I wish I could show some screencaps from the modified Doom3 ingame video posted by Manuel M. Oliveira showing off his “Relief Texture Mapping” technique. It makes the original flat, normal-mapped textures look dull in comparison. If you thought Doom3’s visuals looked detailed, you have to to see this video (Windows Media file only). Find it and more on his website (link).

via Blue’s News

Well, today has gotten off to a lousy start: a “new” Samsung hard drive is already sprouting “bad sectors”. Fudge. After all the recent HD problems around here I think I’m going back to Seagate. My period of testing the various offerings from different manufacturers is over. Give me the good stuff.

So anyway, as is probably obvious, I needed to raise my spirits with something fun to post, since I know this weekend I’ll be playing … (cue theme music) … Computer Repairman. Luckily as I was surfing through the Cool Hunting site I caught an entry that got me doing my own hunting. A little effort and I found myself in the Kidrobot discussion forums where I found what I was looking for: a post with this link to a gallery of images on the Vinyl Pulse website. Vinyl Pulse’s gallery of pictures are from yesterday’s “Munny Show”, a charity auction held to benefit victims of Hurricane Katrina. Worthwhile effort and fun design. It doesn’t get much better.

For anyone who hasn’t followed the niche vinyl toy market, it really is an interesting scene. Wired carried an article on it a year or so ago. Mostly I’ve been watching the scene from a distance. The most recent significant development of which I was aware was Kidrobot‘s introduction of a “Munny” – a kind of do-it-yourself toy. But I wasn’t aware of this event, so this is pretty cool. And of course, anything that brings together design and mass customization is of interest to me.

There. I feel better already.

{Images Copyright © 2005 Vinyl Pulse}

Check out this article (and the accompanying slideshow) about design phenom Ora Ito over on BusinessWeek. It’s a fun piece on how the impatient design dropout rose to the top… but also an indication of the mixed messages being broadcast about Design. Here’s someone with obviously a lot of raw talent and some pedigree being showcased as an example to a business community that is still largely unable to take design seriously. I have no doubt that some senior exec is going to expect one of his CAD jockeys to “be like Mike” (or in this case, Ito). And on the flipside there are people as talented as Ito laboring quietly under the thumb of a mediocre corporate management team; taking direction from people with no vision for the products they bring to market. As one senior vice president once told me, “We don’t know who buys this sh*t. But they do.”

Maybe what the business world needs is a behind-the-scenes peek at the average day-to-day life of a designer in the corporate world. Wouldn’t be as fun, but it might be a whole lot more instructive.

The Simulation weblog posts an entry alerting me/us to a nice Gamasutra article, “Postcard From SGS 2005: Inside The Institute for Creative Technologies“. The article includes discussion about ITC‘s ongoing work toward creating increasingly mind-blowing visuals (among other things, graphics guru Paul Debevec is an employee of ITC, so you know this is serious), and also budgets a hefty portion of wordcount to their efforts on developing adaptive artificial intelligence. Definitely worth the read.

Well this is truly the first time I’ve heard a top-level executive seriously say something like this:

I’m going to run an innovation group, and I’m going to hire highly creative people, design backgrounds, people who have proven their ability to think outside the box. And then I’m actually going to create some sort of career path within innovation.

That’s Mary Jo Cook, the new business vice-president for Clorox’s laundry home-care division in an interview over on BusinessWeek.

Years ago, as I was planning my move into ID, I went looking for some information on career paths. I was lucky enough to come across a business article in the San Diego Union-Tribune that included quotes from Nissan Design International’s VP of Design, Gerald Hirshberg. Not knowing who he was or the status he had within the design community, I sent him a couple of letters with some questions. Fortunately he was kind enough to respond. One of those questions was: “What’s the career path for an industrial designer?”. That apparently confused him as he basically wrote back: There is no path. You either make it or you don’t. Brutal. And in truth, that’s still largely how the field works. The designer’s career path – if you’re lucky enough to even get onto it – usually dead-ends with “Design Manager”, a position normally equivalent to Project Manager on a development team. It’s a low ceiling. And it’s still rare to hear of designers as senior executives at large corporations. Perhaps influential types like Ms. Cook can help to remove that barrier.