“Mad Men” Furniture: Don Draper’s Office : A very detailed review of the show’s mid-century style from none other than The Mid-Century Modernist. I’ve not seen a single episode of “Mad Men”, but I’ve read/seen/digested enough tweets or posts to have seen at least two seasons worth. At least. … Read the rest here
“Web design is not merely building. It’s not just designing. It’s not only the rest of the myriad disciplines and titles we all align ourselves with, but the culmination of all these things.” - Jason Santa Maria, A Real Web Design Application … Read the rest here
Bobby McKenna : One of the most consistent and admired illustrators on Dribbble , Mr. McKenna just graduated from Notre Dame and is apparently looking for a job . Something tells me finding one won’t be a problem. … Read the rest here
Laurent Nivalle Photography: Le Mans Classic 2010 : These fabulous photos look like they were taken 40 years ago. (They were taken just 3 weeks ago.) … Read the rest here
TwelveSouth Compass Stand for iPad : So practical, so beautiful. Same price as BookArc ($40), but way more utility. … Read the rest here
I’m probably way behind the curve on this one, but I recently realized the following: All browsers that support the CSS text-shadow and box-shadow properties also support the new CSS3 RGBa syntax. Which means you can safely combine them today. That’s handy, because it means no worrying about matching a precise hex colour shadow to a specific hex colour background. Instead just let the browser blend. An example: p { text-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) 0 1px 0; } That will produce a paragraph with a 20% opacity black drop shadow that will blend into any background colour below it. … Read the rest here
There is much hand-wringing in the media about the impending death of journalism, usually blamed on the rise of the web or more specifically bloggers. I’m sympathetic to their plight, but sometimes journalists are their own worst enemy, especially when they publish badly-researched articles that fuel moral panic with little regard for facts (if you’ve ever been in a newspaper article yourself, you’ll know that you’re lucky if they manage to spell your name right). Exhibit A: an article published in The Guardian called How I became a Foursquare cyberstalker . Actually, the article isn’t nearly as bad as the comments, which take ignorance and narrow-mindedness to a new level. Fortunately Ben is on hand to set the record straight. … Read the rest here
A Real Web Design Application : This is a very thorough overview by Jason Santa Maria of the current tools available to web designers, their shortcomings, and the friction and waste created by transferring work from tool to browser. Jason’s argument toward the end of his article will certainly continue a debate that’s already raging: A web designer jumping into the browser before tackling the creative and messaging problems is akin to an architect hammering pieces of wood together and then measuring afterwards. The imaginative process is cut short by the tools at hand; and it’s that imagination—or spark—at the beginning of a design that lays the path for everything that follows. Without it, you’re at best able to make a website that looks like a website—rather than a design that tells a story in the form of a website. To read only the above quote on its own would be to take Jason’s remarks out of context. The paragraphs that follow demonstrate he favors designing in the browser if the tools to do so can be improved. … Read the rest here
HTML5 Live with John Allsopp : Just purchased my subscription. Though I’m familiar with a lot of this, I still have plenty to learn. I suspect it’ll be a good interactive complement to Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 for Web Designers . … Read the rest here
Kiva High School : A new effort by Kiva that enables high school students to organize themselves in microfinance clubs with the intent of educating others. I’m a big believer in microfinance, and since March 2008, Authentic Jobs has funded 222 loans by donating 1% of its total monthly revenue. … Read the rest here
World Cup Typography: Yomar Augusto : Though game play ended a few weeks ago, this is still worth reading. FontFont’s Yves Peters interviews Brazilian designer Yomar Augusto, creator of the Unity typeface designed exclusively for Adidas. The typeface appeared on the World Cup ball and the jerseys for teams such as Germany, Argentina, and the 2010 champions, Spain. See also Paul Barnes work for the World Cup . … Read the rest here
UI Design Palettes for Illustrator : If you prototype in Illustrator, consider downloading this framework. Includes GUI elements, interface icons, and buttons styles, all of which can be dropped into your artwork and customized as needed. /via Zeldman … Read the rest here
FontFonter: Try WebFontFonts on Any Website : Bear with me as I continue to catch up on old news. This is probably the coolest thing I missed last week. We’ve been in the process of selectively switching fonts on Authentic Jobs over to Kievit Pro for a little while now. You can see what an all-FF Kievit Pro version would look like and why I’m so fond of of the font family. (We’ve been using FF Kievit Pro for some time, but only as image text on buttons and nav elements.) … Read the rest here
New ‘Tron: Legacy’ trailer : I’m 90% certain this is the latest trailer Disney released at Comic-Con last week, and I’m 110% certain this has been tweeted and blogged to death since last Thursday. But it’s the first I’ve seen it having been out of the office for a little while. … Read the rest here
A month into using Tumblr for the blog and portfolio here, and I’m still happy I made the move. Something that had been bothering me was the redirect that was required for the homepage. I couldn’t point simplebits.com at Tumblr completely. If I had, over 10 years of files and old archives would’ve vanished. Setting up a subdomain avoids that, but I wanted the blog to be the main index of the site. So redirecting simplebits.com to stream.simplebits.com was the best I could do. … Read the rest here
This beautiful Apple Airport Basestation was my 30th birthday present from my wife, quite possibly one of the best presents I’ve ever had. The gift of wireless. In those days it was 1mb broadband, but it was still exciting being able to work from anywhere in the house. These days it’s been overtaken by N wireless devices, but it’s such a design classic that it has to be on display. It’s new home is the windowsill next to my desk at Webble Mill. … Read the rest here
An interview with Think Vitamin : While I was in London for the Future of Web Design conference this past May, I had the pleasure of chatting with Keir Whitaker from Carsonified about Dribbble . You can also find the audio over at Huffduffer if you happen to huff the duff stuff. … Read the rest here
A recent plea on twitter for an Illustrator script has been answered! I needed to export all my artboards as 32bit PNG s (24bit + 8 bit Alpha Channel), with the artboard name as the filename, but Illustrator doesn’t come with a built in method to do this. The closest it offers is the standard export, where it can save all artboards, but it always appends the document name to the start of the filename. Big hurrays then for Dan Smith for creating exactly the script I needed! It’s already made a big difference to my workflow. If you’d like a copy too, Download Artboards- PNG .jsx . I placed mine in Illustrators Presets/en_gb/Scripts folder to make sure it’s always loaded. Tagged: adobe , illustrator … Read the rest here
A recent plea on twitter for an Illustrator script has been answered! I needed to export all my artboards as 24bit PNG s, with the artboard name as the filename, but Illustrator doesn’t come with a built in method to do this. The closest it offers is the standard export, where it can save all artboards, but it always appends the document name to the start of the filename. Big hurrays then for Dan Smith for creating exactly the script I needed! It’s already made a big difference to my workflow. If you’d like a copy too, Download Artboards-PNG24.jsx . I placed mine in Illustrators Presets/en_gb/Scripts folder to make sure it’s always loaded… Read the rest here
Last night I presented a 5 minute microslot on CSS Filters – excluding older versions of IE from seeing your CSS , and feeding extra styles to specific versions of IE and mobile browsers. The slides (with presenter notes) are now available to download from the new Speaking section. Comment on this … Read the rest here
