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Tilt Shift Madness of Springtime in New York

Brian — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:21:07 GMT

tags: new york city, tilt shift, video

Chart Wars

Brian — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 20:30:08 GMT

tags: video, visualization

Julius Popp's bit.fall

Brian — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 20:09:31 GMT

Wow, very cool! Read his interview at Wallpaper*magazine.

tags: interactive art, video

Typeface Talk on "To the Best of Our Knowledge"

Brian — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 18:33:57 GMT

Wisconsin Public Radio’s “To the Best of Our Knowledge“ show had a great typography-related discussion today for all you typofile nerds out there.

Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones discuss one of their more famous typefaces, Gotham, and how the Obama campaign came to use it. Then Matthew Carter discuses his most recognizable creation—Verdana. And, yes, there is a bit about IKEA’s adoption of this screen font, along with a few animated reactions, heh.

The remaining interviews are nice as well, Kitty Burns Florey (whose name sounds like a rather scary children’s story) discusses her latest book “Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting“ and Tracy Honn of the Silver Buckle Press talks about the Golden Official #6 press from the late 1800s.

Check out the audio here—enjoy!

tags: audio, public radio, typography

Zen and the Art of the Electric Fence-licking Goat

Brian — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 17:46:45 GMT

tags: funny

Xixi no banho

Brian — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 17:08:37 GMT

Cute site (in portuguese) about how peeing in the shower helps conserve water.
www.xixinobanho.org.br

tags: advertising, animation, brasil, environment

Hip to be square—and isometrical! [2]

Brian — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 15:24:24 GMT

I’m loving the simplicity and boldness of Aakash Nihalani ‘s “fake” isometric tape bombs. Also check the Flickr photos.

tags: nyc, street art

"The Naturist"

Brian — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:21:42 GMT

Great “survival” tips, heh.

tags: ads, advertising, funny, teva

Chris Anderson's free "Free" book

Brian — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 20:25:01 GMT

Chris Anderson" title="Free by Chris Anderson (fur not included)" class="half" />
Highly recommended book for all you cheapskates out there! No, really, Mr. Anderson explores some really interesting topics regarding the concept of “something for nothing.”

Listen to the free audiobook downloaded from the iTunes store. You can also read the majority of the book at Google Books.

tags: audiobook, books, business, commerce, economics, free

Pursuit of happiness [1]

Brian — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 02:45:03 GMT

I’m a little late to regurgitate this sweet bit of tertiary linkage thanks to Mr Bilton, but hurry up and check out Maira Kalman’s take on the pursuit of happiness. Two personal icons for me personally are Benjamin Franklin and the guy who sort of invented the safety pin.

tags: illustration, new york times, philosophy

CNN—suck it

Brian — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 20:48:05 GMT

I used to have a sweet spot for CNN—especially the international edition when I was living in Brasil. For me, the International news report was a gem of english-language world coverage in a sea of Globo and other Brasilian national news. I watched the Iraq invasion from my comfy apartment across the street from the beach, among other things. I might have even developed a weird fetish for all the well-educated foxes from the international news desk (completely off topic).

So, I’ve been back in my motherland for a few years now and out of habit still watch and click on CNN. But my patience for decent news coverage from them has completely run out. For many months now, I bitched and complained about “Britney Spears” headlines at cnn.com. I think today, I’m finally at a turning point where I no longer regard this company as a true news source, but as a part of a corporation (like all other corps) fixed on making money outside of integrity or purpose. There’s still a handful of bona fide journalists on the CNN payroll, but for the most part, the reporting is so sensationalist, it’s really frustrating to be forced to hunt for actual news.

I really wish CNN would reconsider their efforts. But for the time being, I’m going to get my news elsewhere. So, CNN, you can suck it.

tags: news

Project Alarm

Brian — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 17:01:26 GMT

Absolutely stunning attention to detail! More info at Team Masai.

tags: animation, korea

"See Fernando"

Brian — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 15:28:40 GMT

Great song (thanks Jenny Lewis!, fantabulous video (thanks Team G!)

tags: music, video

Who you callin' a Font-face?

Brian — Fri, 08 May 2009 15:58:05 GMT

When I set up a comp for a website in Photoshop, many times I can spend hours figuring out which pixel goes where and what color it is. And since I drank the web standards/semantic web Kool-Aid, I’ve tried to keep the “text as image” scenario to an absolute minimum. So, while I’m in Photoshop lining everything up, I always seem to end up creating the big content box of greek text. What font should I use for the body copy? It usually ends up being Arial or Times New Roman. As web designers, we’re able to select our 3 or so favorite fonts for a certain class and hope for the best. My favorite thing is the “serif or sans-serif” declaration, which to me seems like a shot in the dark since people can change this preference in their browser. Essentially, outside of Arial and Times New Roman web typography has been just thatâ€”a crap shoot.

Not ever person realizes that websites are designed and built by people who are not necessarily designers (or builders for that matter). So, this is sort of a good thing to constrain font usage on the web. Having a limited amount of fonts to choose from creates a usability construct in that people on the internet get used to seeing Arial or Times New Roman, so anything outside of that throws them for a loop.

A colleague of mine once cringed at the possibility of selecting body copy fonts for a client as it would add another layer of complication in producing a site. I can understand this, though it strikes me as a bit lazy for a designer to disregard something as vital as the typeface of the majority of the content. It’s hard to imagine a book designer only being offered 2 fonts for the body text, isn’t it?

Enter the font-face descriptor from 1997 â€”that really worked out great, ugh. I can’t remember which browser supported this or didn’t, but I do know that it didn’t gain any traction at all and we all kept seeing the same ol’ fonts.

Twelve years later, I think the fire under people’s collective asses are being lit as Safari and Firefox have embraced “new” ideas in web design, including embedding fonts in websites. Of course, this means designers will end up waiting a few years for Microsoft’s IE to catch up, then another few more years for grandma’s to update their web browserâ€”but hey, I’m not complaining.

There are a few potentially large repercussions to all this font-face business. We could potentially have to interact with ugly fonts and/or font treatments. Also, I’m no performance analyst but I wonder how embedding a font or twelve million will slow down me hitting a website.

One of the interesting areas though is licensing typefaces. Right now, designers are limited in the legal sense to free fonts. The idea of “you get what you pay for” typically applies. When I think of free fonts out there on the internet, I always think of the ACDC or Purple Rain fonts which are purely decorative. I’m unaware of any free web fonts out there that are readable in terms of using it for body copy.

In my mind, this opens up the possibilities on two fronts. The first being foundries being able to license fonts for specific usage online, hence increasing their revenue. The other possibility is for type designers to tackle readability issues regarding web typography. So, we might be seeing some really interesting new fonts in webpages! At the very least, this whole font-face thing might stir up the typographer/webdesigner debates in after-work cocktail parties.

By the way, this is set in CA BND by Cape Arcona. While it’s really nice headline font, I wouldn’t want to read someone’s blog using this face.

tags: css, typography, web design, web standards

Playing for change

Brian — Fri, 08 May 2009 15:04:18 GMT

Chanda Mama from Playing For Change.

This Song Around The World is a folk tune from Chennai, India. We started the track in New Orleans and added musicians from the across the globe before finally delivering it the people of itâ€™s origin. We ended up in Chennai recording and filming the vocals from the Oneness Choir. The track has a feeling of perseverance and joy and features vocalists from four continents.

Nice collaboration of well-known and relatively unknown artists from several different countries making music. On one level, the collaboration itself is inspiring. On a more basic level for me, the music is just good. Check them out, watch the videos, buy the album, etc. at Playing For Change.

tags: activism, music

CSS button craze

Brian — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 17:14:15 GMT

I’ve been trolling the internet looking for what’s new with CSS 3. One of the things I’m really looking forward to is making really nice buttons without opening Photoshop. Take a gander at these two buttons above. Rounded corners, drop shadow, and background gradientâ€”and no images whatsoeverâ€”hot!

Obviously, not all browsers have adopted CSS 3 as of yet. As far as I can tell, Safari is in the lead in terms of early adoption.

Firefox 3.0.9 No gradient, no button drop shadow, no text shadow, but rounded corners look good!
Camino 1.6.7 No gradient, no button drop shadow, no text shadow, rounded corners look horrible.
Opera 9.6.4 No gradient, no button drop shadow, renders text shadows, no rounded corners.
IE No idea, but I’ll bet it looks busted up.

Here’s a screenshot from Safari 4:

tags: code, css

Mingus Day

Brian — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 22:48:44 GMT

Happy 86th birthday Chaz!

tags: birth and death, jazz, music, new york city, nyc

Aterciopelados anticipation

Brian — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 18:23:27 GMT

I absolutely cannot wait to see Aterciopelados play this Saturday!

tags: music, new york city

Words, a mathematical interpretation

Brian — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 18:21:58 GMT

Craig Damrauer presents interesting bits of text as mathematical equations. As well as other things.

tags: art, funny, visualization

The paper clip, re-designed [2]

Brian — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 13:42:05 GMT

It has always been my dream to design something that’s overwhelmingly simple, accessible (cost is cheap), and globally accepted—like the paperclip. At any rate, I was happy to see the Skrepkus paper clip this morning. Fantastic!

tags: product design