Skills for the New Digital World

One of Google's many initiatives is Google Digital Garage, an entry point to many courses designed to assist people with skills necessary to negotiating the online world. According to the introductory material:

Grow your career or business at your own pace, with flexible and personalised training courses designed to build your confidence and help you thrive.

• Discover tools to make your business succeed
• Improve your interview skills
• Prepare for the career you want

Well worth a look for anyone wanting to enhance their digital skills, whether for business or other purposes.

Is Google's Material Design boring?

When a massive company like Google attempts to standardise the look and function of its many user interfaces (UI) with a single design 'language', it is naturally big news in the design world. Many welcomed the move away from drop shadows, fake wood grain and bevels etc, but others argue that the new look lacks personality, fails to advance the Google brand and is too uniform.

Noto — A Typeface for Every Language

Google has an endearing penchant for quixotic projects. Noto is that, but also a noble effort to construct a completely inclusive set of typefaces — covering all of the world's major scripts but also most of the minor ones. The name is derived from 'no tofu' — the little white squares that pop up when one attempts to type a character outside the character set of the font in question. The font itself is fairly vanilla, but highly readable and comes in four sans and four serif weights, and is free from Google. 

Great Art by the Virtual Truckload

Via the fine folks at Open Culture, a definitive list of the best collections of digitised artworks. 

• Google Art Project (250,000 images)
• L.A. County Museum (20,000)
• New York Public Library-Historic Maps (20,000)
• Norway National Museum (30,000)
• SFMoMA Rauschenberg Collection
• Stanford University’s Cantor Art Center (45,000)
• Stanford University’s French Revolution Collection (14,000)
• The British Library (100,000)
• The British Museum (4,200)
• The Getty (100,000)
• The Guggenheim (1,600)
• The Met (400,000)
• The Morgan Library Rembrandt Sketches (300)
• The Museum of Modern Art/MoMA  (65,000)
• The Museum of New Zealand (30,000)
• The National Gallery (35,000)
• The New York Public Library: Photos, Maps, Letters (180,000)
• The Rijksmuseum (210,00)
• The Smithsonian (40,000)
• The Tate (70,000)
• The Whitney (21,000)
• The Van Gogh Museum (3500)
• Yale’s Great Depression Photo Collection (170,000)
• Vermeer (36)

Many of the artworks are scanned at very high resolution. In the case of institutions such as the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands, re-use and alteration of the artworks is encouraged and celebrated. Considerable debate has erupted as to whether the wide availability of such material is somehow corrupting the ability of the general public to appreciate the actual rather than virtual artworks.

For those institutions that allow use and remixing of the digitised artwork, authors and designers have at their disposal a vast and powerful visual resource.