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Attractive styleguide for a personal site. Might resort to these one day soon.
08
December
2011
December
2011
Links
Tagged as:
css, design, styles, typography.
14
October
2011
October
2011
Links
Tagged as:
art, c, cities, computerscience, computing, culture, dennisritchie, felixcohen, fonts, games, glitch, history, interview, ios, killscreen, multiplayer, networks, occupy, occupywallstreet, programming, reference, stuartbutterfield, timbray, type, typography, unix, vimeo.
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"It’s hard to believe that there was a time when any of these weren’t conventional wisdom, but there was such a time. Unix combines more obvious-in-retrospect engineering design choices than anything else I’ve seen or am likely to see in my lifetime.
It is impossible — absolutely impossible — to overstate the debt my profession owes to Dennis Ritchie. I’ve been living in a world he helped invent for over thirty years."
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List of all 58 fonts now in iOS, mainly for reference. (Although, eesh, Zapfino AND Papyrus? Really?)
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Critical, critical, to the world we live in today.
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"And all this time I can’t help thinking that this was because I’m working with games. If I was a fimmaker, this is issue would never crop up. But games have to constantly defend their status as a way of creative expression. When creating games, you are by default suspected of either selling out or producing nothing of value what so ever. Or both." Seriously, Vimeo need to sort this out: it's embarrassing, and contrary to the messages they send out.
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"I wanted to talk about the Occupy $CITY movement here (in fact, that’s where this post started); a protest movement that is not about the event, or the movement through the city, or even the disruption per se. It is protest as part of the fabric of the city; a constant questioning and reassessment of a conversation with both the fabric of the city physically, economically and politically; taking the concept of Wall St and Main St and making it suddenly concrete, forcing a conversation to take place."
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"If this doesn’t seem like a big issue imagine the state of cinema if film students were only able to study films made in the last two decades? Or if English Literature students no longer have the ability to examine the works of Shakespeare or Twain? What might be lost?" Seriously, companies: stop turning servers off. Processor power is cheap.
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"Q: I don't imagine that a design meeting with Takahashi is a typical PowerPoint affair.
A: He has singlehandedly invented the animated GIF as the design spec. It's fucking hilarious." Animated GIF as design spec. Superb. (And: nice interview with Stuart Butterfield about Glitch).
04
June
2010
June
2010
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"…Bing Destination Maps [bing.com] seems quite interesting as a new way of rendering geographical maps in a more visually simplified, understandable and accessible way. In other words, imagine one can now create a sort of information-optimized summary maps, similar to those you would quickly draw yourself on the back of napkin." It is slow and a bit beta, and the loading graphic is crackers… but otherwise, this is superb.
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"One of the three typographic styles that is used in Japan is essentially phonetic, and is called Katakana. We’ve been attempting to find ways to incorporate phonetic sounds with the Katakana letterforms." Brilliant.
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Fantastic. If you're like me, and use One Gmail Account To Rule Them All, but use Mail as your email client, you can only use the main email address to send from. This allows you to pick a from address, making your mailing lists work again, and allowing you to pick the From address on send.
21
April
2010
April
2010
Links
Tagged as:
books, design, digital, ebooks, multimedia, reading, typography.
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"I'm excited about digital books for a number of reasons. Their proclivity towards multimedia is not one of them. I’m excited about digital books for their meta potential. The illumination of, in the words of Richard Nash, that commonality between two people who have read the same book." Craig Mod, excellent as ever, on e-books. Whilst he mainly talks about type, his point runs far deeper.
18
February
2010
February
2010
Links
Tagged as:
armitage, design, education, interaction, learning, music, narcissism, notation, type, typography.
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"“Notput” is an interactive music table with tangible notes, that combines all three senses of hearing, sight and touch to make learning the classical notation of music for children and pupils more easy and interesting."
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"I had been studying this style of letters on similar buildings in Washington, D.C., and something about them always felt a little dull. But in the Claremount letters I found life in the charming way the awkward proportions and loose spacing came together. So I set about designing a Claremount typeface." Nice article on designing a typeface, and, I must admit, it's rather good-looking (especially for something named after me).
04
November
2009
November
2009
Links
Tagged as:
application, buildings, calendar, cities, conferences, development, flickr, fonts, funny, informatics, irc, mac, osx, personification, photoblog, photography, plugin, rails, retro, rubyonrails, software, talks, terminal, typography, ui, urban, utility, webapp.
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"Flogr shows your pictures from flickr in a customizable photo portfolio interface which includes a main photo page with EXIF details and flickr user comments, a customizable thumbnails page of your recent work, a slideshow component to browse through thumbnails, a tag cloud page, and an about page that shows your flickr user profile. With flogr you can control which photos are shown by specifying the flickr tag(s) to include so you can show only your best photographs if you choose." Which is something I've been looking for for a while. Glad I didn't have to write it, now.
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"NameChanger is designed for the sole purpose of renaming a list of files."
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"Fortunately, modern displays can display characters that look exactly like this without special circuitry used in the original DEC terminals and there is free software that can be used to create a usable outline font out of a PNG image." Recreating VT220 terminal fonts in software, and from thence into Truetype.
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"LimeChat is an IRC client for Mac OS X written on RubyCocoa." I did not know about this. It looks nice.
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"Easily show multiple, overlapping events across calendar days and rows." Which is hard, and it is nice to know someone else has done the work.
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"Do you like cities? Do you like architecture? Do you like speaking at conferences?" I think this has sewn up the 2010-11 circuit.
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""Who amongst us will write the Building as Contacts and Related Goodness blog post?" It's worth remembering, I think, that he [Dan Catt] already has."
01
October
2009
October
2009
Links
Tagged as:
advice, amazon, americanidol, arcade, art, aws, cancelled, children, creativity, davidburdeny, development, ec2, freedom, gallery, games, government, happiness, howto, icebergs, images, imagination, karaoke, landscape, life, noticings, osx, photography, photos, processing, rendering, report, ruby, scribblenauts, script, shorelines, tutorial, type, typography, video.
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"Players stand in front of a green screen while the game films them and creates a music video background while they sing. Their performance is then emailed to them or burnt onto a DVD players can take home." Awesome. Unfortunately, the project has been canned. Still, it's worth watching the slightly cringey videos of the developers playing it, because it's a nifty bit of code.
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"It all boils down to a Ruby script that runs on OS X only and uses OS X’s really awesome typography and subpixel antialiased font rendering. Why not tap into this to make those headline graphics? With Rubycocoa you can easily whip up a small app that draws some text, and save it into a PNG file." Um, blimey.
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Icebergs and Shorelines; I love the Icebergs series particularly. What a rich page for a gallery.
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"3. Take Notice: Be curious. Catch sight of the beautiful. Remark on the unusual. Notice the changing seasons. Savour the moment, whether you are on a train, eating lunch or talking to friends. Be aware of the world around you and what you are feeling. Reflecting on your experiences will help you appreciate what matters to you." All very good advice – and, frankly, what I knew already – but this one felt particularly appropriate, given Noticings.
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This is a pretty good guide – made sense, got me up and running fast, and nice and clearly written.
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"In a sense, a child, by definition, shrinks Scribblenauts’ scope: the game’s potential solutions are necessarily limited by vocabulary, so players with a smaller vocabulary have fewer options open to them. But, free of the dry, efficient logic of adulthood, a child’s imagination also opens the game up in ways beyond most adults’ reach." Simon makes a strong point about Scribblenauts.
07
July
2009
July
2009
Links
Tagged as:
art, books, browser, chair, code, crowdsourcing, data, design, development, fonts, hack, html, ie6, installation, kevincornell, kidnapped, literature, manipulation, maps, media, michaeljackson, motioncapture, motiontracking, music, oops, physicalcomputing, processing, sculpture, software, southbank, standardscompliance, stevenson, themesong, thoughbot, timwright, tunes, type, typography, video, videos, visualisation, walking, web.
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I am not an expert in these matters, but that is rather lovely.
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That performance of Billie Jean. But with a Giant White Glove. Brilliant.
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"On May 4th, 2007, we asked internet users to help isolate Michael Jackson's white glove in all 10,060 frames of his nationally televised landmark performance of Billy Jean. 72 hours later 125,000 gloves had been located. wgt_data_v1.txt (listed below) is the culmination of data collected. It is released here for all to download and use as an input into any digital system. Just as the data was gathered collectively it is our hope that it will be visualized collectively." This is amazing. And what it leads to is even better.
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Thoughtbot discover their RFID door-lock system has an API. A short bash at some code later, and they now have theme songs when they enter the office.
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"From 30th June to 25th August, I'll be following a route across Scotland from the south western tip of Mull to the outskirts of Edinburgh, as charted in Chapters 14–27 of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Kidnapped’." I remember talking to Tim about this at BookCamp; it's great to see it in-the-world.
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"Peter Newman's Skystation is a circular sculpture inspired by the form of Le Corbusier's LC4 chaise longue which encourages the user to lie down and contemplate the vast expanse of space above and beyond." I rather like that. Doesn't look comfortable, but I agree with the sentiment.
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"After years of observation and reverse engineering I am proud to say I have been able to reproduce the IE6 algorithm to break even the most standards-compliant websites." Hur hur hur.
07
July
2009
July
2009
games
Tagged as:
fringe, games, grid, hitchcock, panicroom, text, titles, type, typedesign, typography.
Text In The World
After a long period underground, Ubisoft’s Splinter Cell: Conviction emerged at E3 substantially different to its previous incarnations. And whilst I, for one, am grateful for the removal of Sam Fisher’s trampy hairdo, the new feature that got me really, really excited seems to have passed with relatively little fanfare. Here it is:
Mission objectives – or, at least, reminders thereof – written into the environment, mapped over space, appearing to the player along; subjective and stylistic, but never part of a HUD. It’s classy and striking, and not something people are playing with in games nearly enough. Prior to this, easily my favourite type design in games came from Codemasters’ GRID:
which placed text into the world as first-class 3D objects, and let the player spin and pivot the camera around it, as if to emphasise both its subjectivity and genuine 3D-ness.
But this has been a thing in movies and TV for a while, now. Here’s JJ Abrams’ Fringe:
which even nails the reflections in the water. And, of course, one of the earliest points of reference for this in genuine 3D is David Fincher’s Panic Room:
which, as Ben has pointed out, owes a great debt to Saul Bass’ titles for North by Northwest:
which makes quite a nice list.
17
June
2009
June
2009
Links
Tagged as:
bbfc, classification, digitalbritain, font, free, gambling, games, gaming, magic, magicthegathering, mtg, pegi, play, poker, pressure, sansserif, skill, type, typeface, typography.
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"MISO by Mårten Nettelbladt is a heavy duty typeface for the construction industry." Ooh, that's quite nice.
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"While the two games have similarities, the consensus is that the collective poker success results more from the experience competition provides than the tactics and skill set utilized in 'Magic.'" Successful Magic: The Gathering players are moving over to professional poker. I particularly liked: '"I never want to play poker in my free time. 'Magic' you can. You can't make a living at 'M:TG,' but it's just the more enjoyable game.""
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But they weren't _using_ the 'rating system for films', beyond the age ratings themselves; they had specialist examiners and criteria and were, basically, quite smart about it all. I have never really trusted PEGI when it comes to this stuff, and I guess now we're just going to have to get used to it.
Links & notes for this month
- "At 14, Caroline Moore became the youngest person ever to discover a supernova. But months later, we're still figuring out how her find, dubbed SN 2008HA, can actually exist, since it defies everything we thought we knew." Awesome.
- "Frankly anyone who thinks you need anything else for a working online content model is living in the past." Hah!
- "Fast-forward ten years, and I'm now using all those accessibility features on a daily basis. At some point during the dot-com bust it turned out that the written word was the payload, and regular people started using alternative (browsing) devices to access text from the web. Arguments about device-independent, semantic markup and graceful degradation suddenly have an additional halo of legitimacy because they affect everyone."
- "LEDs pulse back and forth in the mantle to indicate roughly how many friends are on Xbox Live. It goes into red alert if anyone's playing Left 4 Dead." Nicely done; might poke something similar into life for myself, just for kicks.
- Tim O'Reilly on what he learned from studying the classics at University. Simply because of competence at the languages, I know more of the Romans than the Greeks, but this is thoughtful stuff. I was often asked at school by peers why I'd study something of "no practical value"; O'Reilly has some smart answers.
- "I think that there are really obvious reasons this isn't currently happening. Tech-oriented, web-trained, fast-paced, hard-nosed Silicon Valley culture is not really that similar to game developer culture. Outside of GDC Austin... I haven't seen a lot of opportunities for the two industries to mix. Most crucially, everybody's too damn busy trying to get their jobs done to really spend a lot of time or thought on the issue." That gap in culture is something that still fascinates me.
- "I don’t blame The Cure. That was your call. The Cure is just out there, like car horns or people who make noise when they cry. The Cure is a choice. When we hear Michael, it is not a choice to feel the beat. It is not a choice to cock your head and straighten all the fingers on your right hand." And, in a sea of media nonsense, still the best eulogy was written by an illustrated cat in a thong.
- "Design, culture, scale, space, superpowers. Key concepts: design and contributing to culture; ourselves as individuals and the big picture; taking action. ...other topics covered include million mile tomatoes, President John F Kennedy as a yogic master, superpowers and the tools of production." I am very lucky to work with smart people. I do not know what to do with my 100 hours.
- There is nothing about this that is not amazing.
- "...halfway through the film, the Ghostbusters realize that NYNEX isn't a phone system at all: it's the embedded nervous system of an angel – a fallen angel – and all those phone calls and dial-up modems in college dorm rooms and public pay phones are actually connected into the fiber-optic anatomy of a vast, ethereal organism that preceded the architectural build-up of Manhattan. Manhattan came afterwards, that is: NYNEX was here first." There is no way this wouldn't be awesome. And: a great write-up from Geoff.
- How to compile APC into the Marc Liyanage PHP5 package (which is clearly the most sensible one to be using on OSX). Though this is for Server, it works fine on desktop, and as such comes recommended.
- "This toaster was built from scratch by Thomas Thwaites, a design student at the Royal College of Art, London, as a project in extreme self-sufficiency and to highlight the effects of mass production we take for granted." And this is what it looks like.
- "I'm Thomas Thwaites and I'm trying to build a toaster, from scratch - beginning by mining the raw materials and ending with a product that Argos sells for only £3.99. A toaster." This is clearly amazing, and a timely reminder of, you know, what the age of mass production really means.
- "Fresh data straight out of our uber warehouse: As the news breaks, scrobbles soar as people go to pay tribute to one of the greatest pop artists of all times." I really didn't want to talk about this story at all - but at least there's some interesting data about it. So have some data.
- "Pincus said game-based activity like this was an investment of what he called “social capital,” a means of maintaining contact with our growing network of friends and acquaintances. If the industry further emphasized this advantage in future games, Pincus argued with charming bullishness, social gaming could become as pervasive as social networks themselves."
- 'With Facebook Connect coming to Xbox 360 later this year, could we see similar connectivity between Xbox 360 and Facebook games? "Absolutely," Facebook's head of platform Ethan Beard told me back at E3. "Yeah, totally. That's a simple one -- that's an easy one. There's probably things that we haven't even thought of [coming later]."' Hmmn. Worth a quotation, at least.
- "...once we return to the sun, late on in our economic history, are we still innocent enough to view it this way? The sun isn't so very different from the Beatles back catalogue - there's a lot of it around, you can't control it, we value it highly, it's a 'public good problem' - but the Beatles are subject to various legal and political protections, most recently retrospective copyright extension. If EMI are allowed to profit from music that they didn't create, might not North Africa have some right to profit from energy that it didn't create?" Some brilliant stuff from Will Davies
- "Prayer is an appropriate analogy: So many prayers are poems, and most are repeated to the point at which they become pure sound, a soothing sequence of syllables which remind us of something. “Hallowed be thy name” is not a phrase, for example, which immediately gives up its meaning in everyday English, and yet it still comforts those who intone it. The shipping forecast shows a bit, I think, how both poems and prayers work." A top trump of the web today: S3FM, RIG, the shipping forecast and numbers stations all in one post. Blimey.
- "The amygdala is the “fight or flight” and emotional memory part of the brain. Its job is to protect by comparing incoming data with emotional memories. An amygdala hijack occurs when we respond out of measure with the actual threat because it has triggered a much more significant emotional threat." Wow, there's actually science behind that feeling. Useful to give it a name, too.
- "This is why I tell people over and over again: you cannot trust what you see even with your own eyes. Your eyes are not cameras faithfully taking pictures of absolute truth of all that surrounds you. They have filters, and your brain has to interpret the jangled mess it gets fed. Colors are not what they appear, shapes are not what they appear (that zoomed image above is square, believe it or not), objects are not what they appear." This is crazy - and one of the few optical illusions I've seen that still works when zoomed-in super close. It's so hard to make head or tail of.
- "So, to sum up: Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen is one of the greatest achievements in the history of cinema, if not the greatest. You could easily argue that cinema, as an artform, has all been leading up to this. It will destabilize your limbic system, probably forever, and make you doubt the solidity of your surroundings. Generations of auteurs have struggled, in vain, to create a cinematic experience as overwhelming, and as liberating, as ROTF." This review is, essentially, amazing, and has elevated ROTF to a must-see for me.
- "I'm continually drawn in by the belief that everyone finds their own way through life, age, cities, networks, whatever. And as Meehan's tale recounts, it's the whispers we leave on the wind that entice others to follow our hints." Just go and read the story; it's wonderful, and the fragments George picks out so carefully constructed. That made my evening.
- "The Tower of London tweets every time it opens and shuts..." Nice sub-editing, Daily Mail!
- "Even the platform holders are excited about the potential for social networking to tie into games. At E3, Microsoft proudly announced integration of Facebook, music network Last.fm and Twitter with Xbox Live. The latter pair are fairly irrelevant, admittedly. Last.fm is solely a music service, while Twitter isn't actually a social network at all - it's a one-to-many broadcast system, which isn't quite the same thing." Oh. But that's where you're wrong, Rob. Sorry.
- '“The degree to which you can engage your customer base in creating value for your other players” is key, says Newell. “When people say interesting or intelligent things about your product, it will translate directly into incremental revenue for the content provider.”' Masses of good things in here - think I've quoted it elsewhere - but it's not on my Delicious, so in it goes.
- "DFC's main takeaway from the study is that the flexible, quickly-adaptable nature of online distribution services like Steam allow for developers to use a broad variety of promotions and incentives to keep their game communities fresh; individual promotions like the Survival Pack had a positive effect on both platforms, but it was the one-two punch of that DLC plus the followup free weekend through Steam that had the most meaningful impact on the game at any point on either platform."
- Art of the Title interview the chaps behind Wall-E's end credits, which knocked me out the first time I saw them, and still give me the loveliest buzz to this day.
- Generates a tiny file to do the most basic things, from the looks of it.
- "I was, instead, going to see what it would take to drive around the world in a single sitting. It would have to be a single sitting because, without unlocking the game, I could not easily return to where I had driven to, or save my location. I was going to drive without the safety-net of a saved game, or even a checkpoint." Jim takes a tour of a properly big open-world; Fuel's not a game I'm very interested in for its mechanics, but the world always seemed interesting, and it's nice to have that confirmed.
- "Multiplayer online Benny Hill. Please, game modding community, hear my cry." +1 to this, methinks.
- "This is a website expressing my personal views – through a selection of opinionated observations and arguments. I’ll be including stories I like, ideas I find fascinating, work in progress and a selection of material from the BBC archives." Adam Curtis has a blog.
- "Storytelling began as ceremony and evolved into ritual. It was commercialised in the middle ages, became big business in the 19th century and an international industry in the 20th. Today it is the ubiquitous wallpaper of the postmodern era." I still think there's some separation of plot/narrative to be considered, you can't deny Schrader makes some sensible points.
- Yes, they are.