[survey | read | learn | other | about ]
Apparently using only paint and careful design, Axel Peemöller designed carpark signage that looks amazingly distorted and illegible—except for at specific vantage points, when large, colored letters spelling directions such as "In" and "Up" stand out like huge holograms for drivers.
[via Daring Fireball]
The back of a delivery truck in front of me at a stop light this afternoon: Jax Genuine Cheddar Cheese Curls and Girard's Limousine Service.
Kyle McDonald at MIT has created a bunch of interesting audio/video/music Processing apps, including the Ambient Lapse program shown above (which uses both Processing and SoundStretch).
"Ambient Lapse" is a simple technique for capturing the ambiance of spaces, especially their color and spectral characteristics. It operates on a principle similar to long-exposure time-lapse, but allows exposures to overlap. Instead of producing momentary bursts of specific images, individual objects and well-defined perspectives, we're given vague impressions.
[via createdigitalmusic.com]
AnaimationExpressions on color design in 101 Dalmatians, in what's projected as the first of an extensive series. (Disney, I think, is where I learned most of what I know about color design.)
A Simple Book Repair Manual. If you're like me, you have a lot of books, some of which are (a) not easily replaceable and (b) in various states of disrepair. (If you're actually like me, you have other issues as well, but we won't go into them at this point.)
[via Lifehacker]
From the oddly named Hungry Man TV, the short film Tarantino's Mind. Nice.
A film buff tells a friend that he's finally broken "the code" - the mystery behind the character & story threads that bleed from one Quentin Tarantino movie or screenplay into the next. His friend is less than impressed. Starring Seu Jorge (The Life Aquatic) and Selton Mello (Tarja Preta). A short film by Brazilian directing duo 300ml.
Haven't read it yet, but this looks interesting: David Brown's Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth [amazon link]. From the Huffington Post review:
Browne digs deeply into the band's democratic decision-making process, which gives each distinct personality ample voice. As with any band, tensions do inevitably arise, but disagreements here don't last long. Maybe it's because the members of Sonic Youth are so unwaveringly likable. And they're all characters in their own right: Thurston Moore's continuous joking; Kim Gordon's focused creative input and reserved demeanor; Lee Renaldo's technical prowess; and Steve Shelley's stabilizing influence. It's almost impossible to hate the underachievers now crowned by many as the kings of rock. (Former-Voice critic Robert Christgau called Sonic Youth "the best band in the universe" only a few years ago).
(I feel like I should have heard about this from somewhere way cooler than Huffington Post, but I guess that's my world now.)
[via Huffington Post]
MSNBC appears to have unintentionally combined two unrelated news stories (a grizzly attack in Alaska and a woman committing suicide after her home was foreclosed on).
Or there's a very hairy Loan Officer with salmon on his breath somewhere in Alaska.
Clearleft's Silverback is $49.95 software for the Mac that does screen recording augmented with screen capture for guerilla usability testing. Uses the small Apple remote that came with your Macbook for adding a chapter markers on the fly. There's a thirty-day free trial version available. Features include changing location, size, and transparency of inset video, tracking click locations on screen, and more. (You can also turn off the inset video, which lets Silverback double as a simple app for creating screencasts.)
The program lacks the advanced features you might find in spendier products like Morae—there's no built-in video editing (use iMovie) and no stats tracking, but for quick, on-location work, it's definitely worth $49.95.
Ten percent of profits from registered copies goes to the Save the Gorillas campaign. ("Silverback," "Guerilla usability testing," "Save the Gorillas." Get it?)
Update: Hicksdesign, which created the Silverback icon, posted a series of design sketches showing how the icon evolved from basic concept through hand sketches to final design.
[via Daring Fireball]
Paul Westerberg's selling his new album 49:00 for 49 cents as a single-track mp3. What's not to like? (Well, maybe the slight Amazon weirdness that requires you to use the 1-click button to purchase the album; if you purchase it using one of Amazon's other options, accounting overhead brings the cost closer to a dollar.) Westerberg has a PDF version of the liner notes and other things.
[via Pitchfork: Today]
Noise Between Stations summarizes (and links to) some research on two practices that separate design experts from novices. Experts tend to problem solve top-down/breadth-first and they reframe difficult problems while novices don't.
Obviously, a novice consciously deciding to switch those two behaviors won't automatically make themselves an expert designer. Both expert practices, for example, probably rely on having a rich repertoire of strategies, skills, and experience. But if nothing else, it suggests things that novices might consciously work toward. (I say all this without having looked at the articles referenced. Hey--breadth first.)
Do you sit around idly wondering what it would be like if fonts gathered as a group to vote on membership to some weird, UN-style council? Then this is the video for you. Sort of predictable (Arial Narrow is ethnocentric; Ransom is holding Courier as hostage; Old English is, well, you get it) but still funny. If you're a font geek.
[via Typophile]
Stuart Moulthrop guest edits the Iowa Review Web's issue on Instruments and Playable Text:
Judy Malloy, "Concerto for Narrative Data
John Cayley, "riverIsland QT"
Nick Montfort, "The Purpling"
Shawn Rider, "So Random" and "PiTP"
Elizabeth Knipe, "activeReader"
Stuart Moulthrop, "Under Language"
[via Mark Bernstein]
Michael B. Johnson of Pixar, interviewed by Peter Merholz:
The important take-home point, though, is that Pixar loves their films so much, we make them twice :-).
[...] We’d much rather fail with a bunch of sketches that we did (relatively) quickly and cheaply, than once we’ve modeled, rigged, shaded, animated, and lit the film. “Fail fast,” that’s the mantra. With a team of 10-20 people (director, story artists, editorial staff, production designer and artists, and skeleton production management) you can make, remake, and remake again a movie that once it hits 3D will take an order of magnitude more people to execute. The complexity of the task does not ramp up linearly.
Building things and then taking them apart isn't an error; it's a design strategy. "Measure twice, cut once" is fine when you're sawing a sheet of plywood, but it's a limiting strategy with virtual tools. Find an environment that lets you fail fast.
[via Daring Fireball]
BBC News has a short piece—with some audio samples—on a cache of 267 audiotapes made in the 1960s and 1970s by Delia Derbyshire, an early BBC Radiophonic Workshop member and electronic audio pioneer who, among other things, created the theme music for Doctor Who (from a score composed by Ron Grainer). The Doctor Who theme is among the more conventional things the Radiophonic Workshop did; these people were seriously ahead of their time. (According to the archivist working with the tapes, Derbyshire "got a bit disheartened and a bit bored with it all when the synthesizer came along and it all became a little too easy.")
The also BBC has a brief page covering Alchemists of Sound, a BBC TV documentary about the Radiophonic Workshop (including some free clips); Sound on Sound ran an extensive piece on the group, although you can only read the first few thousand words before you're asked to pay for a PDF. (Worth the 99 pence if you're interested—I read the piece in print a couple of months ago.)
My office on campus yesterday.
Update:: Underdog's immediate comment: Barton Fink.
Stuart forwarded me this Twitter notification:
Hi, Stuart Selber.
State College Police (StateCollegePD) is now following your updates on Twitter.
Check out State College Police's profile here:
http://twitter.com/StateCollegePDYou may follow State College Police as well by clicking on the "follow" button.
Best,
StateCollegePD's twitter feed is actually an interesting idea, despite how ominous Twitter's boilerplate email makes it sound. The PD are using the feed for snow emergency notifications, Penn State football traffic alerts, and other things. I'm not sure how tracking Stuart's writing and reviewing schedule fits into that, but I guess they're just being engaged members of the community.
Chris Marker: Note from the Era of Imperfect Memory
Chrismarker.org is an randomly-compiled, taxonomically naive and hopefully useful archive of ruminations, bibliographic & filmographic notations, untimely meditations, mnemonic minutiae and other glosses on the cinematic, written, photographic and multimedia work of world-citizen & time-traveler Chris Marker.We welcome contributions in short article form from the global village that Marker helped to map. We also welcome Chris Marker news, links, memorabilia, aphorisms, quotations, images and stray insights. Contributions from animals are welcome too, of course, including but not limited to cats, owls, giraffes, emus and elephants (слоны).
[via Ballardian]
SurveillanceSaver for OS X and Windows screensaver that pulls images from 400+ networked surveillance cameras around the world. The programmers call it a "haunting live soap opera." Creative Commons licensed.
[via things magazine]
Virginia Heffernan at the NYT takes on the difficult issue of quoting casual web texts in more formal publications like the New York Times.
Consider another example. To show that Web users are curious about human reproduction, I might quote kavya on Yahoo Answers, word for word: “How is babby formed? How girl get pragnent?”
But that makes kavya look like an idiot. Readers might miss the sweet earnestness of his question. Maybe he (or she) is 7 or a native speaker of Hungarian. I should cut the kid a typographical break; that’s not an easy question to ask. The cockamamie diction and syntax of Internet English is, possibly, only incidental to his inquiry. A reporter could paraphrase or revise his question — “How is a baby formed?” — lest readers get blinded to the intent of the question by moronizing typos.
But “How is babby formed?” is funny. And who wants to deny readers a chance to laugh and to get the full flavor of Internet-culture wackiness? It’s flat-out lying to pretend that everyone (or anyone) spells well online.
This is something you've run into if you write about the Web much: Do you preserve spelling errors? Do you correct them in brackets? Do you just paraphrase? When and why? It all comes down to (predictably) rhetorical purpose, tempered by maintaining the validity of your data. As Times editor Daniel Okrent says in Heffernan's piece, we've struggled with this issue for a long time in terms of quoting verbal statements (do you spell out accents to give readers the flavor? do you preserve the "and ... uh ... um"?), and there aren't simple answers. (Not a direct quote.)
[via Fimoculous.com]
