Geoff Manaugh, writing on his BLDGBLOG (“building blog”) about Die Hard and architecture:
The majority of that film’s interest, I’d suggest, comes precisely through its depiction of architectural space: John McClane, a New York cop on his Christmas vacation, moves through a Los Angeles high-rise in basically every conceivable way but passing through its doors and hallways.
In light of the apparent mess that is A Good Day to Die Hard, it’s great to go back and revisit what made the original so amazing. Usually most attention is lavished on Bruce Willis and the tight direction, but Manaugh really illustrates a new whole angle I’ve never considered.
There are so many native iOS weather apps released on a regular basis that it’s reached a point of near self parody. But Sun is different: web based, fluid, minimal, with some slick off canvas navigation for getting around. I’m still sticking to my own custom web weather app, but it’s awesome to see we have great options out there.
Nice performance pointers by web developer Kelly Norton on the problems of post page load layout (a.k.a. reflow or repaint), and how it can cause such an adverse effect on web sites and web apps.
I agree with Kelly regarding the Chrome extension Speed Tracer. Even though I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of what the tool can do, I’ve found it can come in handy for more complex web pages that I’m working on.
I’ve recommended the ShopTalk podcast in the past, but hosts Dave Rupert and Chris Coyier touched on a pressing topic here for me: finding unused CSS selectors in your code. I didn’t realize until it was mentioned in the podcast that one great way to do so was to open up the Chrome web tools, click on the Audits tab and let it run. Scroll to the bottom where ‘remove unused CSS rules’ are listed. It’s far from perfect, but it’s a good starting point for trimming excess CSS.
The whole film is a visual treat, but I remember seeing that opening sequence for the first time in theaters distinctly. I still occasionally pop in Run Lola Run‘s soundtrack today.
Sacha Grief is already a designer I’ve kept my eye on for a while – prolific on Twitter, creator of the amazing Sidebar – but he’s outdone himself with this very long post on the future of web and app design. Loved this line:
When you have a high-definition display and screen-optimized fonts, you quickly realize you don’t need much else to create beautiful work.
I’m not a filmmaker, nor do I have any intention of starting down that path, but I found these series of videos from lightsfilmschool.com pretty fascinating. The first video breaks down the 180 degree rule, a key guideline with two character film scenes. The second looks at various distances to shoot characters, introducing some terminology and motivations behind each distance.
Designer Nathan Ford’s responsive grid workflow can be boiled down to this quote:
You should design a grid based on your content’s constraints, not design your content based on a grid’s constraints.
It’s rather brilliant when you think about it. It’s also one of the most succinct descriptions of a shift in methodology I’ve been after for a while now, having worked for over a year professionally on responsive web designs. I generally lean heavily on the Skeleton grid system, but something about landing on break points for existing iOS hardware just feels wrong. I’ve got to research Gridset more.
Great series of images from Bond’s latest spawned from this Reddit thread. I’m rooting for Deakins, the look of that film honestly is at least half the reason I’d place it in my top five Bond films of all time.
The FontFeed‘s Yves Peters looks at typographic choices made on poster art for recent Hollywood releases. Interesting to see the ubiquitous Helvetica Neue put to both great (Zero Dark Thirty) and not so great (Django Unchained) use.