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Won't lie: nearly had a little sniff at Marie's presentation during Playful 2013; a love letter to a town in Animal Crossing, and also to London. Safe travels, Marie!
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This is a good explanation of how to get sharp Canvas-based rendering on iOS browsers. It was on Posterous, so the only way to get at it was this archive.org page. Sigh.
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Ben on postboxes as boundary objects – with a nice map from Hello Lamp Post, indicating how the boxes were talked to, and suitable name-checks to The Crying of Lot 49.
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"…drawing, even at a representational level, is the construction of ideas. Therefore the conscious manipulation of ideas through the act of drawing becomes highly fruitful for a designer." More from Matt on drawing, and particular approaches aimed at unlocking drawing-as-thinking. Excellent as ever. I continue to vaguely try drawing in all workshops and for myself, and am still amazed by the number of people who, in design workshops, illustrate what they mean with sentences. For reference: I am a truly appalling draughtsman who was the despair of many an art teacher.
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Both of these are great, and express some of what I've been trying to say in recent talks far better than I've expressed myself.
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Rather good interview with MJH; covers lots of bases, carried out just before Light was published.
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John Gray on M John Harrison – not just the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, but also Viriconium and Climbers.
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"…I feel like five or ten years ago we had a common critical vocabulary robust enough to talk about what is going on in low-agency, linear, or hypertext games, but that the community has shifted enough not to be using that vocabulary now that there are lots of such games to talk about." Emily Short's roundup of the 2013 IF Comp. Really good notes on the state of the modern competition; also good notes on the nature of interactivity. Worth your time.
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"…we re-designed our lighting rigs in the computer to be very similar to traditional lighting rigs with bounces and blockers and things like that. The slight difference being we could make a white bounce card that was a kilometer by a kilometer if we wanted to bounce a light onto the ISS." Easily my favourite sentence from an excellent article on the effects work in Gravity – not just how they did it, but what their processes were like. I love this stuff, especially around the interaction between vfx and DOP.
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"Had our correspondent developed the gift of foresight? No. He really had heard these stories before. Spend a few moments on Google and you will find that the tale of how Procter & Gamble developed the Swiffer is a staple of marketing literature. Bob Dylan is endlessly cited in discussions of innovation, and you can read about the struggles surrounding the release of “Like a Rolling Stone” in textbooks like “The Fundamentals of Marketing” (2007). As for 3M, the decades-long standing ovation for the company’s creativity can be traced all the way back to “In Search of Excellence” (1982), one of the most influential business books of all time. In fact, 3M’s accidental invention of the Post-it note is such a business-school chestnut that the ignorance of those who don’t know the tale is a joke in the 1997 movie “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion.”" This is a brilliant article on the literature – and culture – of talking about 'creativity'.
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"Why doesn’t popular fiction encourage writers as entertainingly skilful as this? Because we do not value the skillset itself, only the story it mediates. We long ago separated the skillset out and donated it to literary fiction. Danny MacAskill doesn’t tell a story. He just is. Indeed, by the look of it, he just is the skillset. As a result I cry every time I watch him perform, because the performance is so much more intense than anything I’ve ever made." Great writing, by a great writer, about a great performer. Perfect.
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"Castles In The Sky is a tiny window into a delightful bedtime story. I imagine parents reading it aloud to their children as the child is fascinated by the huge bounds the boy makes through clouds. Very little happens but kites and planes go by; the music gently ebbs into your mind and as the story ends you feel peaceful and contented. It has thawed me a little, from a week of thinking only about GTA V and how serious life must be all the time. It has made me think about how five year old me used to listen to stories in our community library crosslegged and have to shut up, at least for a little while." This is a glorious piece of writing from Cara. And: a reminder that the thing I've always known is that being read to – and reading aloud to others – is so often a complete delight.
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"I’m not asking for the world here. I really don’t think I am. I would merely like to suggest some manners, no different to those used by anyone out there who wouldn’t walk in front of someone engaged with a painting in an art gallery, or emit a loud noise during the crucial speech in a play. Music needs a certain environment and respect to have full effect. And no – that is not, not, elitist." I, too, could have punched the man – it was clearly a man – who, in what seemed like an attempt to show off about just how much he enjoyed the performance, was early to the gun. Why not let it breathe? Why not let it sit? Currie's description of applause as a train you get led onto is particularly good, as is his point about how applause-whenever can have its place. But there were only two people who should have been making Contacts with things at that point of the concert, and they were both on stage.
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Nice article from Tom Phillips on a potted history of graphic scores – with a rather good gallery "attached", buried in the Guardian's IA.
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Yuri Suzuki and Mark McKeague have a new design/invention firm. I like that they emphatically describe themselves as making "machines" (along with products and experiences). (Found because of Ototo).