Thoughts about design, code & technology
Very interesting video for Dutch band Kraak & Smaak’s Squeeze Me.
It’s amazing to see that the folks at Pool Productions didn’t settle in executing the whole flip book concept really well: they dove deeper into it, forcing the boundaries established between reality and the book contents in interesting ways. And the song is pretty good too!
When reading this somewhat average post from Smashing Magazine (average when compared to the excellent quality of the stuff they usually provide: I think their game lies in web design resources), I sure didn’t expect to end up finding a link to book cover paradise. 6,179 book covers posted so far.
This reminded me of the Most Coveted Covers Forum newsletter from Readerville to which I have subscribed for a few years. It’s been a bit slow lately, but it’s a good service, with insightful reviews from passionate analysts.
And as a bonus, a share a link to Book Covers, a site dedicated entirely to this subject, which sports a nice feature on John Gall, a long time favorite of mine.
It’s funny to look back just a couple of years and realize that, when graduating from college, I was pretty sure I’d specialize in designing books and book covers, only to find out a few months later that I’d be designing and developing user interfaces—and now actually sure this is what I really want to do for a living. Life is full of twists!
Once again, writing as a personal note, and hopefully as something that could end up being helpful for others.
I struggled quite a bit a few days ago trying to setup simple HTTP authentication (.htaccess + .htpasswd) in my development machine at work (Windows XP). I just wouldn’t work the same pair of files that worked successfully in the remote testing server (Linux) resulted in failed authentications when in my dev machine.
After a lot of research, I discovered the cause: .htpasswd passwords should not be encrypted under Windows! It took some time to find out about this, specially considering every single example of simple HTTP authentication I could find was scoped to Linux (including the many .htaccess generators out there).
In short, the lesson is:
when using .htpasswd files under Windows,leave the password as plain text.
So, for example, to protect a given cave directory with user name alibaba and password opensesame, you’d have an .htaccess in the parent directory such as
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Cave"
AuthUserFile /path/to/password/.htpasswd
Require valid-user
with the corresponding .htpasswd file in /path/to/password/ (remember this path is relative to the root of the volume where Apache is running from)
alibaba:opensesamewhile in Linux, the .htpasswd file would read
alibaba:b3xT.a9Xe7LsMI hope this helps someone!
Beautiful!
The AirJelly is, quite simply, a jellyfish that floats through the air. It’s a concept project by Festo, a German manufacturer of motion control and automation systems.
There’s no information in English so far, but from the whitepaper in German I managed to get that it’s 1.35 m (4.43 ft) in diameter and 2.2 m (7.2 ft) high, while weighting a mere 1.3 kg (2.86 lbs). It must be quite a sight.
The 960 Grid System CSS framework website, offers a nice explanation on why using a 960-pixel page width:
All modern monitors support at least 1024 × 768 pixel resolution.
960 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, 24, 30, 32, 40, 48, 60, 64, 80, 96, 120, 160, 192, 240, 320 and 480.
This makes it a highly flexible base number to work with.
I’ve been designing web pages with a default width of 955 pixels for a long time, and I always had a hard time dividing the width in useful modules, since this number isn’t a joy to play with.
Perhaps this might be obvious to some, but struck me as a very useful tip.
I have been thinking and discussing with friends for quite some time on how design (and specially visual design) is mostly an income-limited activity (e.g. your income is directly proportional to the time you spend working). I found via 32Signals’ SvN this post by Derek Silvers that explains the notion more in depth.
The article is focused towards the music business, as it is the main subject of that blog, but it can certainly give some insights to the design crowd. Of course that, differently from the hands-on massage example Derek suggests, designers can have a variable income-to-time ration, depending on a series of variants such as briefing clarity, collaboration with clients and co-workers and, we have to admit, inspiration.
37Signals themselves remodeled their business model to accommodate the kind of ‘while you sleep‘ earnings that Silvers talks about, but that did so by becoming a software company with design DNA. Not every web design firm can do that, nonetheless graphic design shops that have nothing to do with software development.
And this it the notion that I have been so interested in: how can a designer/small firm create a framework for continuous earnings from the same effort? So far I have only considered these three options:
This can, in the long run, amount to some good money, but is somewhat unstable, requires quite some time to build up and is in fact something outside the core activity of design, since it depends on the person’s skills as a writer.
And I’m dismayed by how designers frequently can’t write squat, even about their day-to-day activity. (Not that I am any good at it.)
Perhaps someone else can enjoy that neat poster your created just for yourself, or you may like to exercise your own personal style in ‘clientless’ compositions. Printing these out in some very high quality process can turn them into very marketable products and work as either decoration or art.
I have seen also t-shirts as very nice media for this kind of work, as Brazil had quite a boom of t-shirt designers in recent years (Camiseteria being a very popular spot).
On top of that, the visual thinking skill set often comes with some manual ability as a bonus. It’s not rare to find designers that can actually build stuff they design. This can mean painting, sculpting or any other way of bringing to reality something from your imagination.
These can be sold in some traditional way or maybe in websites such as Etsy, which seems to do a very nice job (they have cool visualization options, though only a few are actually useful).
There’s a big market out there to reusable design bits, such as generic illustrations, symbols or templates. These can be quite offensive to some designers—design work should be specific for a given purpose, not some one-size-fits-all solution—but can probably become quite a profit source. Because you’d be actually multiplying the income from something you would have worked on only once.
There’s a huge number of websites where to sell this kind of work, the first that comes to mind being Deviant Art.
These can be some nice alternatives, but I’m not satisfied with these so far, and hope I can come up with some more ways of repeatable ways to ear money ‘while you sleep’.
This is quite impressive: Super Mario Bros in 14kB JavaScript code with no external images: the sprites are encoded as strings in a custom format that allows for 4 colors. Quite impressive.
Pure canvas magic under Mozilla and DIV positioning (!) under IE. Please do check the original post and find out more about this.
These are a couple of very famous quotations in the tech field:
640K ought to be enough for anybody.
and
I think there is a world market for about five computers.
They are supposedly attributed to Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and Thomas J. Watson, Jr., former president of IBM (1952-1971), respectively.
The wise folks at the Freakonomics blog have been running these so called ‘blegs’, a blog-beg, where they ask the readers of information they’d like to straighten out. These two quotations have been featured recently, and had been properly debunked as myths by both the authors and the readers. See here (Gates) and here (Watson).
I assume more of these interesting and perhaps fictitious phrases might come up in the future, so it’s worth checking back again.
On a side note, these posts broght to my attention The Yale Book of Quotations
I am a huge fan of Jonathan Harris, ever since I found out about We Feel Fine. It just blew me away. Recently, the creator of this and other outstanding works of art and visualization launched I Want You to Want Me, an installation at the MoMA in New York. Harris describes the project as simply as
I Want You To Want Me explores the search for love and self in the world of online dating.
There’s no online version for the unfortunate of us who cannot be in NYC to attend the exhibition to enjoy, but the project’s website is most certainly worth checking out.
If by any chance you’re not familiar with Harris’ work, I highly recommend visiting his sit and viewing each project with the attention they deserve. It can be quite rewarding.
* I had this post kept as a draft for a while, and in the meantime, Harris released The Polaroid Project, which I’m still to visit in depth.
Dutch publisher Onomatopee has in their catalog this interesting poster/pamphlet:
Text by Max Bruinsma and design by the Strange Attractors.
I find it interesting how the attributes of each of the companies which logos are mimicked highlight a few of the many characteristics attributed to the concept of God: Lego brings up God’s aspect of kindness, perhaps, while IBM suggests an all-knowing, designer-of-huge-things God.
Oddly enough, I’m not sure of exactly how Google’s God echoed upon me. I think the logo design itself isn’t as strong as the brand name for Google as it is for older companies, or companies that rely in a heavier way to the visual presentation of their names (as Coca-Cola most certainly does).
I hope this is isn’t offensive to anyone. : )
* The simple header in Onomatopee’s website is nice; very ‘soundful‘ in a strictly typographic fashion.