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Brian and Carolyn make funny faces
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Brian and Carolyn make funny faces
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Cheese
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Hanging out on St. Patty's Day
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Hanging out on St. Patty's Day
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Twitter Is Dumb, But I’m Stupid
Scrivs encapsulates my exact feelings on Twitter. I can’t get into it myself, but that doesn’t mean I think it’s not going to be successful. Obviously, it’s hugely popular right now and if the guys can find a great way to monetize it, they’ll do very, very well — at least for a while.
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Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2007 Sessions
I wish I could go, just for Developing Cocoa Applications with Python and Ruby. It’s so awesome that Apple is making these two languages first-class Cocoa development environments with Leopard. I really hope they take off.
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Letterhead Fonts embraces DRM
The foundry (which has long been a favorite of mine for display type), has added DRM for their fonts, and placed ludicrous restrictions on them, such as the inability to embed them in PDFs and incompatibilities with font management programs like Suitcase. Sad, really sad. These guys do great work, but if they really believe this will help their business instead of hurt it, they are downright crazy. It’s one thing to try to stop the rampant font piracy. It’s another thing entirely to not let me embed your typeface in the most popular digital format in existence.
This help no one. It won’t stop piracy (music has shown us that), it makes paying customer’s jobs harder, and it’s going to drastically cut into sales for Letterhead.
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Digital Web: Redesigning the ExpressionEngine Site
Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain covers his design process in great detail as he helps redesign the ExpressionEngine site for Ellis Labs. This great piece is part of The Working Designer, which looks to be a great news series from Digital Web. Stay tuned — I’m slated to write one of these articles myself. :)
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22 different fonts used on front page of LA Times redesign
Cartoonist Daryl Cagle counted 22 different fonts in use above the fold on the front page, and decided it looked more like a ransom note than a newspaper. Unbelievable.
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Polar Clock Screensaver
Let me preface this by saying that I am not a screensaver guy. With that out of the: damn this OS X screensaver kicks ass! Beautiful time visualization. Love it. Thanks, Nix.
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Highrise
The latest app from 37signals looks like another beauty. You can get a limited free account, but it seems like you have to pay $50/mo. for the cases feature, which seems like the most killer part of the deal. Nonetheless, $50/mo is a small price to pay for someone who really needs this kind of app (and there are lots of those people). All in all, looks great — which is no surprise, judging by the quality of the other 37signals apps. Check it out.
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Josiah Cole: 19 Things NOT To Do When Building a Website
These are all written in a “do what I say or else you suck, no questions asked” kind of manner, but the messages are generally good. I wish people writing this stuff would understand that there are no absolutes — it’s just inaccurate to say, “there is never a reason for an all-Flash website.” But, there are good rules of thumb that apply to at least 90% of cases, and this is a pretty good list of them (even if the writer thinks they apply to 100%).
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The Principles of Beautiful Web Design by Jason Beaird
Jason’s new book has a kick-ass website to go along with it. Congrats, Jason!
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Subtraction: Oh Yeeaahh!
Khoi has a post up about he and Mark’s terrific SXSW presentation about grid-based design. Slides, screenshots of his Yahoo! redesign,and more included. If you weren’t at SXSW, this is a must-see.
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Faux Lomo and Holga Photoshop scripts
I’m no expert on Lomo and Holga photography, but these seems to approximate the effects pretty darn well to me. Fun. Thanks, .sara!
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Playground Blues: Make Flash and Javascript Sing
Nathan has a nice little tutorial on how to make Flash play nice with Javascript, so that you can call Actionscript functions from Javascript and vice-versa. This is exactly the type of interaction between web standards and Flash that I’ve been wanting to see. Be sure to check his example wherein a playlist in HTML triggers Flash videos to start. Rally good stuff.
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Very Wrong, Only 17, not “50 Beautiful CSS-Based Web-Designs in 2006”
Yet another asshole trying to make a name for himself by publicly bashing websites of popular designers. He thinks my website is the most egregious offense of all. When will people learn that being a dickweed doesn’t get you anywhere in life?
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shaunline.com: SXSW Sunday
Another positive review of our Design Workflows panel. Good to hear about more people liking it as I read these blogs. Seems like at least as many people liked it as didn’t — the naysayers were just very loud very early, I think. :)
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Jeremy Keith on Design Workflows and SXSW 2007
“So, for something like Brian’s talk on the Mobile Web, I was expecting some good no-nonsense practical advice and that’s exactly what I got. Whereas for something like the Design Workflows panel, I was expecting a nice fireside chat amongst top-notch designers and that’s exactly what I got. That’s not to say the panel wasn’t prepared. Just take one look at the website of the panel which is a thing of beauty.”
Thanks, Jeremy. I’m glad you liked it. This shows once again that it all boils down to expectations. Those who knew what they were getting into liked it. Those who didn’t, didn’t. Jeremy probably had a better idea what he was getting into because he’d seen the questions as one of our interviewees.
Lesson learned: set people up with accurate expectations of what they’ll be getting in your panel/presentation.
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Helvetica Screening at AIGA Kansas City May 1&2
I’m there. I missed it at Southby and everyone has been saying how wonderful it is. Doesn’t look like you can buy tix yet, though.
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Finale: the show with zefrank
Ze does it right, with a simple thank you and some highlights. Thank you, too, Ze. It’s been a fun ride. Good luck in Hollywood.
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SXSW 2007 Infographic
Naz Hamid rocks a Feltron-esque infographic chronicling his time at Southby. Very cool.
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Wilson MIner: The problem with pixels
Wilson reacts (in agreement) to my point from the SXSW typography presentation about why it’s not so bad to size text in an absolute unit (like pixels) instead of a relative unit (like ems). He also outlines a philosophy he’s been using lately, which I think is perfect:
The principle I’ve been operating from recently is to design for the first page load in an ideal environment, while allowing for flexibility in non-ideal, unintended and user-modified environments.
Love it. Welcome back to the blogosphere, Wilson.
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Looks like someone is bored tonight (or maybe drunk).
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Looks like someone is bored tonight (or maybe drunk).
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Pentagram: TIME Magazine redesign
Time has been redesigned by the great team at Pentagram. Looks great in the photos — I might have to go pick up a copy to see it closer. I heart good editorial design.
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siliconsoul: SXSW 2007 Day 2
Just another mini-review of Design Workflow at Work
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Crazy Characters at SXSW: Day 2
Oh man, this is great. Varick Rosete sketched people at SXSW — including me and my panelmates. Even got my dark circles under my eyes and a little shark nibbling on my finger. Killer. I love it.
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SxSW Diary: Design Workflows at Work notes
Another nice set of notes, which seem mostly positive. Maybe some people actually liked this thing, after all. :)
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Traces of Inspiration: Design Workflows at Work notes
Great, comprehensive notes of our panel at SXSW.
I’m really amazed at how little of the panel I actually remember. I had a lot of notes in front of me — thing I really wanted to say, if the moment presented itself (this was a free-form discussion and not a structured presentation). I don’t think I actually looked at the notes once during the panel, and I left feeling like I probably forgot to say all of these things. Thanks to these notes, I now realize I did actually say most of what I intended to — and I feel a lot better about the panel because of it.
It may not have been exactly what everyone in the audience wanted, but I’m starting to realize that we really were successful in doing what we wanted. So, that’s something.
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James Asher: SXSWi 2007 Day 3 Review
It’s becoming a theme in the blog entries I’m reading that people liked the second half of the panel much better than the first. Thanks for the review, James. And yes, I do need to stop worrying about how it went — but so far, no luck on that front.
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On Writing Better
The future home of the website that accompanies Greg, Ethan, Bronwyn, and Erin’s great SXSW panel on writing.
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Jeff Jewiss
Nice-looking blog design using almost exclusively CSS. I only spotted one image — the background pattern. A good example of CSS being used well for typography.
(Not that I think we should avoid images — I’m just saying.)
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Triple OT: The 50th Anniversary of 1957 Championship
A nice example of multimedia storytelling over at KUSports.com. I put together the initial design for this one, but David Ryan and Christian Metts, our newest designer, took it to the next level while I was away at Southby. Great work, guys.
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SXSWi 2007: Panels, parties, and VIP areas
I’m back in Lawrence after a long trip down to Austin with Matt, Nathan, and Michelle. As per usual, SXSW interactive was a blast. Also as per usual, it was the people that really made it so. I saw several good panels and presentations, but the real reason to go to SXSW is the relationship. Meeting people for the first time face-to-face, re-meeting those you met last year, and generally enjoying the good company is what it’s all about.
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A Journey's End
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A Journey's End
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The Morning News: South by South-BEST!
Todd Levin has a funny and sarcastic take on SXSWi. Good stuff.
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SXSW Panel/Presentation podcasts
Looks like SXSW is doing a better job of getting podcasts online faster this year. There’s still a lot to add, but there’s already a good handful there for your listening.
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Jeff Croft
I’m a digital product designer and developer in Seattle, WA. I currently work with Simply Measured, and recently co-founded Lendle, a Kindle book sharing service.
Some of my past clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Copious, The New York Review of Books, Django, The Lawrence Journal-World, and the University of Washington.
I’ve authored two books on web and interactive design and spoken at dozens of conferences around the world.
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