04.09.12 |
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Lori Houston, O’Reilly:
The last question touches on a bit of early O’Reilly history. Edie Freedman (now O’Reilly’s Creative Director) was hired to design the first book covers. She thought the books had the strangest titles–sed and awk?–that evoked images of the popular fantasy game, “Dungeons and Dragons.”
While looking for imagery, she came across the Dover Pictorial Archives, a series of books (and now CD-ROMs) containing copyright-free collections of 18th- and 19th-century wood and copperplate engravings of animals. She encountered a pair of slender lorises and had an epiphany. “That’s sed and awk!”
She scanned several animals from the archive and placed them on mock-up covers, which she then presented to everyone at O’Reilly. O’Reilly had ten or so employees at the time, and people wondered if the animals were appropriate. But Edie convinced them to follow her instincts. Customers wound up loving the covers, and a brand was born.
I’ve always been curious why O’Reilly books have always been synonymous with animals on the cover; now we know.
04.09.12 |
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Ian Grey, writing for Press Play:
To me, Rouge! Is a traditional musical, except with twice as many shots run at the speed of a trance remix. The Transporter is a Euro-trash version of a John Woo cartoon. And Friday Night Lights with graceful camera? Nope. Boring. We’d never be able to slink into those sizzling Texas mini-worlds on network time. And I’ve not yet mentioned Paul W.S. Anderson’s jaw-dropper of a surprise, Resident Evil: Afterlife, one of the greatest uses of multi-level geometry and spatiality in cinema I can recall seeing, where oneattack scene features twenty or so color-coded Milla Jovoviches attacking hundreds of color-coded bad guys, and it’s not even a high point.
Chaos, I think, has been evolving.
He’s got a point. Much maligned “chaos cinema” would technically embrace the Bourne films. And 28 Weeks Later. True, the ratio of bad to good films in the chaos canon is staggeringly high, but let’s not completely overlook what’s great.
04.09.12 |
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Laurie Segall, CNN:
Johnnie Manzari, a prominent user interface designer for more than a decade, says he gets weekly phone calls from people asking him to recommend good designers.
“There’s a huge demand for finding talent,” he says. “Just like with engineering, one of the reasons it’s been so difficult is there just aren’t many people that are that good. Not only are people looking for designers more than they used to, but the bar they’re willing to accept has gone up.”
Several of the industry’s power players have been on design-focused shopping sprees.
This whole article reeks of being about six months to a year behind coverage in tech news sites like Engadget and Hacker News. Many traditional “engineering heavy” companies, most notably Google and Dropbox, have seen their design focus ramp sharply upward as soon as early 2011. Around then or by that summer, there were a lot of websites and apps that saw a serious bump in usability and their aesthetic quality.
I’d argue a interesting issue, largely sidestepped by CNN, is why design salaries still don’t equalize that of developers, at least in more entry level positions. It’s a hard nut to crack, yet I find the disparity, given design’s (much deserved) increasing prominence in tech land, increasingly difficult to justify.
04.09.12 |
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I'm increasingly seeing placeholder label free forms proliferate online; it's inevitable given the Apple Store's heavy usage and the form style's compact, minimal approach. Yet in the process, developers shouldn't forget the basics; nice tip here by 456 Berea Street.
04.08.12 |
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A.O. Scott, The New York Times:
As she sprints through the forest, Katniss is carrying the burden of multiple symbolic identities. She’s an athlete, a media celebrity and a warrior as well as a sister, a daughter, a loyal friend and (potential) girlfriend. In genre terms she is a western hero, an action hero, a romantic heroine and a tween idol. She is Natty Bumppo, Diana the chaste huntress of classical myth, and also the synthesis of Harry Potter and Bella Swan — the Boy Who Lived and the Girl Who Must Choose.
As is clear from the above, A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis go through some pretty deep analysis of why Katniss is such a hot character in this lengthy Times piece. To its credit, it touches on a lot of social and psychological issues from The Hunger Games I've generally dismissed up till now.
04.08.12 |
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Great small film websites can die, but that doesn't stop great writing from continuing on. Screened was one such site, with a wiki like interface and a lot of personality. But last week the site was sold off to new management with all the writing staff disbanded.
Nevertheless, Screened's head writer Matt Rorie is now setting up temporary residence over at his Tumblr blog. The guy is an excellent writer so check him out; not a lot there yet, but it shows a lot of promise with a kick ass review of The Raid and some commentary on Netflix.
04.07.12 |
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There’s taking notes at a typography lecture, and then there’s
drawing notes. Really cool looking work, along with some useful design pointers by designer Oliver Reichenstein (iAWriter)
04.06.12 |
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Great idea. I see this really being useful for getting some of my Paper shots quickly sent to my Mac with minimal fuss. (h/t Ben Brooks)
04.06.12 |
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There’s been of takes on the Lumia 900 this week, yet I’m fascinated most by Ars Technica’s Casey Johnston’s analysis on the shortcomings of the Metro UI:
[At times] the large fonts that characterize the OS take up too much valuable screen real estate.
The headers in the Outlook app, for instance, have a lot of breathing room. It makes the layout look nice, and choosing to display your contacts’ names in the largest font, twice the height of the rest, rather than the subject or snippets of content presumably makes you feel popular and keeps it people-centric. But I generally care just as much, if not more, about the subject and content preview than the sender, which are grayed out compared to the sender’s name.
In Mail on iOS, you can customize the font and the number of lines of the message preview, but Windows Phone provides no such options. Because of all the white space and large font, and the inability to fix that through settings, I can skim less of my e-mail at once, requiring more scrolling to go through it all. These information-sparse design cues extend to many of the third-party apps we tried, including Yelp and Twitter, where screen real estate often seems wasted by big fonts and white space.
I’m generally critical of the opposite problem on the web: a lot of websites, especially those on the arts/fashion side of things tend to emphasize small, 10 or 11px font as a primary body font. Yet in the process of going big, you can go too far – it looks like Metro fell down that trap.
04.06.12 |
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There’s several Apple vs. Nokia camera mashups to pick from, but I prefer this one from Tested. Bottom line, it reinforces what was apparent in other reviews: the Nokia stacks up the to the iPhone in great lighting conditions but falls apart in low light situations. Given how often people shoot later in the day or indoors, I’d argue that in practical use, this is a deal killer for the Nokia.