QuickBits Archives
489 entries
House Industries ampersand tees
For the ampersand lover in your life. See also: mousepads and cast metal sculptures.
BusinessWeek on the Sphere redesign
I chatted with a friendly writer over at BusinessWeek recently, and the result is a little article focused on the redesign of Sphere. Part of a larger Web Design Special Report published last week.
Huge Job
I recall being impressed with Huge Inc.’s redesign of IKEA (em-based layout, no less). They have an intense client list, and recently listed an open Web Architect position. Huge opportunity?
This Ain’t No Disco
Need workplace design inspiration? TAND showcases the “inner sanctum” of some creatively-executed spaces.
Ceramic Atari joystick candle holder
Trying to justify the £50 price tag, and failing.
Cork coffee cup sleeves
Not only do they look cool, they allegedly insulate better than paper sleeves, and are made from renewable cork bark, which is harvested without cutting the tree down.
S3Hub: S3 Client (for Mac OS X)
“S3Hub allows you to view your S3 online storage, upload, download, set permissions, share with friends and more.” This could come in handy, soon.
1% for the Planet's new blog
The first post offers this great news: “Our members can now be found in 27 different countries and we’re channeling over $12 million annually to a myriad of environmental groups (more than 1,500) around the world.”
Wordle
“Wordle is a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.” Here’s what Wordle did to an old article I wrote way-back-when.
NetNewsWire for iPhone
Great news. My favorite RSS reader will be released as a native iPhone application. Hopefully around the same time the app store launches (via)
Start! Conference
Some very smart people are getting together in August to put on Start: “… a one-day conference in San Francisco designed for smart, talented Web people to take hold of their ideas, follow their dreams, and start their own companies.”
Abbreviation Venn
Tweet about an internal debate on how to correctly mark up “ABBA”, semantically, and good things happen.
Build Guild
Live near Salem, Massachusetts? You might be interested in the Build Guild: “… a monthly event (starting in July 2008, and occurring every 2nd Tuesday of the month) where folks in the web industry—designers, coders, project managers, hobbyists, etc.—can get together to talk web, debate industry topics, share ideas, make professional connections, land gigs, and discuss the real reasons why mustaches need to make a comeback.” Is it just me, or is there a burgeoning North Shore web scene happening?
Leo DiCaprio to play Atari founder
A Hollywood feature film about the history of Atari? I must be dreaming (via).
dConstruct 2008
Brighton, England’s affordable one-day conference is back. Great lineup. I also particularly dig their idea of mashable badges (add your own background image) to help promote the event.
Tetris ice cube trays
Play fast, before they melt.
iPhone Sun?
Just last week, I was complaining to my wife about the lack of progress regarding solar-powered electronics. It’s as if the inventors of the solar-powered calculator (and watch) gave up after those world-changing technological wonders. I have similar questions about the next potato-powered device, but that’s neither here nor there. In all seriousness though, being able to go outside to rejuvenate a dying iPhone or iPod would make the world a better place (via).
Pretzel type
Delicious (via).
Ryan Irelan's ExpressionEngine screencasts
Just released from the folks at Pragmatic Programmers, Ryan’s EE tutorials may be just the thing I need to make a long overdue CMS update.
Pork and Beans
Weezer’s brand new internet meme-tastic video is a great one. (via).
The Ampersand
“I like the ampersand. I think it is often the most attractive punctuation mark of them all. This blog is an attempt to give this humble character the respect it deserves.” Subscribed, naturally (via).
Cubescape
Brilliant application for creating isometric pixel illustrations by Cameron Adams. Be sure to watch the construction animation on some of the Popular pictures. There goes the day.
Shipwrecks & Sea Disasters
Great collection of shipwreck photos from around the world.
Corporate Logo Mashups
Just like it says (via).
superbrothers
Some pretty unique pixel art going on here.
XHTML + CSS template for Nutrition Facts
I just had to mark-up and style a “Nutrition Facts” label that matches the layout found on food packaging here in the US. Jonathon’s templates just saved me a few hours work.
Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks
A new book by Luke Wroblewski published by Rosenfeld Media. Highly recommended.
Hahlo 3
A great iPhone Twitter client that just got even better with the latest release.
Designing for the Social Web
Josh Porter wrote a book about “social design” and it’s out and available now from New Riders. If you’ve ever heard Josh speak or read his blog, you know this will be a great one. Congrats to Mr. Porter!
Koloroo for iPod
“Simply select your base color by moving your thumb over the Click Wheel. A suggested color scheme is automatically displayed in the four corners. To match the color of an object, simply hold your iPod next to it like a paint swatch.” I’m going to assume an iPhone version is also in the works.
Chip Kidd, Dean Allen, Ze Frank and Aviary join The Deck
Zeldman has a nice writeup here of the new additions to “The ad network of creative, web and design culture”. The Deck network continues to get bigger and better, and is now sporting a new domain and design as well.
Addictomatic
From Rollyo founder, Dave Pell, comes a new one-stop-shop to find news, videos, photos and blog posts. Awesome robot icon and design by Bryan Bell.
Boston Web Studio
Congratulations to fellow Salem resident, Markup & Style Society member and all-around good guy, Marc Amos on leaving his day job to go out on his own (today!). Cheers to more independent web craftspeople in the Witch City.
Beck's 8-Bit packaging
And speaking of retro 8-bittyness, loving this experimental packaging (via someone on Twitter who I failed to note while bookmarking).
Pixel Pour
Neat urban art installation, bridging the 8-bit gaming world to reality.
Web Standards Design + Development group
From the fine pilots over at Airbag, comes news of a newly formed group of web professionals: “…to form a strong network of individuals who have taken the initiative to become craftsmen of their trade. Today it is a list of names, tomorrow it will be a force for good—or at the very least a good list to have when you’re in a financial crunch and the guy schlepping real estate is paying $50 per new lead.” Joined!
Rainbow Tennis: red, blue, yellow, green, 3 more colors!
Photoshopp’d Atari 2600 game box covers of yesteryear.
Ten Thousand Cents
“…a digital artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool.”
Cooking With Rockstars
Jennifer Niederst Robbins (author of Web Design in a Nutshell) interviews super-cool music people (Apples in Stereo, Spoon, Death Cab for Cutie, Jack Black, etc.) about cooking and food.
50 Ways to Help the Planet
Great roundup of fifty little things we can all do to help. Part of Wire & Twine’s The Green Line.
We All Hate Quickbooks
Another nifty example of parallax scrolling by using layered, semi-transparent PNGs (try resizing your browser window).
Authentic Jobs Affiliates Program
Just weeks after SimpleBits became a partner, Cameron Moll’s Authentic Jobs rolls out some cool new developments. Earn $75 per full-time listing and $25 per freelance listing when you become an AJ affiliate. Also announced today is a brand-spanking new Authenic Jobs API for job-related mashup goodness.
Jeremy Keith's Future of Web Design coverage
Excellent live blogging of the conference in London. Sounds like it was a great show.
Creatively carved food
Photos of various foods carved into people, animals and other objects (site is in Russian).
Gary Vaynerchuk in print
The multi-media master now has a book coming out next month: Gary Vaynerchuk’s 101 Wines: Guaranteed to Inspire, Delight, and Bring Thunder to Your World. Can’t wait to check this out.
Coda Confidential
Interesting presentation by Panic’s Cabel Sasser. Covers the history of the company as well as interface design challenges while creating Coda, their web development app.
Dinner in the Sky
Terrifying. And don’t drop the pepper (via).
Ten Thousand Cents
“…is a digital artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool. The total labor cost to create the bill, the artwork being created, and the reproductions available for purchase are all $100.”
Accessible Data Visualization with Web Standards
Wilson Miner shows off some nifty tricks for styling informational navigation. This is ALA at its best: practical, hands-on goodness.
New UK coin designs
The Shield of the Royal Arms, cleverly split among six coins. Beautiful.
The Highly Extensible CSS Interface
A four part article series from Cameron Moll, filled with bulletproofness and scores of resources for creating flexible designs.
On Being a Web Craftsman
Josh Porter’s write-up and slides from the latest Markup & Style Society mini conference earlier this month, in Boston. Josh’s talk was a great one, filled with great quotes and thoughts on web craftsmanship.
Wine label design
A tear-off tab to easily remember the bottle you’re drinking. Excellent idea (via).
Vintage Logos on Flickr
A collection of vintage logos from a mid-70’s edition of the book World of Logotypes.
Color palettes from photos generator
I’ve often talked about the method of extracting color palettes from photos of nature (see Luke Wroblewski’s article from 2003). Here’s a tool that takes any image URL, and creates the palette for you instantly (via Rowan Simpson).
The Earth and Moon as Seen from Mars
Amazing picture. Incredible perspective. Everything that’s happening … is right there.
Custom Laser Engraved Moleskine Notebooks
Beautiful stuff. And I’m surprised at how reasonably priced the custom engraving is.
Webstock Recordings
Recordings from last month’s Webstock conference in Wellington, New Zealand have been posted. Every talk is available as a video steam, MP4 video and MP3 audio.
Melpo Mene
It’s not everyday you hear great music during a Volvo commercial, but Sweden’s Melpo Mene has a sweet, Elliott Smith vibe that convinced me to hunt them down via a Google search. Looking forward to that new album that will hopefully be available in the US.
ROFLCon
From their About section: “Mix up a bunch of super famous internet memes, some brainy academics, a big audience, dump them in Cambridge, MA and you’ve got ROFLCon.” Tempting.
Parking Garage: Beyond the Limit
Mark Odlum on reaching for the summit: “It’s the tallest garage in this town, and not many people have done it and made it. I decided I was going to do it.”
iPod and phone recycling
Apple will send you a pre-paid label or mailer to recycle your old iPods and mobile phones (any brand).
Hex silliness
Andrew Huff realizes that l33tspeak could be applied to hex values and shares the results (via).
How to recreate Silverback’s Parallax
Paul Annett describes how to achieve that excellent faux 3D background sliding effect using layered alpha-transparent PNGs. Ignore most of the comments.
Money Celebrities Pictures Gallery
The top 26 photos from a contest combining celebrities with the faces on money from around the world (via).
Archer
Everyone’s buzzing about Archer, the new colorful slab serif typeface from Hoefler & Frere-Jones. Liz Danzico made beautiful use of it in her presentation at Webstock last week, and I have to say after seeing it on a 10-foot screen — it’s a keeper. Love the “c”.
CSS Type Set
Fancy interface for visually setting hypertext. Could be helpful for those first learning the CSS properties we have at our disposal.
Silverback
Ingenious use of layered, alpha-transparent PNGs (resize your browser window). Not to mention a wonderful Jon Hicks illustrated gorilla as well. Who cares what the app does? I kid.
Rainbow Dividers!
For future reference. Be sure to refresh a few times for maximum enjoyment, but please avoid visiting this link if you suffer from Photosensitive Epilepsy (via).
Instapaper
It’s like delicious, but simpler. Basically a quick way to save bookmarks for future reading. I’ve been using delicious to save things immediately, re-posting a select few here as QuickBits — but Instapaper might be an easier way to handle that.
Use CSS3 to hide an image behind text
Erik Kastner whips up a neat little demo that hides an image behind text. The image is revealed by using the ::selection pseudo-element found in CSS3. You’ll need Firefox or Safari to see the magic.
Passage
A seemingly simple little 5-minute video game by Jason Rohrer. You have to play first, then read about it (via).
Made by Elephant
I’m digging Tim Van Damme’s design here. I also have a thing for simple animal-shaped identities. Nice work!
Lego Mario
I think it’s the flute soundtrack that makes this a winner (via).
Why I'm excited about the Google Social Graph API
Josh Porter has a nice summary of Google’s newly released Social Graph API, which allows developers to write software that understands who your friends are, using the power of XFN or FOAF markup. Another exciting example of microformats in action.
Barcode Yourself
Create a unique barcode by entering personal information about yourself.
Sub-Pixel Problems in CSS
John Resig investigates the different ways in which browsers round up or down a half pixel. Frustrating that browsers aren’t consistent with this — especially when sizing things in ems or percentages. (via)
Feet First floor mats
Reproductions of popular city manhole covers. Made from 100% recycled truck tires. Wants (I have an odd obsession with floor mats).
IE8 passes ACID2 test
Dean Hachamovitch: “I’m delighted to tell you that on Wednesday, December 12, Internet Explorer correctly rendered the Acid2 page in IE8 standards mode.” Now that is excellent news.
Elastic IKEA
Patrick has just tipped me off that IKEA impresses us with an elastic (em-based) layout. Try resizing text if you’re not sure what that means. Nicely done! Now if I could just figure out where this extra hex nut goes… Update: Naz Hamid tells us (via Twitter) that HUGE was behind the redesign.
Overheard.it
Neat little Twitter app that collects tweets prefaced with “overheard” or “OH:” from Sidebar Creative.
CommandShift3
It’s like Hot or Not for web design. You may also find some familiar faces as easter eggs when submitting a new site.
Do websites need to look exactly the same in every browser?
Inquiring minds want to know.
The Rissington Podcast
A beautiful design that gets even better when you resize your browser window (check the layered footer!).
Hugs
The folks at Carsonified have cooked up a neat idea in just a week: limited edition MacBook Pro and iPhone sleeves that you pass along to a friend after a month.
IE8
Nope, we will not have to wait 5 years for the next version. Huzzah.
How Many HTML Elements Can You Name in 5 Minutes?
I named at least three. Oh wait, <nav> is part of HTML5. Two then.
24: The Unaired 1994 Pilot
“What would the 24 TV series have looked like if it was created some 10 years ago?”
Fawnt
A promising free font resource.
Nice Web Type
“One place for web typography, leveraging our collective knowledge for the betterment of typographic style and practice.”
A Christmas Story House
The house from the classic movie, restored and open for tours in Cleveland. Complete with BB gun range in the backyard and leg lamp giftshop.
Uncovered
“[Photographer] Thomas Allen selects the pulpiest of pulp paperbacks and then lovingly slices out a figure from the cover, gently folds it into position, and constructs a witty scene around it.” The ultimate coffee table book, although ironically the actual book’s cover is a bit lame.
Blue Beanie Day
“On Monday, November 26, 2007, don your blue beanie to show your support for web standards and accessibility.” But hasn’t that war been won? Not really. Just look around the web in general. Plenty of room for improvement.
The rise of the micro-app
Adam Keys gets it: “… go out, build the sucker and figure out how to have fun with it.”
Do Canonical Web Designs Exist?
Josh Porter: “The web is not suffering from a lack of canonical design. It’s just that canonical design on the web isn’t as glamorous as some want it to be.” More really interesting thoughts on what great design on the web means.
Understanding Web Design
Zeldman: “The experienced web designer, like the talented newspaper art director, accepts that many projects she works on will have headers and columns and footers. Her job is not to whine about emerging commonalities but to use them to create pages that are distinctive, natural, brand-appropriate, subtly memorable, and quietly but unmistakably engaging.” This entire article should be printed on a t-shirt and worn at every design shop or web depatrment worldwide.
Design doing
Jeremy Keith’s pretty excellent roundup of some recent design debates. I like the idea of HTML and CSS being the “raw materials” of the web craftsperson.
MobileSafari ViewS
Shaun Inman iterates on Anthony Piraino’s aforementioned iSource, adding the ability to create a JavaScript bookmark for push-button source viewing in MobileSafari. Excellente.
iSource
Ask and you shall receive! Anthony Piraino creates a little app that displays the source code of any given web page, optimizing the output for the iPhone. View Source on the go. Awesome.
Coffee Drinks Illustrated
Fellow Bostonian and Lightbox creator, Lokesh Dhakar, beautifully illustrates all those fancy coffee drinks. See also his equally educational baseball pitches illustrations. Great site design to boot.
Favikon
Amazingly great tool that will crop and/or resize your uploaded image and turn into a favicon. As someone who has touted the importance of a good favicon in the past — and how cropping can sometimes be the answer — I think this is pretty darn cool.
Making Stuff vs. Making Stuff Up
Dan Saffer: “It is in the detail work that design really happens — that the clever, delightful moments of a design occur. Those are as important, if not more so, than the concept itself.” Great piece. I agree, and it’s stirred some interesting debate in the comments.
Content AND Presentation
Mark Boulton: “… the medium of social interaction is language, and the way language is shaped and looks is typographic design.” Interesting thoughts on how the separation of content from presentation can leave typography out of the mix.
How-To: Get Rid of the Glass Dock in Leopard
Historically, I don’t customize much of the OS and Apple’s defaults are typically right on the mark for me. Not the case with the new Dock. My biggest complaint is the extra space required for the reflections. Take those away and you can shrink the Dock back down while still being able to see things clearly.
The Superest
A continually running character illustration battle drawn by Kevin Cornell, Matthew Sutter and guests.
Flat input buttons in Leopard?
Are you noticing flat, odd-looking form input buttons in Safari 3 as well? Todd Dominey figured out why.
Web Directions North '08
Canada’s finest web conference has been announced once again. I had an absolute blast last year, and am sad to miss it this time around (the lineup looks fantastic). The Vancouver/Whistler area is beautiful, and the conference/ski combo makes for quite a trip.
MRI
A browser bookmarklet for web developers that allows you to test CSS selectors on any given page. The “suggest selectors” option seems particularly useful for troubleshooting inheritance issues.
The Marble of Doom
“… the OS X spinning wait cursor is well-known and well-dreaded by Mac users around the world.” Enter time wasted in OS X and commiserate with other other beachball (what I’ve always called it) watchers worldwide.
Is it Christmas?
Find out here.
The Human Icon T-Shirt
Please call my agent for more t-shirt modeling requests. Cottyn’s brand new tee is now available! And dare I say it’s the most comfortable shirt I’ve ever worn. Don’t even try to hack it this time, Mr. Rubin.
U-Haul's ems
Had to rent a van today to pick up a new/used dining room set. What I was surprised to find, is a fine example of an elastic (em-based) layout on a large corporate site.
Findings From the Web Design Survey
A List Apart’s beautifully organized PDF of April 2007’s first-ever survey of web design and development professionals. 33,000 responses of really useful and interesting data. Congrats to all involved.
Pixel It poster
“… consists of two layers of paper. Cuts on the white outer layer allow the user to fold parts out and therefore create a ‘Pixel-Structure’ by showing the coloured layer underneath.” Does want (via unstoppabot).
Premailer
A script that turns external CSS into inline, improving the rendering of HTML e-mail. The plain text output could also be useful.
Big Red Angry Text
“… a simple, but effective way to give an extreme visual example to show the editors that something has gone horribly wrong.” Clever way of calling out non-semantic elements via ugly CSS rules.
Location, location, location (doesn't matter as much)
Brian Oberkirch on current discussions regarding location (and whether it matters). See also our podcast from last year’s SXSW on the very same topic.
DeVillain Centerfold
The world’s first folding electric guitar. Crazy.
Are JPEGs the New Album Covers?
It’s the part I deeply miss about buying digital music: the art and the packaging.
The ThinkGeek 8-bit Tie
“What an awesome way for the drones of Cubeland to show their independence from Corporate America!” (via)
NoSquint
A Firefox extension that allows you to adjust the default text zoom level and remembers that per site.
Wine Ink.
Stewart Kenneth Moore: “I painted each picture here with just a glass of red wine and some paper or card. I sign my work with the name and vintage I used to create it.” Genius.
Ampersandland
A Flickr pool devoted to ampersands.
Boagworld Show 97
Where I try not to taint the infamous podcast with an interview about ems, pixels and percentages.
Radiohead: In Rainbows
Their new labeless album due out October 10th. If buying the digital download, you decide how much to pay for it. The music industry watches (or continues to keep blinders on).
My Star Wars Collection
Josh Budich created little pixel illustrations of his enormously huge Star Wars action figure collection. Jaw hits floor (via).
Webstock 2008
“5 full-on days. 9 hands-on workshops. 19 kick-ass speakers. 24 must-see presentations. Truckloads of design, development, user experience, web standards, content, community, innovation & inspiration.” It’d be an understatement to say I’m excited to visit (and present in) New Zealand next year. See you there?
Wire & Twine
“We are a group of designers, coders, screenprinters, photographers, artists, moms, dads, and down-to-earth people — and we like to make things.” Including cool tees.
The Talk Show
A must-listen podcast with your hosts, Mr. John Gruber and Mr. Dan Benjamin. Now sporting a new design by Airbag Industries.
Note to self: quit Parallels next time you want to watch and/or encode a DVD in OS X. Otherwise, the newly-inserted DVD is unrecognized by either OS, and the eject button is useless. You’re stuck. Once Parallels is shut down, the DVD shows up on the Desktop as usual. Yay.
HandBrake
An open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows. HandBrake painlessly turns a DVD into files suitable for Apple TV, iPhone and video iPod (as well as other tasks).
:-) turns 25 tomorrow
I’d be more interested in when the beer c(~) emoticon was invented, and by whom.
Maniacal Rage TV
Impressively done, and very funny pilot episode.
Photoshop for iPhone!
I wonder if double-clicking the headphone mic can be mapped to a keyboard shortcut (thanks Hivelogic).
The Rissington Podcast
A new podcast from officemates Jon Hicks and John Oxton.
Lake Michigan
Cannot wait for the new Rogue Wave album due out next week.
Bloxorz
Ridiculously addictive game.
Logology
Looks to be an interesting book of logo designs and case studies (love the embossed leather cover).
A Brief Message
Design opinions expressed in 200 words or less. A new venture from Khoi Vinh and Liz Danzico. Short and sweet rules the web.
There are no social networks
Cameron Adams: “If you don’t want to be part of the system, if you don’t want to play nice with others, if you think that you can be my social network, then you’re seriously mistaken.”
Airbag's guide to properly stealing design
Greg Storey doth speaks the truth: “There are no circumstances that will ever make it a good idea to link to the site you stole the design from … It’s how you’re going to be caught”.
Monoscope
I’ve been following this seemingly endless stream of visual inspiration ever since John Gruber linked it earlier this month. Wonderful stuff.
Regrets: Hobbies
Jim Coudal showed this film (by Steve Delahoyde) at An Event Apart Chicago as part of his hilarious and inspiring talk. My sides are still hurting (and it hits close to home).
Mobile Web Design
Cameron’s excellent book is now available for purchase. You can win an iPhone if you buy before September 14th.
The Markup & Style Society (meetup #2)
Bostonians, join Mr. Marcotte and I for a second installment of informal beers and conversation on September 26th. And do Let us know if you can make it — we’d love to see you there.
Eric Meyer's CSS Sculptor
A new CSS layout creator for Dreamweaver, whereby Mr. Meyer does the hard work for you. Also, best animated header graphic in the history of animated header graphics.
Retro MacOS Wordpress Theme
In all of it’s circa System 6 glory. The week after I bought my monochrome Mac Classic II, the Color Classic came out. And so started the cruel cycle of Apple product releases vs. my purchase dates. This beautiful theme helps dry my tears a bit (via).
What crisis?
Jeffrey Zeldman on the W3C: “But a glacial pace isn’t all bad, especially if you’re driving off a cliff (which I gather we are). Driving off a cliff at a glacial pace affords you the luxury to turn around. I loves me some glacial pace.”
Mobile Web Design, the book
Cameron Moll’s long awaited book will be available August 28th in PDF form. Excellentness.
Unstoppable Robot Ninja
The beautiful new home of Mr. Ethan Marcotte. I really hope the robot’s eyes blink on the t-shirt, too. Wait, there will be a t-shirt, right?
Jeffrey Zeldman: King of Web Standards
Jessie Scanlon’s Business Week article profiling Zeldman and his giant impact on the web.
Gary Vaynerchuk on Conan O'Brien tonight
Gary Vaynerchuk of Cork’d and Wine Library TV fame, will be a guest on Late Night with Conan O’Brien tonight. How cool is that? DVR set. Update: Gary was hilarious and had Conan eating grass, dirt and rocks.
XRAY
An ingenious bookmarklet from Westciv that exposes the box model for any element on the current page. Works with Safari and Mozilla browsers.
Type the sky
A photographic alphabet created by buildings and sky (via).
The Small Stakes posters
Beautiful silk screened music posters by Jason Munn.
Quote/unquote bookends
Clever design by Eric Janssen.
Bokardo Design
Fellow North Shore Bay Stater and social design whiz, Josh Porter, has announced the launch of his new company. Congrats!
Better Know A Speaker
A little interview with the fine folks of An Event Apart, where I’ll be speaking again in Chicago next month.
Digg on an iPhone
Daniel Burka: “When your primary input device is a honkin’ fat finger, it changes the way you think about links and buttons. Everything’s got to be bigger… way bigger.”
Typographica: Our Favorite Fonts of 2006
“… a set of 23 font releases that inspired our group of type designers and type users to pen their praises, and in many cases, to pony up some dough.” Estilo caught my eye, especially.
Gary Vaynerchuk featured in Time magazine
Totally Uncorked by Joel Stein: “I want to drink whites at room temperature so I can really taste them, and hell, yes, I want to get my mom to try something other than Yellow Tail, and goddam, I do want to break up these stupid cliques of Pinot Grigio chicks and Pinot Noir snobs and Chardonnay old ladies.”
Color Inspiration from the Masters of Painting
An article on pulling color palettes from famous paintings.
12 years of zeldman.com
Zeldman.com turned 12 last month (holy cow, congrats!) and Jeffrey posting retrospective “best of”s featuring past Daily Report gems — still in their original clothes.
dConstruct 2007: User Experience Design Conference
September 7th in Brighton, England. Great lineup and great site for the event as well. Love the clickable timeline switcher at the top that dynamically takes you from wireframe through final design.
Distinguished Characters: Modern classics of type design
Profiling type designers Matthew Carter, Zuzana Licko, Sumner Stone and Gerard Unger. The MyFonts email newsletters consistently have great type info, interviews with designers, etc. Recommended for discovering new (and old) type.
Wine for the Masses, Courtesy of the 'Average Guy'
A nice profile of the new Cork’d commander-in-chief, Gary Vaynerchunk, over at ABC News.
Blaise Aguera y Arcas: Photosynth demo
“Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation.” Incredible stuff from the TED conference. Via Dunstan.
Creating wood grain texture in Photoshop
Using built-in filters and a single background color, this simple little tutorial worked like a charm.
Building Community Focused Web Apps with Rails
I’m hearing Dan Benjamin gave a great presentation at RailsConf last week in Portland, where he talked about building Cork’d. The slides are up in PDF and Keynote format (featuring excellent movie screenshots, I might add).
An Event Apart Chicago opens its doors
“Tickets are now available for An Event Apart Chicago, August 27–28, 2007, at the Chicago Marriott Downtown. It’s two days of web standards, best practices, and creative inspiration from … amazing thought leaders and artists.” See you there I hope?
The Human Icon T-Shirt
Ryan Sims grabs a couple Sharpies and creates “… my human icon shirt. So people will stop thieving my torso.” Hilariousness! We’ll see if it works.
Halvorsen
Recently found and purchased. Possibly for an upcoming project.
MTV.com
MTV relaunches this week, swapping the previous all-Flash design with fast and clean HTML. I’ve been working with them for the past few months, consulting on template code and CSS guidance. High fives to the team. Read more about the redesign, and also about the cool new rotating “hats” (logo/background art) produced by various artists.
Airbag fills up
“Airbag Industries LLC, a California corporation and Vertua Studios of Cambridge, Massachusetts have merged operations effective April 1st, 2007. Ethan Marcotte, founder of Vertua Studios will lead all of Airbag’s web standards development.” Congrats, Airbaggers (an undecidedly endearing term)!
The Web Design Survey, 2007
A List Apart asks: “People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession. Who are we? Where do we live? What are our titles, our skills, our educational backgrounds? Where and with whom do we work? What do we earn? What do we value?” The answers will surely be interesting and highly valuable — if you take the survey. Yes, you.
Coda: one-window web development
From Panic, comes an all-in-one development environment for interface designers. I haven’t tried it yet, but if the text editor is solid, this could be heaven.
POSH
A newly-coined acronym for Plain Old Semantic HTML, POSH is “… a simple short mnemonic term that captures the essence of the concept, and is easily verbed (to posh, poshify, poshed up)”.
Meloriac
“… a pseudo-retro, unicase display font. An obvious tribute to Futura Ultra-Mega-Freakin’-Black and Avant Garde Heavy Heavy Heavy Heavy; Meloriac is ideal for tight headlines and logos. Squish! When we say tight kerning, we mean disco-slacks-tight 1970s kerning.”
Let’s say you were in the market for a label printer. And let’s also say you’re on a Mac. Don’t bother with Brother. Get the Dymo that costs a little bit more, but doesn’t require a driver that never ends up working (when’s the last time you needed to install a driver on a Mac?) and that comes with software that works like you’d expect label printer software to work (hello terrible Windows 3.1 port!).
That’s all for now. Label on.
SimpleFools
A Flickr pool of yesterday’s April Fool’s logo hijinx. I’m still chuckling over each and every one of these. Bravo, folks!
Something tells me my legal team is going to be very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very (Update: very very) busy tonight. Note to self: get a legal team!
I probably missed some (Lauren Smith has a comprehensive list here), but I love you all. Hilarious!
Hello Chalkwork
Dave Shea releases a beautiful set of stock icons.
Learning Interaction Design from Las Vegas
I only caught the first half of Dan Saffer’s presentation due to our panel directly following it, but what I heard was a really interesting comparison to Vegas and user experience.
Web Typography Sucks
One of the many presentations I meant to see but didn’t at SXSW this year. By Richard Rutter and Mark Boulton.
Hivelogic T-Shirt
Featuring the newly-introduced (and SimpleBits-designed) logo, which also “helps reduce the damaging effects of lower temperatures on beings without an exoskeleton, such as reptiles and humans.”
Chewbacca mimobot
Awesome USB keychain drive seen at the SXSW tradeshow.
Five Principles to Design By
Joshua Porter: “In a great irony of the world, bad design is much easier to see than good design. It raps us on the head like a bully. Because of its success, great design is often invisible.” I had just typed up a presentation slide titled “Great Typography is Invisible”. Lots of head-nodding throughout Josh’s post.
Where is Your Startup? Does it Matter?
I’ll be sharing a panel with Brian Oberkirch next week at SXSW. We’ll be talking about ValleySpeak for the Rest of Us: Developing Apps Outside of InternetVille AKA: how location might play into buidling web apps these days. Looking forward to it (and the return to Austin as well).
Where Our Standards Went Wrong
“I found that approximately fifteen percent of my time was spent mired in invalid code.” Ethan Marcotte on validation and web standards at A List Apart.
A design pattern for image and figure alignment
Chris Messina’s non-presentational classes for floated (and non-floated) figures. The magic happens when feed readers adopt!
Synchronized Fangs
The result of browsing a search for “dog” on Flickr to amuse the Little One while checking email.
How to Make Square Corners with CSS
“Below is our coveted 84 step process for creating beautiful square corners. Follow our lead and you’ll soon be basking in splendid perpendicular glory.” Via Twitter.
Planet Microformats
A giant master feed of anything and everything tagged with “microformats” from Brian Suda.
Happy Cog relaunches
Beautiful redesign unveiled today with new structure, new look, new words, new semantics, etc.
Stikkit API
Values of n opens the back door to Stikkit. Surely there’s some really cool stuff to come out of this.
Building Ruby, Rails, Mongrel, and MySQL on Mac OS X
A major update to Dan Benjamin’s soup-to-nuts tutorial. If you want to run Rails on your Mac, go read this now.
Brusheezy
Rate and download free custom Photoshop brushes and patterns. Looks to be recently launched, but promising.
Mint 2: The Freshmaker
Shaun Inman releases a big update to his popular and invaluable stats tool. There’s also a fresh coat of paint on his personal site. Bravo!
Fishing With Sandy
Jack Handey: “Dexterous as he is, he has broken about seven or eight of my fly rods … When I got it back from Sandy, he had tried to tape it back together with a piece of black electrical tape. The tape didn’t hold, but just making the gesture was so Sandy.”
BookCrossing
Mark a book you’ve read with an ID number, leave it in a public place, then watch others pick it up, read it and log journal entries about it. A bit like Where’s George?, but for books (and less illegal!).
@media 2007
The tri-continental web conference site goes live, in a trippy, “Magical Mystery Tour”-esque design.
Bulletproof Ajax
A new book by Jeremy Keith for front-end developers. I couldn’t think of a better author to carry on the “bulletproof” adjective to another aspect of web development. Look for it next month.
Twitterrific
A little Mac desktop application designed by Iconfactory that lets you read and publish Twitter posts. I’d been playing with the beta, and it’s really useful if you’re into Twittering. Especially the auto hide/show based on new posts.
The Office: The Best of Andy Bernard
Well, it is Friday after all.
AEA Boston Registration is open!
There’s an early-bird discount through February 26, but SimpleBits readers can save an additional $50 by entering the following coupon code at checkout: AEACEDE. A full schedule of the kick-ass two-day event has also been posted. I certainly hope to see you there.
Max Fischer: Official Uniform T-Shirt
“Inspired and modeled after the attire worn at Rushmore Academy, this full-print t-shirt features a collared shirt, loosened tie, and navy velvet jacket wrapped into one easy-to-wear piece. To top it off, we are including two very special pins that will add the final flair to your ensemble (and truly need no explanation).” Brilliant. (via)
Hivelogic podcast
Dan Benjamin interviews Daring Fireball’s John Gruber about what we might see from Apple at next week’s MacWorld 2007.
Had a great chat with Brian Oberkirch earlier this morning, and it’s been posted in the form of the latest episode in his ever-growing “Edgework” series of podcast interviews. Brian’s amassed some 50 interviews with interesting people from all over the web, and he continually has his finger on the pulse of what’s happening out there. Great stuff.
I’ll also be sharing a mini panel (I believe “power session” is the term they’re using for these half-sized slots) with Brian at SXSW this year, where we’ll be talking about creating web apps outside of the Valley.
Röntgenschall
Setting out to be the first band in history to tour online. Also loved this in the footer: “It’s private, non-profit and supernaturally beautiful.” (via)
Some Cork'd updates
Buddy icons (finally!) and improved buddy search. Get on over there and upload away, my fellow wine fans.
Operator
A new Firefox plugin that does some very cool stuff by extracting microformats, then using that information on various sites and applications.
Return to Letterpress
Jason Santa Maria’s further adventures with letterpress. Inspiring stuff. *Shuffles off to find local letterpress class*
Problems with font rendering on Macs
Richard Rutter gives us a side-by-side comparison of type displayed in various browsers. Camino 1.2 and Safari come out on top.
Mezzoblue: Fountain
Dave gives the site a nice refresh, adding a custom color palette based on a particular photo for his archives. Very nice.
DS Buttons
Wear your desire to battle strangers on your Nintendo DS Lite, in button form. I just received a sample pack of these little guys, and I must say they are the bomb (oh wait, I still don’t have a DS Lite though. Oopsie).
Coming soon from Mark Simonson
Three new fonts inspired by the hand-lettered titles in 1940s films.
Firebug 1.0 Beta Screencast
Seeing is believing. Firebug looks to be an incredibly handy tool for web developers. (via)
Tanya Merone
Love the simplicity of this one-page portfolio.
I just read a really interesting blog post on color theory from the perspective of a former Hanna-Barbera background painter by the name of Art Lozzi. Examples of his work on the Yogi Bear cartoon are used to explain his tips on using color via the tools of the time: namely brushes, sponges, chalk, etc. I found the bit about a main background color (he chose “salmon” because Yogi looked good on it) peeking through other layers particularly interesting:
You can see the peach sky in the little holes in the hills where the sponge didn’t paint. This gives the effect of mixing the main BG color with the other colors in the BG and it ties them all into one harmonious color scheme.
This sort of “layering” to create a unified theme is certainly made easier these days with Photoshop, etc. (as pointed out in the Drawn! post that led me to this). Great stuff.
I’m getting a kick out of following referrer links to this site that describe the recent unstyling of SimpleBits as shocking, lazy, unprofessional, disappointing or all of the above. Not to worry — this was meant to be a very temporary excercise, and one that’ll be over in probably just a day or two. But I have to say, it’s been fun — and it’s spreading!
eboy's FooBar poster
Spot the web logos (including Rollyo!). There is already one of these currently en route to SimpleBits HQ. (via)
Dave's lunch
But specifically, the beer (Blanche du Chambly) — a really great beer I also tried once in Quebec City. Mmm.