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: Carol & John’s Comic Book Shop by Mikey Burton
Beautiful, simple and bold identity work from Mikey Burton for Carol & John’s Comic Book Shop—a small comic book shop in Ohio. You’ll find more shots here, and more of Mikey’s work at his portfolio site. Lovely stuff.
#161 365 Ideas: The “What We’re Working On” App
In the midst of being hopelessly distracted by this list by Jonathan Hoefler of Hoefler+Frere-Jones, it struck me that sharing the things we’re working on could be a good basis for a new app. There are plenty of very broad platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and even ListGeeks, but I think there’s plenty of room for services at the opposite end of the spectrum, with a more specific purpose. Here’s how this might work:
Users register, create a list of things they’re working on—with attached external links where appropriate—and publish the list. A published list can be easily syndicated via RSS, as well as via an HTML or JavaScript snippet for pasting into websites, and various plugins and extensions for popular publishing and social platforms. Each list item becomes a forum thread for discussion, which can also be syndicated.
Beautiful Things: Kill Your Timid Notion Identity by Jez Burrows
The other day, I came across this lovely work by Jez Burrows for the 2010 Kill Your Timid Notion festival, two examples from which are shown below. I especially love the iconic diagrams that he created to represent different events and ideas contained within the festival.
You’ll find more from this project on Jez’ website, which is well worth some browsing time. Also interesting are upcoming publications from Sing Statistics. Oh, and if you know Radiolab, look into this too.
A Holistic Approach: Idea First, Then Content, Then Device
Once there were web pages, then came varying screen resolutions, and now we have mobile devices, screen readers, and the Retina display. Content and the delivery of that content are necessarily becoming more and more detached. Several thoughtful, experienced and clever people have picked up on this increasing gulf between content and device, and are talking about how it may be good for the design process, and might better serve the content.
Mark Boulton‘s post, A Richer Canvas, provides a good summary of his presentation at New Adventures in January about designing from the “content out,” rather than “canvas in” (well worth a watch, when the videos are released). Just the other day, Jeremy Keith posted Content First, which discusses the importance of starting with the content, rather than the device.
Beautiful Things: Typographic Posters by Alex Varanese
It’s quite rare find a style as distinctive, yet eclectic as that of Alex Varanese, and it makes for a very strong combination. I especially love these three topographic posters, based on Alex’s own typeface designs. You’ll find plenty more here, and the rest of his portfolio site is well worth some browsing time.
This is interesting too—lovely stuff.
#160 365 Ideas: Important Things are Handcrafted
Spending a few days working with someone who is using some of our open-source software, to help them get it just right for their particular use case, is completely un-scalable. We can’t do this for everyone who needs a more customised solution, but we can do it for one or two, and we should. The process is important: we gain knowledge of the software being used “in-the-wild” and we gain in-depth knowledge of a user’s direct experience with it. We also improve the software, learn what the next iteration might benefit from, and find bugs that we may not otherwise have uncovered. Most importantly, though, we help someone get the very most out of the thing that we created, which motivates us to create more, to improve what we already have, and to keep looking for more things to do by hand, in a personal and tailored fashion.
Taking the time to look through a new Twitter follower’s website, learn more about them—what they do, who they are, what they care about—is completely un-scalable. It would be inconceivable to do this each end every time someone new followed me (well, perhaps not—I’m not the world’s most popular Twitter user), but for the occasional one—the ones whose bios seem particularly interesting—it’s perfectly feasible. This way, I often learn something new, and regularly discover incredibly interesting things, places and ideas that I would otherwise never have known.
Beautiful Things: Colour of Series — Rainbow by Simon C Page
A lovely piece of work by Simon C Page. The colours here are beautiful, and the design does everything possible to show them off to their full potential.
You’ll find this available as a high quality print at In Print, and you’ll find more in Simon’s impressive gallery of available prints. If you just you can’t get enough, try his portfolio site too.
Beautiful Things: Japanese Touch Wood Phone Ad
This is amazing, and must have taken a very long time to set up. There’s a wonderful atmosphere created by the cinematography and setting, but the real genius here is the idea, coupled with the fact that someone actually made this happen—there must have been so many opportunities to write this off as impossible and do something else instead. Quite a feat, and a stunning end result. Inspiring.
#159 365 Ideas: Be Personal
I enjoyed this post by Tina Roth Eisenberg today. She writes about how Mailchimp, the sponsor of her Creative Mornings gatherings, are making a custom slide for each separate event, designed with the guest speaker in mind. If you look at the slides they’ve designed so far, you’ll notice that they have nothing to do with Mailchimp, other than a small, discrete logo tucked away in the bottom corner. And they probably don’t even need that—everyone knows who made them.
By creating something personal, based on the life or work of the individual speaker, Mailchimp are connecting with many more people, in a much more natural way that they would by simply showing a large logo, or even a clever—but not personal—advert. These slides are easily related to by the people in the room (their audience), and for the few seconds that they’re the focus of attention, they tie these people together in a moment of joint understanding. They bring together the audience and the guest speaker, and in doing so make a meaningful connection.
Navigating Between Blog Posts with jQuery Keyboard Shortcuts
We recently added a quick and simple way for you to navigate from one post to the next, with the push of a button. On any post on this blog, you can now use the ← and → arrow keys on your keyboard to move to the previous or next post, chronologically.
Combine this with the work we’ve been doing to speed up page loading, and browsing between posts has become just as quick as—probably even quicker than—turning the pages of a book. Go ahead, try it, hit the left-arrow ← to view the last post. You’ll be amazed at just how quickly you can flick through the pages.
