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Cameron Moll Go to the source

Kathryn Schulz, as quoted by Maria Popova : If we have goals and dreams and we want to do our best, and if we love people and we don’t want to hurt them or lose them, we should feel pain when things go wrong. The point isn’t to live without any regrets, the point is to not hate ourselves for having them… We need to learn to love the flawed, imperfect things that we create, and to forgive ourselves for creating them. Regret doesn’t remind us that we did badly — it reminds us that we know we can do better.” … Read the rest here

SimpleBits Go to the source

A little over five years ago, Greg Storey suggested Whitney for the SimpleBits logotype that went along with a previous brand update . I’m thankful he did, because since then it’s become a favorite typeface around these parts, eventually becoming the base for the current ‘SB’ mark. Over the next few years,  Hoefler & Frere-Jones catalog became my standard go-to font choices for presentation slides. I was hooked. Over the weekend I made some subtle design tweaks here, and some not-so-subtle type refreshing. I’m honored to be beta testing H&FJ’s forthcoming webfonts offering. … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. –W. Somerset Maugham Pressing ‘Pause’ on this site for a while has afforded me time and distance to realign my writing objectives. An invitation from Chris Shiflett to join today’s “ Ideas of March ” has afforded me an opportunity to break the silence… Read the rest here

Jason Santa Maria Go to the source

Kickstarter has quickly become one of my favorite sites around, and not just now, but for as long as I’ve been on the internet. Their goal is so empowering, so noble. Every time I visit the site, there is a very good chance I’ll be parting ways with some cash. Whenever I see someone talking so deeply about something they want to make a reality, and how low the bar is to help them do it, it gets me every time. It’s such a simple concept, but the effect is gargantuan. Today I read this, Kickstarter Expects To Provide More Funding To The Arts Than NEA : One of the company’s three co-founders, Yancey Strickler, said that Kickstarter is on track to distribute over $150 million dollars to its users’ projects in 2012, or more than entire fiscal year 2012 budget for the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), which was $146 million… Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

I’m on a workshopping roll. Fresh from running my Responsive Enhancement workshop in Belfast , I’m now heading to Düsseldorf for Beyond Tellerand where I’ll be running the workshop on Sunday (and if you can’t make it, don’t forget that you can book the workshop for your own workplace too). As part of the process of building a responsive site from the content out rather than the canvas in, I talk about beginning with the individual components divorced from any layout context. Or, as Mark puts it, “start with the bits.” That’s the way I’ve been starting most of my projects lately: beginning with the atomic units of content and styling them first before even thinking about layout. This ensures that those styles are extremely robust—because they don’t depend on any particular context, they can be safely dropped into an part of a part. I’ve been calling this initial collection of markup snippets a pattern primer… Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

I don’t think I’m the first person to come up with this idea but figured I’d document it. If you’re unfamiliar with the Yellow Fade Technique, make your way over to the 37signals article that ushered in the design effect that was all the rage for awhile. This is the same thing but using CSS animations. /** * Quick fade on target to attract user attention */ :target { -webkit-animation: target-fade 3s 1; -moz-animation: target-fade 3s 1; } @-webkit-keyframes target-fade { 0% { background-color: rgba(0,0,0,.1); } 100% { background-color: rgba(0,0,0,0); } } @-moz-keyframes target-fade { 0% { background-color: rgba(0,0,0,.1); } 100% { background-color: rgba(0,0,0,0); } } Just a short and sweet blog post. You can go back to work now. … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

How To Back Up Your Life Automatically with ifttt : Nice overview of ifttt , including some useful “recipes”. … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Retiring Jobs’ Number : Rob Cottingham: The debate will rage for a long time over what piece of technology best encapsulates Steve Jobs’ influence on our world: The iPhone? iPod? iMac? iPad? OS X and Aqua? But I’m going to argue for something a lot more low-tech: the turtleneck… Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

HOW Interview with Yours Truly : Bryn Mooth interviews me leading up to this November’s HOW Interactive Design Conference in San Francisco. Speaking of, the early bird registration ends this Thursday, September 1. Save an additional $50 on top of that with discount code CAMERON. Hope to see you in San Fran. … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Hiring: Front-End Designer/Developer at Roland : I’ve played a number of Roland keyboards over the years (I play only a little piano, and mostly by ear). The touch-sensitivity nearly rivals that of a real piano. And I swoon over their V-Drum kits every time I’m in a music shop, equally matching the sensitivity and touch of a “real” kit. This is a contract position in Los Angeles and involves work on the company’s web properties, including mobile. jQuery/HTML/CSS know-how a must. … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Andy Rutledge: Redesigning NYTimes.com : Andy Rutledge: Regarding content strategy and mechanism, today’s ‘news’ is rife with irrelevancies and distractions. Part of this is due to the news industry’s abandonment of actual journalism, but much of it is due to thoughtless promotional strategy and pathetic pandering. I suggest that digital news acquire a responsible and more usable approach. Andy’s arguments and mockups are both very well-conceived — I would love to see online journalism (all of it, not just NYT) head in this direction. His design concepts are fabulous. I do believe, however, there should be an affordance for social components in news media, which Andy leaves out of his concepts… Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Web Typography for the Lonely : “…aims to excite designers about the possibilities of cutting-edge web standards and javascript through beautiful and inspiring typographic explorations.” Complete with downloadable code, and cleverly written by Christopher Clark. From the Coolinate page: I am very aware that Coolinate is a dumb name for anything ever. Sadly, my other ideas— Line-shadowify, Manystuffify, and Bloginate — all seemed dumber. There weren’t many options really. Putting some lines under text isn’t an activity that conjures epic war-hero-style action verbs… Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Most Common iPhone Passcodes : Hint: 1234. This isn’t actual iPhone passcode data, but instead passcode data from an app called Big Brother Camera Security whose “passcode setup screen and lock screen are nearly identical to those of the actual iPhone passcode lock.” (From what I can tell, Big Brother is an app not unlike Hidden of This Guy Has My MacBook fame, but for iPhone.) There’s some irony here to behold. Users of the Big Brother app track those who use their phone without permission. And how did Daniel Amitay compile the Big Brother passcodes being used? By quietly, albeit anonymously, tracking users of the Big Brother app. Apptly named… Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Hiring: Senior Software Developer at charity: water : Regular readers of this site are familiar with my partiality to charity: water . They’re seeking someone with experience developing with an MVC framework (CakePHP is a plus), database design and implementation (RDBMS or NoSQL) and working in test-driven development. Experience with PHP and Java is necessary, as well as HTML/CSS and JavaScript. It’s a tall order for an organization accustomed to crushing tall orders, i.e. helping nearly a billion people get access to clean drinking water. … Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

Polygraph is a lively new typeface from PintassilgoPrints that’s just bursting with character. It’s inspired by polish artist Leszek Zebrowski’s poster work, but I see echoes of Rennie Mackintosh’s hand lettering style in here too. Whereas official Mackintosh typefaces (and my own amateur contribution Hill House ) are very clean and rigid, Polygraph carries the expression of artists hand really, really well. Packed with eccentric alternates, it is an all-caps font with four exchangeable variations for each letter. These alternates are programmed to cycle when the font is used in OpenType-savvy programs, creating a random effect on glyphs distribution. … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Blake Allen , a man with impeccably good taste in music and the founder of Designers.MX, has just posted my mixtape: The Film Sessions, Volume One . I’m a film score nut. For a short time during college I was a music major with aspirations of becoming a composer for films. Obviously, I never made the cut, so I live out glory days gone by through collecting and arrange scores that others have composed. Sure, I enjoy indie rock as much as anyone else while working, but I also enjoy relaxing instrumental pieces as a soundtrack to my workday. … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Tron Legacy: The Making of UI/Visual Effects : Josh Nimoy: In addition to visual effects, I was asked to record myself using a unix terminal doing technologically feasible things. I took extra care in babysitting the elements through to final composite to ensure that the content would not be artistically altered beyond that feasibility. I take representing digital culture in film very seriously in lieu of having grown up in a world of very badly researched user interface greeble…. In Tron, the hacker was not supposed to be snooping around on a network; he was supposed to kill a process. So we went with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep… Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Teehan+Lax 6px Baseline Grid : I have to admit, I’m not much of a baseline grid user myself. But Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain pointed me to this yesterday, I threw it in a PSD I’m working on, and things were fairly close to baseline — font alignment, visual elements, navigation lists, etc. I think that’s due to the 6px spacing of the baseline and the flexibility such a small increment provides. I’m convinced to give this a try in my next design. Download the grid here . … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Vacant : I like this stencil typeface by Mike Jarboe. A lot. I don’t know what I’d use it for, but then I’ve said that about a lot of things I ended up using. … Read the rest here

Mezzoblue Go to the source

I’ve decided to slap a Creative Commons license on the entire darn Chalkwork Family and make them completely free for personal use, starting right now. I’ve been considering doing this for quite a while. These icons represent a lot of hard work for me between 2006 and 2009, so you can imagine I’ve thought through the implications of making them available for free download without a pay barrier: will people use them commercially and not pay? Will they abuse the license terms? … Read the rest here