April 2008 Archives
22 entries
Beck's 8-Bit packaging
And speaking of retro 8-bittyness, loving this experimental packaging (via someone on Twitter who I failed to note while bookmarking).
Pixel Pour
Neat urban art installation, bridging the 8-bit gaming world to reality.
Web Standards Design + Development group
From the fine pilots over at Airbag, comes news of a newly formed group of web professionals: “…to form a strong network of individuals who have taken the initiative to become craftsmen of their trade. Today it is a list of names, tomorrow it will be a force for good—or at the very least a good list to have when you’re in a financial crunch and the guy schlepping real estate is paying $50 per new lead.” Joined!
Rainbow Tennis: red, blue, yellow, green, 3 more colors!
Photoshopp’d Atari 2600 game box covers of yesteryear.
Ten Thousand Cents
“…a digital artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool.”
“There’s a possibility that really great web design receives neither praise nor criticism. It just works.”
Cooking With Rockstars
Jennifer Niederst Robbins (author of Web Design in a Nutshell) interviews super-cool music people (Apples in Stereo, Spoon, Death Cab for Cutie, Jack Black, etc.) about cooking and food.
50 Ways to Help the Planet
Great roundup of fifty little things we can all do to help. Part of Wire & Twine’s The Green Line.
We All Hate Quickbooks
Another nifty example of parallax scrolling by using layered, semi-transparent PNGs (try resizing your browser window).
HyperType
Posted at 9:07 PM
A portion of a talk I gave throughout much of last year had a little bit on typography, and quoted an article from October 2006, Web Design is 95% Typography (the percentage could be a little exaggerated, but the concept is solid):
During the Italian renaissance the typographer had one font to work with, and yet this period produced some of the most beautiful typographical work.
A perfect present-day example of working with one font + CSS to manipulate that to convey meaning and interest is the current one-pager for the Seed Conference in Chicago this June. Beautiful work. One font. All hypertext.
Oh, and it looks to be a great conference, too.
Update: several people have pointed me to the impressively re-worked em-based version of the Seed design by Phineas X. Jones. When using ems instead of pixels, resizing text will keep all that lovely type work intact. Nice work.
Authentic Jobs Affiliates Program
Just weeks after SimpleBits became a partner, Cameron Moll’s Authentic Jobs rolls out some cool new developments. Earn $75 per full-time listing and $25 per freelance listing when you become an AJ affiliate. Also announced today is a brand-spanking new Authenic Jobs API for job-related mashup goodness.
“…this isn’t a field of straightforward answers and universal solutions. We are often faced with problems that have multiple solutions, none of them perfect. To understand what makes each solution imperfect and to know which of them is the best choice in the situation—that’s knowing your craft.”
Jeremy Keith's Future of Web Design coverage
Excellent live blogging of the conference in London. Sounds like it was a great show.
Creatively carved food
Photos of various foods carved into people, animals and other objects (site is in Russian).
Gary Vaynerchuk in print
The multi-media master now has a book coming out next month: Gary Vaynerchuk’s 101 Wines: Guaranteed to Inspire, Delight, and Bring Thunder to Your World. Can’t wait to check this out.
Coda Confidential
Interesting presentation by Panic’s Cabel Sasser. Covers the history of the company as well as interface design challenges while creating Coda, their web development app.
Dinner in the Sky
Terrifying. And don’t drop the pepper (via).
Ten Thousand Cents
“…is a digital artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool. The total labor cost to create the bill, the artwork being created, and the reproductions available for purchase are all $100.”
Accessible Data Visualization with Web Standards
Wilson Miner shows off some nifty tricks for styling informational navigation. This is ALA at its best: practical, hands-on goodness.
Authentic Jobs
Posted at 11:44 AM
Since 2005, Authentic Jobs has been:
… a targeted destination for standards-aware designers and developers and the companies seeking to hire them.
It’s a fantastic resource for the community — and one I’ve often pointed folks to that seek help.
You’ll notice some Authentic Jobs listed right here in the sidebar of SimpleBits. We’re happy to have joined the network of partners over the weekend. AJ proprietor (and designer extraordinaire) Cameron Moll announces the new additions over at his site. It’s great to be aboard.
New UK coin designs
The Shield of the Royal Arms, cleverly split among six coins. Beautiful.
The Highly Extensible CSS Interface
A four part article series from Cameron Moll, filled with bulletproofness and scores of resources for creating flexible designs.
A tiny web design studio founded by designer and author Dan Cederholm. We deliver hand-crafted pixels & text from Massachusetts, USA. Learn more
Bulletproof Web Design Second Edition New Riders
Web Standards Solutions The Markup and Style Handbook Friends of Ed