“The Colosseo poster has to be experienced in person. Truly beautiful.” : Thank you, Tiffany . (It’s worth noting Tiffany Wardle earned her Master of Arts in Theory and History of Typography and Graphic Communication from the University of Reading in England). … Read the rest here
Last week I put together an animated infographic that required some flexibility. Alpha transparency was essential, but the number of images I needed to pull it off meant that my typical way of creating PNGs wasn’t going to work. Let’s be honest; Photoshop is absolutely terrible at saving transparent PNGs for web use. Your choices are between an 8-bit with 1-bit transparency (better than a GIF in terms of file size, but no better in terms of transparency options) or a huge 32-bit PNG with alpha transparency. There’s no middle ground. … Read the rest here
In October 2009, the hashtag #lessconf began showing up repeatedly in my Twitter stream. The tweets were remarkably positive for something I’d heard nothing about previously. It turns out Steven Bristol and Allan Branch of Less Everything , the bright minds behind LessAccounting , were hosting a conference. Crush It! author Gary Vaynerchuk, Wufoo founder Kevin Hale and others spoke, and nearly 200 of you attended. This year’s LessConf 3010 resumes in Atlanta, Georgia, May 21–22… Read the rest here
Library of Congress to House Your Tweets : Kent German, writing for CNET’s Crave Gadget Blog: The Library of Congress announced today —via Twitter, no less—that is acquiring the Twitter’s entire archive through donation…. Though the whole idea may sound bizarre, the Library already holds more than 167 terabytes of Web-based information, including legal blogs and Web sites for political candidates and current lawmakers. We all best write a little more carefully, I suppose. … Read the rest here
Sweetie’s Bakeshop Letterpress Business Cards : These are undeniably delicious. Well done, Adrienne . … Read the rest here
Twitter Unveils “Promoted Tweets” Advertising Plan : Claire Cain Miller, reporting for The New York Times: The advertising program, which Twitter calls Promoted Tweets, will show up when Twitter users search for keywords that the advertisers have bought to link to their ads. Later, Twitter plans to show promoted posts in the stream of Twitter posts, based on how relevant they might be to a particular user…. When a Twitter user searches for a word an advertiser bought, the promoted message will show up at the top of the results, even if it was written much earlier. The posts say they are promoted by the company in small type, and when someone rolls over a promoted post with a cursor, it turns yellow. Best Buy, Virgin America, Starbucks, and Bravo are among the first advertisers, but expect that list to grow by the thousands very shortly. … Read the rest here
Letterheady : Interesting letterhead designs, as it says. You didn’t have anything planned for the next hour anyway, right? /via @typographica … Read the rest here
Here’s some fun. (For a sufficiently nerdy definition of “fun”.) Launch Safari 4 or Chrome 4. Drag Videotate to the bookmarks bar. Go opt into the YouTube HTML5 beta . Find your favorite YouTube video. … Read the rest here
This second contest, much like the first , offers you a chance to win an iPad 16GB Wi-Fi (valued at $499 USD). It requires less cash but more effort. Contest #2: Win an iPad 16GB To have a shot at winning, here’s what you need to do: Using the content publishing method of your choice (Twitter, Tumblr, any blogging or CMS software, or even just straight HTML), write something that will be indexed and rank well for the Google search “ cameron moll colosseo ipad martian giveaway ”. Your text must contain a prominent link to colosseotype.com . A photo of the artwork may also increase your chances of winning. … Read the rest here
iLounge: iPad Case Gallery : No excuses if you can’t find a case that’s hip, utilitarian, or whatever—plenty of options are already available. /via @cindyli … Read the rest here
As I’ve said before, the quality of the acting in new Doctor Who has often gone some way to disguise the lack of a decent story. In particular, David Tennant’s swansong “The End of Time” was a big confused mess of abandoned plots and ‘reset buttons’, but it shone whenever there was one to one dialogue. It wasn’t a satisfactory end to his reign by any means. It’s not as if Russell T Davies can’t write good Who stories – ‘Gridlock’ and ‘Midnight’ show us he jolly well can – he justs gets a bit overexcited when it’s finale time. It’s like a Royal Variety Performance, Who style… Read the rest here
Helvetireader², the minimal & anti-social theme for Google Reader, is now out . Sort of. It’s an unfinished and ongoing project, but it’s in a ‘ready as it’ll ever be’ state. Helvetireader is simply a hosted user stylesheet for Google Reader served via a user script. It aims to make the interface a clean, minimal experience where you’re not assaulted by an array of colours, lines, social features and buttons. As it removes these bits, and is designed for the expanded view only, you may not like it. … Read the rest here
Leave it to PPK to come out with a bold statement like, " CSS vendor prefixes considered harmful ". Moreso, It’s time to abolish all vendor prefixes. They’ve become solutions for which there is no problem, and they are actively harming web standards. The problem is that they are necessary. Look at Safari’s implementation of border-radius compared to the rest. I still can’t remember if it’s border-radius-topleft or border-top-left-radius . … Read the rest here
Magic Mouse, Fixed : Will Davidson: The Magic Mouse does not contour to the users hand. So, being a product designer and manufacturer, I decided to see what I could do to fix it. I started by building prototypes out of clay and testing them until I came up with one that fit my hand nicely and eliminated the wrist pains I was developing…. From there, I had it converted to a three-dimensional model and put into production. /via @ teehanlax … Read the rest here
“Video for Everybody”: HTML5 ‘video’ Compatibility, Sans JS : Similar to html5media but “without the use of JavaScript or browser-sniffing.” Two disclaimers: 1) I’ve not tried this trick myself, and 2) the amount of markup it requires may be no better than using JavaScript. /via @ taddgiles … Read the rest here
The malware attack(s) that my site suffered in recent weeks put into motion a series of changes which have been planned for some time now—some for a few months, some for a couple years. What follows is a detailed explanation of the changes. New Design Over Christmas Break in 2007, I started two redesigns: One for Authentic Jobs and another for this site. The premise for this realign encompassed a concept that wasn’t original, but one that I felt better suited my style of blogging. You see, I’ve always enjoyed posting links as much as I’ve enjoyed posting articles. … Read the rest here
The winners of Microsoft’s MIX 10K Smart Coding Challenge (for which I was honored to serve as one of the judges ) have been announced, and the Grand Prize has been awarded to… Jimmy D ’s Frog Log . Which is an HTML5/CSS/JS entry. That doesn’t run in Internet Explorer. Yep. Frog Log was my top pick, and obviously did very well with the other judges too, for a good reason: it’s a fun game. It doesn’t play quite the same in Firefox previous to v3.5, as the drag-n-drop doesn’t work. … Read the rest here
The last thing I needed was more choice in apps for keeping a ‘Design Scrapbook’, but that’s what’s happened with Zootool . At first glance, it looked like just another FFFF ound , Ember or Img Spark , but it turns out it’s much more than that. The developer, Bastian, told me to think of it as more of a visual Delicious. Once I got into that mindset it made more sense. Zootool ‘lassos’ not only images, but documents (like PDF s), videos, and pages (not complete pages yet) and stores them in your ‘zoo’… Read the rest here
The last thing I needed was more choice in apps for keeping a ‘Design Scrapbook’, but that’s what’s happened with Zootool . At first glance, it looked like just another FFFF ound , Ember or Img Spark , but it turns out it’s much more than that. The developer, Bastian, told me to think of it as more of a visual Delicious. Once I got into that mindset it made more sense. Zootool ‘lassos’ not only images, but documents (like PDF s), videos, and pages (not complete pages yet) and stores them in your ‘zoo’. … Read the rest here
“Someone asked me the other day what percentage of my day was spent doing what. Yesterday it was approximately one third general admin type stuff, one third client liaison type stuff and one third designing type stuff. If we ignore the fact that there isn’t really such a thing as a typical day – that is a pretty much a typical day.” Ben Terrett ( Interesting Mini CEO Half Thoughts ) When I started working freelance, I worked out my rates and estimated earnings based on a ‘typical’ eight hour day. What I didn’t really comprehend at the time was the fallacy of an eight hour day of solid work. … Read the rest here
