‘The Bacon and Cheese Machine’ is a collaboration between Illustrative genius McBess and P-G Bikes for Dudes Factory I’m a sucker for art projects like this, and really fancy having a go myself! This video shows the intricate painting process unfold: … Read the rest here
Hero : This is a really fantastic, well-shot piece. And the resulting portrait definitely wasn’t what I was anticipating. Update: The process of creating art with small dots is called stippling . Had no idea. (Thanks @signalnoise .) /via @jontangerine … Read the rest here
Have you every been in the situation where the client keeps requesting tweaks to the design or changes in functionality? As you sit moving boxes around the page, the budget is slowly draining away and you’re no longer sure whether the project can be completed on target? In these situations what do you do? Some designers will push back on the client, claiming that these changes were never in the agreed brief and that they had only budgeted for 2 or 3 rounds of design. … Read the rest here
I’ve written my first book! Its taken even more time and energy than I ever dreamed it would, but yesterday marked the very last chapter passing it’s final stages of being buffed and tweaked into a manuscript that people would actually want to read. I started planning this book 5 years ago, and only the combination of Five Simple Steps , Chris Mills (A.K.A “Mills of Steel”), Owen Gregory and my technical editor, Gedeon Maheux of The Iconfactory has made it actually happen. All the icon artists I contacted (bar one – but I shan’t name any names!) were enthusiastic and responsive, which made it a joy to organise. Many responses came with fantastic icon material that hasn’t been seen before – early ideas and process snapshots, as well some yet to be released. … Read the rest here
Jason Santa Maria Go to the source
Tiles is an animation made of a large photographic collection of street tiles. By viewing this collection of photographs as a sequence, different movements and processes become visible within the frame of the tiles. Both music and animation are trying to find a balance between a thought-out arrangement and an arrangement of ‘chance’ deriving directly from the tiles. Mesmerizing. … Read the rest here
With all my work at Yahoo!, I’d been thinking more and more about CSS architecture. I really sat down and took the time to analyze my process. What’s the most flexible but straightforward way to do it? How does this fit in with the team process and how does this work in comparison to how other people are doing it? I started making notes and eventually started writing up my thoughts… Read the rest here
Target.com Redesign : Wow, how’d I miss this news about this? I’m pretty sure someone made an argument like this at some point in the design process — and won: Look, everybody uses the search bar or those big fat categories strung across the top anyway. So, why not have a little fun with the rest of the page? Update: For those asking, since it may not have been clear in the sarcasm: I’m quite impressed by the new design. … Read the rest here
Visual Design is Not a Thing : Mark Boulton: Talking to and observing your audience is a fundamental part of graphic design research. In fact, it’s the first thing they teach you about communication theory: what are you trying to say, and who are you trying to say it to. So, you see, graphic design is not Visual Design. And given that the look of something — in my mind at least — can’t be considered holistically without the feel of it, or the use of it, then how can Visual Design be separated as not only a step in a process, but as a job title? … Read the rest here
Nosh 404: Behind the Scenes : The deftly talented Alex Cornell (director, cameraman, editor, voice talent, designer , musician ) describing the production process for the Nosh 404 page : The script was basically this: cool place, action and stuff, guns, cool sounds. Generally that’s about all I have to go off anyway for my videos, so I figured we were ready to rock and roll. It’s pretty impressive to read just how much was done by one individual, and done so well. … Read the rest here
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about CSS architecture these days. One thing in particular that has crossed my mind is how to handle certain situations. For example, we want to hide content on the page and then reveal it (or vice versa). In JavaScript, this is relatively straightforward: get an element, and apply a class or remove a class to change the state of the element. … Read the rest here
I’d reached that point in my rides, where I wanted some sort of cycling computer to track my progress and show my route, so I recently picked up a Biologic BikeMount to allow me to use my iPhone. Rather than buy a dedicated unit (such as a Garmin, which isn’t really an option financially at this point) this lets me reuse a device that’s already replaced lots of other separate devices like Camera and iPod. Here are my thoughts after 2 months of use. The phone gets clipped into a sturdy protective hardcase, which is then mounted to your handlebars via a supplied bracket. … Read the rest here
Over on the HTML5 Doctor site, Oli has written a great article called Quoting and citing with <blockquote> , <q> , <cite> , and the cite attribute . Now, I still stand by my criticism of the way the cite element has been restrictively redefined in HTML5 such that it’s not supposed to be used for marking up a resource if that resource is a person. But I think that Oli has done a great job in setting out the counter-argument: By better defining <cite> , we increase the odds of getting usable data from it, though we now need different methods to cover these other uses. Oli’s article also delves into the blockquote element, which is defined in HTML5 as a sectioning root . Don’t be fooled by the name: sectioning roots are very different to sectioning content in a fundamental way. Whereas sectioning content elements— section , article , nav and aside —are all about creating an explicit outline for the document from the headings contained within the sectioning content (using the new outline algorithm ), the headings within sectioning roots ( blockquote , td , fieldset , figure , etc. … Read the rest here
As somebody who has publically stated that they “don’t care about user experience” and is fed up of “defining the dammed thing” I find myself being drawn into discussions about the term far more often than I’d like. Some designers think that user experience is just a made up name and that we’re all user experience designers really. Others think that User Experience is a term used by consultants to trick clients out of money and would prefer it we all just stuck to the title of web designer. Some feel that user experience is simply common sense design while others see it as a land grab to own the fun bit of the design process. This is all complete nonsense of course, which is why I keep getting drawn into an argument I don’t really want to have and one that isn’t especially beneficial to the industry. It’s obviously nonsense to argue that the field of UX design doesn’t exist as there are hundreds of books and conferences devoted to the practice, tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of people with UX in their job title and an unfathomable number of blog posts about the subject… Read the rest here
There’s an interesting debate happening in the world of mobile design at the moment. In one camp we have the “nativists” who believe that the best mobile experiences are tailored to a particular device. These are the people focused on creating platform specific mobile apps and mobile websites. Then we have the “universalists” who believe in the “one web”, a place where all content and services can be delivered to multiple devices through the same URL. This division is causing me a bit of a quandary. … Read the rest here
Agile vs. Agility : Hugo Rodger-Brown: Agile (big ‘A’) has become a bit of an albatross — it doesn’t really work, it doesn’t deliver the benefits it promised, and it inevitably involves a lot of arguing amongst the team about who should be doing what, and when. All of which distracts from the fact that agility (small ‘a’ this time) is a wonderful thing, that can be achieved, that does provide enormous benefits, and that should be encouraged in everything we (as an industry) do. Agile (small ‘a’) refers to team dynamics, delivery processes, the software itself (how easy is it to change), and operations. … Read the rest here
Can CSS create art? That’s a question I set out to explore recently, and I like to think that the answer is yes. You can judge for yourself: Spinning the Web , a photo set on Flickr. To be clear, when I say “Can CSS create art?” I don’t mean that in the sense of wondering if art, or artful designs, can be accomplished with CSS. … Read the rest here
Two media-centre related things I’ve done recently: Jailbreak my Apple TV to install ATV Flash Black , and update my Boxee Box to v1.1. Heres a quick report of how it went: First the ATV : When the beta of ATV Flash Black was announced last December, I looked into and disregarded, the jailbreak process. Too much hassle if you had updated your ATV from the factory supplied version. Now, the process is straightforward with Firecore’s Season Pass app and a micro-usb cable. Likewise, installing ATV Black was easy when following the instructions, and I was able to add extras onto my Apple TV. … Read the rest here
Puzzld! : Jacob Souva, who did the illustration for Funny Bugs , did the illustrations for this beautiful app for kids ages (I would guess) 2 to 5. Via Veerle Pieters, who just published an interview with Jacob . … Read the rest here
The next speaker at An Event Apart in Boston is Veerle Pieters . I’m going to try liveblogging some of what she’s got to say. Veerle’s talk is called The Experimental Zone and it’s all about experimentation in web design. People often ask her how she comes up with, say, certain colour combinations but she doesn’t really have a straightforward answer—a lot of it is down to experimentation. So it’s good to learn how to experiment better… Read the rest here
Hiring: Lead Web Designer at Apartment Therapy : I have to admit I’m feeling a little special right about now seeing these guys post a listing on Authentic Jobs. I’ve been quietly following Apartment Therapy for several months, along with its sister site Unpluggd . What’s really exciting for me is that, while the content they post is fantastic, I’ve always felt the formatting and layout could use a little fine-tuning. Looks like that’ll be part of the job: The first job will be to join in our redesign process with our art director, Thomas Porostocky, and work through a complete redesign for launch in September. After that, you will be working on everything: site pages, email templates, cross browser compliance, media kits, and ad driven event campaigns… Read the rest here