All entries from October 2007

A few items of interest, in no particular order…

Casual Aesthetics

Our pal Wyeth Hansen recently launched the Casual Aesthetics blog. The first three posts are great.

I figure Wyeth’s writing will appeal to all sorts, as you have some of this:

Now anyways, to make the animation feel ‘vintage’, I developed a layering system which basically involved lowering the frame rate, desaturating certain colors and bumping others up, adding a looped ‘wash’ texture over the piece and adding fake film grain to give it a gritty texture.

and this:

Casual Aesthetics embraces a sort of sliding-scale approach to problem solving by identifying both the merits and shortcomings of various solutions. What emerges is a gradation of values linked to formal attributes, which ultimately becomes an expanded matrix as more and more elements and ideas are analyzed and added. This is achieved by organizing and analyzing existing objects and media that exemplify various characterstics and extruding their latent meaning.

Thinking for a Living

Duane King recently sent us copies of Thinking for a Living, the newsprint companion to Duane’s session at the Dallas Society of Visual Communications 3rd Annual National Student Show & Conference. Duane also launched http://www.thinkingforaliving.org.

Both the website and print peice serve as a collection of ideas & resources for young designers — lots of recommended reading.

Bob Borden and Duane King run BBDK, a multidisciplinary studio based in Sante Fe, New Mexico. We’ve collaborated with BBDK in the past, and expect more in the future. Total sweethearts.

Web design process, client-perspective

I’ve been reading Joel on Software for some time. Joel Spolsky is a software veteran, and founder of Fog Creek Software in NYC. One might describe Joel’s writing as popular fiction for software nerds.

Today he posted an article on the recent web redesigns for Fog Creek Software and their product, FogBugz. Designers, developers, freelancers, project managers, proposal-writers, & those that run studios should enjoy.

Yesterday A List Apart released the results from 2007’s Web Design Survey, conducted in the spring of 2007. 33,000 web professionals participated, myself included. ALA’s 81-page report is a fascinating read.

In the spring of 2007, I distinctly remember being excited by the prospect of the survey. I was surprised to discover that this marked the first meaningful public research of the profession.

In answering each of the 37 questions, I was amazed that we (the web industry/community/whatever) didn’t know this stuff already — Who’s doing the work? For what sort of companies? Where do people live? Age, sex, ethnicity? How much money do people make? Education? Do people enjoy the work?

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. The questions dig pretty deep: prevalence of blogging/personal publishing, tracking career history/future, perceptions of bias, interest/methods of continued education.

The results are extensive. Tons of graphs and charts. ALA did well to commission statisticians Alan Brickman and Larry Yu to make sense of it all. The report is a beautifully crafted document. ALA intends to conduct the survey annually.

Thoughts

It’s interesting to consider the number of participants. The 33,000 figure can seem both big and small. I’m impressed that ALA managed to get that many people to carve out the time necessary to complete the survey. It’s more than you can fit into Madison Square Garden (19,763), but 33k isn’t blowing my mind. The world is sort of big, with a lot of humans. Microsoft alone employs 78,000 people. Over a million people live in Rhode Island. The human head weighs eight pounds.

I realize the industry is bigger than 33k, and that the survey only represents the dedicated core — those down for the cause, blog-readers and general-purpose nerds — but, it reveals that this whole dot com thing is propelled forward by a relatively small group of people.

A mystery to most, but Atlanta knows what I’m talking about. At the very least, one should appreciate the flyer.

Some tunes: Think about it. Ben Burton Park.

Gavin might still have some records (Update: he does).

See you Thursday.

Update:
Was fun. Time-warp to age 16.

Opening tunes Nasty Moves & Ben Burton Park:

Many websites offer RSS feeds. If you have no idea why, this article is for you.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Any given feed is just a summary of content from an associated web site. Websites offer feeds for all sorts of content — blog posts, podcasts, news articles, or any sort of timely content.

An RSS feed is content wrapped in a generic data format called XML. Humans have no business reading this stuff. It’s for computers.

All that matters is that you can plug feeds into a feed reader. A feed reader like Google Reader allows you to keep track of hundreds of feeds in one place. Rather than discover new content by navigating to websites individually, a feed reader can instantly inform you of new content across hundreds of sources. For information junkies, feed readers offer increased consumption across countless content sources, at near real-time speed.

Process

I wake up in the morning and open Google Reader, where I plow through a river of news. 154 subscriptions and growing, I’m following major media, design, politics, and all varieties of nerdstuff. I repeat at various points during the day. I can’t say the same for newspapers, magazines, television, etc.

Here’s a snapshot from today:

River of news

I have a bunch of feeds in one big pool called “favorites.” Here I step through a big pile of latest posts from the various feeds I designate as favorites. With this method of browsing, I’m able to move through an amazing amount of content very quickly.

New feeds

As I browse the greater web, I find other sites of interest and plug them into the Google Reader super-brain.

Firefox makes this easy with the little subscription icon:

Upon clicking “Subscribe to this page…”, Firefox will add the feed to whatever feed-feader you like (Google Reader, Bloglines, My Yahoo, NewsGator, etc.)

Or, you can paste the feed directly into Google Reader:

The comprehensive sell

If you’re not excited by new forms of information consumption/aggregation, you might be reeled in by content. Here’s some favorites.

Designerly

• Brand New
  Opinions on corporate and brand identity work. Feed Link
• Design Observer
  Writings about design & culture. Feed Link
• Viewers Like You
  Contemporary art, design, music, culture. Feed Link
• YouWorkForThem
  Books, stock art, typefaces, DVDs, posters, etc. Feed Link
• A Brief Message
  Short-form design opinions. Feed Link
• Fecal Face
  Interviews, features, forums, etc. Feed Link
• Monoscope
  Design inspiration. Feed Link
• Pentagram
  New from Pentagram. Feed Link
• Motionographer
  A bunch of motion graphics stuff. Feed Link
• The Nonist
  Unwilling to bind to any particular ideology. Feed Link
• Princeton Architectural Press
  papressblog. Feed Link
• Rinzen
  Latest from Rinzen. Feed Link

(Note: Interestingly Newstoday.com doesn’t offer a feed.)

Nerd-stuff

• Scott Rosenberg
  Technology, politics, culture from writer Scott Rosenberg, author of Dreaming in code. Feed Link
• Kaourantin.net
  Tinic Uro, Adobe Flash engineer. Feed Link
• Photo Matt
  Matt Mullenweg, founder of Wordpress. Feed Link
• Daring Fireball
  John Gruber on Mac. Feed Link
• Particletree
  Web stuff from makers of Wufoo. Feed Link
• Mezzoblue
  Dave Shea, web designer from Vancouver, Canada. Feed Link
• Joel on Software
  Joel Spolsky, NYC software developer. Feed Link
• Call Me Fishmeal
  Wil Shipley’s blog. Mac programmer, runs Delicious Monster, makers of Delicious Library. Feed Link
• Coding Horror
  Programming and human factors by Jeff Atwood. Feed Link
• A List Apart
  For people who make websites. Feed Link
• Fake Steve Jobs
  Secret diary. Feed Link

Other stuff

• The Morning News
  Online publication. Variety of articles, features, links, etc.
• Pitchfork
  Indie-rock arbiters. Feed Link
• The Conscience of a Liberal
  Paul Krugman, op-ed columnist for the NY Times. Feed Link
• Free Williamsburg
  Local Williamsburg, Brooklyn blog. Feed Link
• Kottke.org
  About the liberal web arts. Feed Link
• TapeOp Forum
  Forum for TapeOp magazine. Feed Link

Other interesting cases

• You can subscribe to any Flickr user’s public feed (Here’s ours).
• Or subscribe to any del.icio.us user’s bookmark feed.
• You can find fifty-eleven different feeds for every major media outlet (BBC, CNN, NY Times, AJC, etc.)
• You can keep up with the latest on social news sites like Digg and Reddit.
• Most web services (hosting providers, things like that) offer customer support feeds keeping customers informed of service issues.
• Most message boards offer feeds.
• Weather.com offers feeds for national and local weather.
• If you run a website, the web analytics software Mint offers a feed for your website’s latest referrers.

Higher education doesn’t guarrantee awareness

This new form of information consumption remains a mystery to many — even those with one or more master’s degrees. The insertion of a content aggregator (Google Reader) between users (you, me) and content creators (websites, blogs, etc.) is a level of abstraction that requires some explanation. Perhaps this article will help connect the dots for those interested in increasing their daily information throughput.

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Questions? Comments? Contact James via email - .

If you’re reading this, you likely arrived via a link posted somewhere out there in this great big internet. This article is no longer available because it needs some revision. You could say it expired. Adobe has changed the behavior of Photoshop a bit since Adobe CS1 and some of the issues that inspired this piece in the first place are no longer applicable.