Recently of note

Tuesday October 30, 2007 - 9 months ago

Posted by James Ellis / Filed under Random

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.