Last week I came home to a brown box from the amazon.ca fairy. Low and behold it wasn’t my copy of New Moon on BlueRay (the only way to watch a teen vampire drama) Nor was it my book about Dieter Rams. What it was, was something more. 37Signals has been in my top tier of favorite places that consistently does great work. Chock full of smart people, with simplistic designs which I’m always looking at for hints on how to accomplish great functional designs. To say that I sometimes thing WW37SD? is an understatement.
REWORK is a book about business, from the perspective of 37Signals. Each chapter is like a punch to the face. I’m not much of a reader but I’ve read more of this book in the last week than I had of all the books I bought last year. (I like to buy books but rarely read them fully) If you cant take my word on the importance of this book then read the words of other more famous people from this link here. 37Signals – REWORK
If that doesn’t get you clicking “add to cart” hell I don’t know what will. Maybe watch those nice videos on that link too. Below is a video that 37Signals made as an attack style add against Karl Roves new book. Which was number 1 rework coming in at number 2 for its release week. Its a good watch, the book is an even better read. you should buy it. Plus its even got great illustrations from Mike Rohde.
A great little info graphic on social networking from your friends at flowtown (yes that flowtown). The jist is that in the social sphere creating (like I’m doing in this blog) has shifted to chatting as more and more people opt for social media applications like Twitter and Facebook. It’s all apart of that fast moving train called of ease of use and one click.
Its not a lie. I’m late to the IgniteTo party. I know, I know shame on me for not keeping up but alas sometimes there are other things in my life that I need to do than hear smart people talk for 5 minutes about things I could or couldn’t care less about. More often than not, I like to hear interesting stories from smart and clever people, so it was without hesitation that I picked up some tickets to IgniteTo’s third offering. (more…)
I stumbled across this music video made by montreal’s Fluorescent Hill for the band N.A.S.A. a couple of months ago and was completely blown away by it. Fluorescent Hill did a great job at mashing together a world full of vibrant colours, texture and shape. The video’s style is as bold as the song itself, which features Tom Waits and Kool Keith embodying a tear-drop-ish entity that splashes colour all over the screen as it flies around. Love it.
TAXI’s Dave Watson was featured in this weeks Strategy Magazine article, Design Trends, which focuses on branding work done for The Carlton Hotel:
“I call it anti-technology or anti-machine,” says Dave Watson, CD design North America at Taxi, referring to a recent proliferation of seemingly hand-crafted design – found on everything from magazine editorial pages to movie credits (think Juno). “Designers are really yearning for the days of yore when print was king…Sometimes when you look at design, especially modern design, although beautiful, it could be considered a little cold. I think people are looking for warm communications and something that speaks to them on an intuitive level.”
A few weeks ago I stumbled upon a Java applet that let you track your mouse on screen live. Your co-ordinates converted into lines, your mouse pauses transformed into circles of varying sizes depending on the duration of the pause (longer = bigger) I ran this for a couple days and found great enjoyment in the results at the end of each day. Naturally I shared my results on flickr and via twitter.
The reaction to this little project by Anatoly Zenkov from his flickr feed was outstanding, so much so that its evolved into a full fledged app with the help of Andrey Shipilov
Want to see your mousing habits? How you work? Where you leave your mouse when you go to lunch?
Now that I have your attention. Check out the new amazing typographic Durex ads from German illustrator/designer Andrej Krahne. Not only tells it but demonstrates it.
See more below (more…)
Oh man do I love code. I love HTML, CSS, AS, php, the list of acronyms is long. What do I love more than code? Organs? not quite but I love the idea of taking code that was written for one purpose and transforming it into another experience altogether. An experience that the original coder never intended as a final output.
I present you with CODEORGAN. The simple premise of the site is you input in a URL and hit the “PLAY THIS WEBSITE” button. Wait a tick and then listen to the music that is generated from that sites source code. Amazing right? Don’t believe me?
Want to know what went into the redesign of the BBC website but were to afraid to ask. Or maybe you didn’t even know they had such a major overhaul. From the company who just recently told all its journalists to get used to using social media or get out. Is a honest look back at the process involved when they tackled the massive task at bringing the BBC website into the modern digital age. From grid systems to fonts. How a universal media player was developed, mobile and color rules, this blog post is something I hope more companies do in the future. The digital landscape has, to me always been about sharing and collaboration. I wouldn’t be where I am today if people hadn’t shared with me their trials and tribulations in their own projects and processes.
