Ltd)

Eat with your fingers

Mangiare con le dite non è buona educazione, oltretutto non è igenico. Quante volte però prendiamo con le dita il cibo, senza pensarci troppo.Che so un'oliva. Eat with your fingers è un'idea geniale  e pratica per mangiare con le dita, ma senza toccare il cibo. Un set di tre mini pezzi in plastica a forma di forchetta, cucchiaio e coltello. Divertente, da provare.

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Comment on Tobias Baeck by jason reynolds

Something about this site is very pleasing but the spacing needs serious work - It just looks a bit messy currently. Colours are excellent and it’s easy to read.

Original post by Styleboost comments

La moda che fa storia

In mostra a Firenze, fino al 20 gennaio 2008, Contromoda. Oltre 200 abiti della collezione del Los Angeles County Museum sono ospitati nelle sale di Palazzo Strozzi. Un evento unico e da non perdere dedicato alla memoria di Gianfranco Ferrè. Servizio di Claudia Spiti

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ACLU: Ideological Exclusion

Hyperakt Design Group proudly to present the ACLU’s Ideological Exclusion website; meant to educate the public about the prohibition of entry made by the United States government to those deemed with ‘ideological’ concerns. The site features prominent and well-respected artists, writers and political figures, who have endured such exclusions by the government. They make use of local passports from around the world with great success. This is a powerful site and should be experienced by us all.

Original post by Styleboost links

ACLU: Ideological Exclusion

Hyperakt Design Group proudly to present the ACLU’s Ideological Exclusion website; meant to educate the public about the prohibition of entry made by the United States government to those deemed with ‘ideological’ concerns. The site features prominent and well-respected artists, writers and political figures, who have endured such exclusions by the government. They make use of local passports from around the world with great success. This is a powerful site and should be experienced by us all.

Original post by Styleboost links

ACLU: Ideological Exclusion

Hyperakt Design Group proudly to present the ACLU’s Ideological Exclusion website; meant to educate the public about the prohibition of entry made by the United States government to those deemed with ‘ideological’ concerns. The site features prominent and well-respected artists, writers and political figures, who have endured such exclusions by the government. They make use of local passports from around the world with great success. This is a powerful site and should be experienced by us all.

Original post by Styleboost links

ACLU: Ideological Exclusion

Hyperakt Design Group proudly to present the ACLU’s Ideological Exclusion website; meant to educate the public about the prohibition of entry made by the United States government to those deemed with ‘ideological’ concerns. The site features prominent and well-respected artists, writers and political figures, who have endured such exclusions by the government. They make use of local passports from around the world with great success. This is a powerful site and should be experienced by us all.

Original post by Styleboost links

ACLU: Ideological Exclusion

Hyperakt Design Group proudly to present the ACLU’s Ideological Exclusion website; meant to educate the public about the prohibition of entry made by the United States government to those deemed with ‘ideological’ concerns. The site features prominent and well-respected artists, writers and political figures, who have endured such exclusions by the government. They make use of local passports from around the world with great success. This is a powerful site and should be experienced by us all.

Original post by Styleboost links

ACLU: Ideological Exclusion

Hyperakt Design Group proudly to present the ACLU’s Ideological Exclusion website; meant to educate the public about the prohibition of entry made by the United States government to those deemed with ‘ideological’ concerns. The site features prominent and well-respected artists, writers and political figures, who have endured such exclusions by the government. They make use of local passports from around the world with great success. This is a powerful site and should be experienced by us all.

Original post by Styleboost links

ACLU: Ideological Exclusion

Hyperakt Design Group proudly to present the ACLU’s Ideological Exclusion website; meant to educate the public about the prohibition of entry made by the United States government to those deemed with ‘ideological’ concerns. The site features prominent and well-respected artists, writers and political figures, who have endured such exclusions by the government. They make use of local passports from around the world with great success. This is a powerful site and should be experienced by us all.

Original post by Styleboost links