Meandering writings about the web, business, code, design, people, life, the universe and everything. If you're here for a reason, forget it.
Beautiful Things: A Letter From My Great Uncle
My gran discovered this old letter, written from her brother to her sister during World War 2 (she thinks — we can’t actually make out the date). The subdued colours of the stamps, the old print and type, and the texture of the paper are beautiful, so I photographed it for the collection.
Beautiful Things: Typography Sketchbooks
Typography Sketchbooks by Steven Heller and Lita Talarico arrived today. It’s cover-to-cover loveliness, full of mid-process images from the sketchbooks of typographers and designers. The kind of thing you can take in for hours on end.
I’ve posted a few quick photos below (also just discovered that Typetoken have a much better set).
Designers & Developers: Imagine That
I’ve been following the #MakeTime hash tag today, as the Good for Nothings have been doing their thing, making stuff at an incredible rate, and having a blast (I’m more than a little envious). Intoxicated by the photos of a room full of designers and developers, I wrote the following post.
A room full of designers and developers holds so much potential.
This Is How We Reconnect
We should interact with music and film makers, not with marketing departments and distribution systems.
We should interact with those who actually make our food, rather than the conglomerates through which it is distributed. And food makers should interact with the producers of raw ingredients.
A Quick, Personal Guide to Problem Solving
(This is mostly a personal reminder, based on personal observations. I’d be interested to know if your experiences are similar/different.)
We’re all capable of producing brilliant solutions to challenging problems, which is good, because this is exactly what the world needs more of. In my own experience, however, it’s easy to allow the problem solving process to become compromised, and accept solutions that are not as good as they could be.
The Do Lectures
I recently attended the Do Lectures – an annual event held in a stunning location in West Wales, often referred to as a conference, although I don’t think that word describes the experience very well at all. Since then, I’ve been asked numerous times what it was like, and haven’t been able to explain it – there’s a lot to say, and a lot that can’t be said. So, in an attempt to tidy up my thoughts, I’ve written them down here.
One of the things that makes Do special is the intensity of the whole experience. Attendees, speakers and staff all sleep in tents. They drink local brews together in an exceptionally small pub. They gather around the campfire into the early hours, listening to the music of talented local musicians. They get little sleep, yet they enthusiastically attend ten lectures a day, and eagerly launch into conversations with complete strangers – the kind of conversations that many would only dare to have with old friends.
Semantic Markup for a Single Page Web App
PHRASE is our recent entry for 10k Apart. It uses analysis of the characters in user inputted text to generate circular patterns, like these:
Whilst writing the markup for the application’s single page, a few interesting decisions came up regarding semantics and the use of HTML5 elements. Here’s a brief run-down:
Beautiful Things: Painting with Molten Glass
Everything about this beautifully shot short film is wonderful. It’s the work of Filmmaker Alistair Banks Griffin combined with the art of Etsuko Ichikawa. The film was commissioned by The Anthpropologist and you’ll find some very nice still shots along with quotes from Etsuko on their website.
#163 365 Ideas: The New Challenge is Discovery
The traditional music industry is a good example of a flawed system of discovery: Artists have bodies of work, and perhaps very local, very small audiences (relatively speaking). A large record label selects an incredibly small percentage of these artists, whose body of work they promote and distribute to a much larger audience. This is how the majority of audiences currently discover new music – via the marketing efforts of a large organisation (directly or not) that has little to do with the artist-audience relationship, other than a profit motive.
When music had to be transferred using physical items, such as records or CDs, record labels made sense: they distributed these physical goods. This is now taken care of in much more efficient ways, and artists can distribute their work to whoever wants to hear it, instantly and almost free, via the internet. The problem of dscovery – making the connection between artists and listeners – still exists, however, and although there are some attempts at a solution, I think we’ll look back on these as rudimentary and largely ineffective.
#162 365 Ideas: Comments
I recently came across this challenge on Mozilla’s Drumbeat.org and it struck me that the whole idea of “fixing” content commentary misses the point somewhat. Commenting isn’t broken, it just isn’t happening in the way that content publishers want it to.
Commentary on content is the healthiest it’s ever been. Huge, broadly used social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, smaller niche forums, and even local pubs and coffee shops all accommodate these conversations extremely well, and they’re happening more and more. As they happen more, the quality of the discussion inevitably expands in both directions—getting simultaneously better and worse—and people have more opportunity to engage in whichever parts of it interest them the most.
