I really enjoyed watching Jason’s talk. He starts out illustrating how the right font face matters. Pay special attention to last twenty or so minutes where he runs through a few quick tips on font selection (e.g. when in doubt between two font sizes, bigger is better.)
If you’ve got twelve minutes and dig science fiction films, watch this Vimeo video essay by Steven Benedict. It jumps around in its coverage, but on a surface level it illustrates why Blade Runner still holds up as one of my favorite films.
Columbia professor Tim Wu, writing for The New Yorker:
That doesn’t mean the cable industry has no prospects. But this year or next, cable companies will have to accept that they are no longer the gatekeepers for the best content. It means, eventually, that the industry will probably have to embrace the idea of simply carrying the content of others (which was its original business model), and essentially function as what used to be called an “Internet-service provider.”
Wu is a very smart guy, and his points about the potential impact of House of Cards are argued well. But I’m not as optimistic that the ‘best content’ will move as rapidly away from cable as he predicts.
You can read endless speculation on Valve’s upcoming Steam box on almost any gaming or tech site. But for a one stop, comprehensive look on what we really know, T.C. Sottek piece over at The Verge is stellar. If you’re at all mildly interesting in the future of gaming you should read this piece.
Paravel founder Trent Walton on the transition to building responsive web sites properly:
I believe this starts with a shift in perception. Whether massive or minute, this shift usually involves letting go of a lot of assumptions that center around desktop-centric browsing.
I found myself nodding a lot to Trent’s post. There’s no one simple solution for implementing responsive web design, but trying to just take an existing desktop workflow (e.g. fixed width psd comps, jamming a few CSS media queries on existing work) won’t do it justice.
I couldn’t put it better than Ars Technica writer Lee Hutchinson’s own tag line: a minimum wage gig in the 1990s turns into pretty much the Best Job Ever. Fun read and makes me a bit nostalgic for those earlier days of gaming in my teenage years.
Sometimes you want a super quick way to both identify core dimensions on your open web browser and, especially for mobile devices, what critical dimensions like device width, height, and pixel ratio should be. That’s exactly what this web site does; bookmark it and keep it for reference later.
Ben Kuchera, writing for The PA Report:
I took my son to Math and Science night at his school last night and saw three kids playing MineCraft on tablets or phones. They discuss what’s happening on their respective servers at lunch. It’s a huge hit, and an innovative platform.
It also would have been impossible on any existing console.
MineCraft may have ultimately come to the Xbox 360, but the game breaks many of Microsoft’s rules.
Influential designer Andy Clarke gives a great talk, and his slide deck all about responsive web design has a lot of smart ideas I’ve never considered before. Granted it’s not nearly the same as a live talk or full day workshop, but it’s worth a quick scan for almost any web designer or developer who wants to refine their responsive skills.
In case you thought all top selling games were first person shooters, here’s Brian Crecente for Polygon:
And perhaps that’s the more important point: Not all video games are for everyone and not all of them are violent. The game industry produces a surprisingly eclectic mix of titles.
Nearly 18 million copies of Minecraft have been sold. While last year’s top-selling games included Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, half of the top games of 2012 weren’t violent. Those non-violent games include sports titles, dancing games, even a Lego game. And that’s just counting games sold in stores in the U.S. When you start to look at mobile gaming, where Angry Birds remains the king of the platform, overtly violent games become even less prevalent.