09.20.13 |
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I’ve written here earlier on how amazing the PS3 game The Last of Us is, on both a narrative and cinematic level. So there’s a sense of validation when Art of the Title, which usually focuses on classic film openers, highlights the game’s title sequence. It’s a bit nuts to hear what the creative directors went through to get what’s basically a time lapsed fungal growth captured on film. In the words of title sequence director Kevin Joelson:
So I found some slime mould stuff and some YouTube videos and hacked something together. Within three days we had our foundation…I ended up taking it to my house and growing some there with my wife watching the cameras. We shot everything camera raw so that we had the most to work with. By the end of those two weeks I had a pretty severe cold, I think from all the spores and slime moulds, but it had to get done.
09.19.13 |
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“Stanley Kubrick”, writing in McSweeneys (with a little help from Chris Okum):
If the heat is not at it’s absolute lowest, the crust on the French toast will turn a darker shade of brown, almost black, and while it is perfectly acceptable to eat a piece of French toast with slightly blackened crust marks, it is not aesthetically pleasing, at least not to my eye…You must care about the French toast. If you don’t care about the French toast, then perhaps you don’t care about anything is my train of thought on the matter, and if you don’t care about anything, then working for me doesn’t seem feasible, as I have an insatiable desire to be surrounded by people who care as much as I do.
09.18.13 |
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Web developer Brad Frost:
It’s time for us to treat performance as an essential design feature, not just as a technical best practice.
Some may interpret Brad’s post as a shot against a traditional web design workflow. It is, and rightfully so. Too often, both in my own career and in talking with other developers, designers run off the Photoshop deep end without a lot of developer collaboration. They create something that is gorgeous, groundbreaking but in the end really slow. Or a team’s focus is just on shipping new web functionality without considering the performance impact.
Successful teams consider and optimize for performance. As Brad emphasizes, get into prototype form earl and if it’s too slow revise immediately.
09.17.13 |
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This guest post by free-to-play consultant Ethan Levy on Kotaku was interesting, but I’ve flip flopped on my feelings on it. I planned to first link to it pointing out some of Levy’s strong arguments, but at rereading it a few times he comes off harsh and defensive with his audience.
Levy makes a fair point about changing economics and tastes of the audience, and how a free-to-play model can lower the risks for developers:
On the development side, a free-to-play game lowers the risk involved in making a game. A developer is able to release a high quality game that represents a fraction of the total vision, and if players think it is fun and justify it by spending money, the developer can continue to improve the game for months or years on end.
But at the same time, there’s a “business first” tone in the article; a lack of financial support for traditional games forces studios to jump to free-to-play. But I think there is a lot of support for more traditional gaming, especially on mid budget indie releases. Furthermore, many genres of games, especially those with a longer, single player narrative (e.g. The Last of Us) just can’t adapt to free-to-play. We need a strong market for these games as well. If gaming markets sees dollars only around free-to-play, we could lose a lot of gaming diversity. We’re seeing these problems already seep heavily into EA’s latest game releases along with mobile gaming.
09.16.13 |
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Emmet LiveStyle is a Chrome extension paired with a Sublime Text plugin that transforms your CSS workflow. Install both tools and you get no BS live bi-directional CSS editing. To put it another way, either tweak in Chrome DevTools, your Sublime Text CSS file or both, and the changes immediately take effect on your page.
Admittedly LiveStyle isn’t perfect. First you have to be committed to Sublime Text as a text editor (which I’d highly recommend, but it isn’t for everyone). Setup can be sometimes annoying; when you switch to the tool in DevTools you’re often forced to assign CSS files you’re editing manually. Also it’s in beta, so expect occasional stability problems. But for the most part when you start getting in a CSS editing groove it’s pretty awesome.
09.13.13 |
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John Siracusa:
If the time of the game console is not yet at an end (handheld or otherwise), then Nintendo has a lot of work to do. It needs to get better at all of the game-related things that iOS is good at. It needs to produce software that clearly demonstrates the value of its hardware—or, if that’s not possible, then it needs to make new hardware…
…Nintendo needs to do what Nintendo does best: create amazing combinations of hardware and software. That’s what has saved the company in the past, and it’s the only thing that will ensure its future.
I agree with Siracusa; Daring Fireball’s John Gruber and others that disagree I think are missing the potential of the current market. We may be clearly moving in the direction of multi functional platforms that can do more than play games. But, as Siracusa points out, as long as there’s a strong market for dedicated gaming devices that offer a richer, more immersive experience (I think next-gen console sales will reflect this), Nintendo still has a shot with its hardware and software combination.
09.12.13 |
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Keeping the trend from yesterday on bad work practices, designer Murat Mutlu:
Ahhh working til 9pm several days a week, it’s just the agency way of life right? Wrong, it’s bad management.
Tell your account managers (or yourself) to stop selling things that can’t be completed unless we work ourselves to death. I’ve seen people strain their health, relationships and family lives for what? So a deodorant can get more brand awareness? So that we can meet the unrealistic deadline you promised whilst trying to win a pitch? Or so a client can get dozens of mockups before they go on holiday?
This is advertising we’re talking about, not some higher calling. Everything we make is forgotten about in 6 months. Who gives a shit?
This is a mantra that could be extended to a lot of other industries as well, especially web and tech agencies.
09.11.13 |
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Author “Shanley” on Medium:
What about when we reward acts of heroism — recovering from severe outages, working unreasonable hours, emerging triumphant from a death march? When such acts of heroism are very visible and rewarded, do we end up with a situation where people are incentivized to manifest the very conditions of catastrophe that allow them to be heroes? At what point are we actually incentivized to create unrealistic deadlines, work at an unsustainable cadence, even cause production issues?
09.10.13 |
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I have read far too many posts in recent months on how to incorporate responsive web design into a design workflow. Most cover what I already know, but leave it to designer Jacey Gulden to shake things up:
By nature, a mobile device is narrow, and it forces the content to be presented in a single column. The linear display caused by this narrowness forces the designer to give priority and hierarchy to certain pieces of content that is much less apparent when a site is viewed on a wider screen.
Because of this, many designers have started experimenting with a new kind of mockup that involves content hierarchy rather than design layout. Designers give numerical values to elements of content that correlate to where those items might appear in a stacked column layout. This way, design is less constrained, but the content is always presented in the best way possible.
I’ve heard the “content hierarchy first” advice before but rarely in such a clear manner.
09.09.13 |
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Capcom just released this documentary free on YouTube. It’s gotten a lot of praise online with its extremely high production values (as expected from the production studio Area 5.) Anyone who’s into gaming, especially Street Fighter fans, should watch this.