09.19.12 |
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The always dependable Karina Longworth outdoes herself on this extended Village Voice piece. Before it closed, its gigantic collection VHS taps and DVDs shipped overseas, Kim’s Video was a fixture of the NY film scene. Before torrents went mainstream, these guys had basically everything you wanted, especially for cult and foreign film selections. I remember hearing about the now famous South Korean film Oldboy playing over at Cannes…and two days later spotting it on the shelf under new releases at Kim’s (some clever attendant got a universal DVD overseas.)
09.18.12 |
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Upstatement is a small web firm that assisted with the massive Boston Globe switch to a fully responsive design. In this blog post they go through some of their choices made: workflow, tools, break point decisions and more.
Biggest surprise for me came with their primary design program: InDesign. Not Photoshop or Illustrator? Strange at first, but their reasoning appears pretty sound.
09.18.12 |
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Not super crazy about developer Troy Hunt’s title (“uncultured” comes off as a bit crass), but he brings up some excellent points about working in web development for an international audience. Does your site support automatic currency conversion? How about something as simple as proper dd/mm instead of mm/dd for users outside the U.S.?
09.15.12 |
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Watts Martin:
What makes Apple the fabulous and infuriating company that they are is their mix of conservative minimalism with crazy risk-taking, running ahead of the herd betting that everybody is going to stampede in their direction. There was no mix this time. Neither the iPhone 5 nor iOS 6 are ahead of the herd. And depending on what Android 5 does, iOS 7 may need to make one hell of a leap not to be behind it.
I’d still argue the wide breadth of apps are the iPhone’s strongest selling point, pushing it ahead of its competition for now. I even find little fault with the iPhone 5’s hardware – gorgeous, minimal, and build quality that few others touch. But in terms of iOS as an operating system? We’re hurting, big time.
09.14.12 |
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Dieter Bohn for The Verge:
Like Microsoft in the 90s and early 2000s, it is taking a very conservative approach to updating its core UI in the name of accessibility and consistency. Apple is keeping the iPhone in a very familiar and safe zone, but does it really need to? It’s risky, taking something that’s massively successful and trying something new and different with it. Most companies don’t do it, but Apple has a reputation built making those kinds of bets. Perhaps it doesn’t deserve that reputation anymore.
As Bohn himself states later in the article, Apple’s not close to the Microsoft Windows Vista fiasco state of Microsoft circa 2000. But do big Apple fans like myself have reason to be concerned? Certainly.
09.14.12 |
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Jess Cartner-Morley, writing for The Guardian:
Remodelling the grand structure into a bricks-and-mortar version of a website is a clear statement to the world that, for Burberry, digital now comes first.
Christopher Bailey, the firm’s chief creative officer, said: “We designed it like that because when you’re shopping at home online, you are on the sofa with your credit card. You don’t stand up and queue.”…
For Bailey, the primacy of the digital experience is self-evident. “I find it weird that anyone would find it weird [digital-first thinking].
“Most of us are very digital in our daily lives now. Burberry is a young team and this is instinctive to us. To the younger generation who are coming into adulthood now, this is all they know.”
Hats off to Burberry for getting the message loud and clear. It’s still shocking that so many high end labels refuse to put their stock online or have such a poor branding experience on their respective websites. There’s an amazing opportunity with this market, both for web designers and developers.
09.14.12 |
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If you thought the hotness of Twitter Bootstrap would slow down in any way, sites like Bootsnipp beg to differ. Bootsnipp compiles free HTML snippets that can easily drop into Bootstrap friendly sites. There’s some really common and useful UI functionality here: a monthly calendar, progress bars, like/share buttons and much more.
09.13.12 |
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It appears from this Digital Photography Review post that the iPhone 5 camera primary benefit is its speed, albeit with slightly greater light sensitivity.
09.12.12 |
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Really enjoyable article on the influential gaming company Valve, best known for the Half-Life series and Steam gaming service. I liked the insights here on their very unorthodox management structure (there effectively is none) and distributed work ethic. If you’re into gaming or just interesting in learning about a shaken up company hierarchy, it’s a good read.
09.11.12 |
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Now that I’m teaching a front end web development class over at General Assembly, I’ve been researching HTML and CSS tutorial sites to get ideas for class. Most are pretty bad, but Don’t Fear the Internet stood out. Lots of really simple, well done videos to get web newbies on the right track. Love their intro:
Are you a print designer, photographer, fine-artist, or general creative person? Do you have a shitty website that you slapped together yourself in Dreamweaver in that ONE web design class that you took in college? Do you not have a site at all because you’ve been waiting two years for your cousin to put it together for you? Well, we’re here to help.