A nice video detailing the history and business model of Pentagram. Hillman Curtis’ shorts are always good, so be sure to check out the others on the site while you’re there. Visit site »
If you love end-of-the-year lists like I do, you have to check out Rex’s list of lists, which he’s putting together yet again this year. Thanks, Rexy! Visit site »
I”m a fan of Shepard Fairey, so I am no doubt biased. But, I don’t see why it strikes anyone as surprising that Fairey uses other people’s imagery in his work.
To me, Fairey is much more graphic designer than he is artist. Us designers make quite a little habit of compiling graphics, type, photos, and the like from disparate sources into new compositions. It’s what we do.
Fairey shouldn’t try to pawn off the appropriations of other people’s work as his own any more than Dr. Dre should claim that he wrote the musical hook for California Love (he didn’t, it’s from Joe Cocker’s “Woman to Woman”) or Notorious B.I.G. should claim he created the groove for Big Poppa (it’s a sample from The Isley Brother’s “Between the Sheets”) — but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t use it. Borrowing bits and pieces of material and working them into a new original composition is hardly plagiarism.
Fairey samples, just like musical artists do all the time. What’s the big deal? Visit site »
My co-worker and good friend Tom Watson covers the basics of information architecture in this post at the Blue Flavor blog. The Blue Flavor blog is more active than ever, with new articles about web design and our industry being posted every week. Subscribe, yo! Visit site »
An absolutely wronderful post regarding the prevelance of silly arguments about tools and technologies in our industry. A few choice quotes:
On the web, whenever there is no clear advantage of one technology over another, conflict arises. You have people entrenched on both sides of the debate of which technology is better. What is not seen is that neither side is inherently right or wrong. Rightness is only determined by what creates tranquility in the person using the tool.
And…
The main goal is not to choose some arbitrarily correct right tool, because what may be the bee’s knees to one developer may be chopped liver to another. It’s usually not that extreme, but the point is that often arguing over particular technologies is like arguing over favorites colors. The only winners are the ones that choose the tools that suit themselves the best.
Amen. Visit site »
Jon’s post is really good and worth reading, but I’m actually linking to Joe Clark’s comment on it, in which he states, “Jeff is getting craftier at restating his ‘Real code isn’t all that important’ ideology.” I’m not quite sure what “real code” means, but I found it amusing to hear Joe put words in my mouth.
Since I don’t know what he means by “real code,” I can’t speak to whether or not he’s accurately paraphrasing my thoughts. The only code I can call myself any kind of expert on is HTML and CSS, and in the case of those, my only “ideology” is to write clean code that is as semantic as possible (in the case of HTML) and as valid as possible within the constraints of a given project (budget, timeframe, etc.). I can only presume this is what Joe’s referring to. Visit site »
If you ignore the tired “getting real” brand masturbation, there are some really good thoughts in here.
In fact, that could be said about pretty much every post on SVN. Visit site »
Just ordered the world’s greatest ping pong table. Hoping it’ll make it here for the Blue Flavor holiday party on Friday. w00t!
Heading into the office (yes, late.).
This Saturday, Djangonauts the world over will come together, physically and virtually, to “sprint” towards Django 1.0. Django had a sprint back in September, too, and it was hugely productive. Looking forward to see what comes of this one. Visit site »
Heroes fucking sucked tonight. Are we on replacement writers now, or something?