Archive for March, 2010
Monday Typography #5
Monday, March 29th, 2010
Adjusting the technology
Sunday, March 28th, 2010This is actually more of a “thinking” subject than plain facts, but it’s pretty interesting and has been in my head for quite some time now. Let’s think about an evil example first. Do you think that macromedia making flash (well, making, buying whatever ;)) thought for a moment that it’ll cause a mass of screen blocking, full blown ads all over the internet? But on the other hand they didn’t probably think about how complicated and amazing the flash games can be, and that youtube made online video possible thanks to that technology. So basically it’s nothing new – a technology is a tool, a path that we can use and misuse (which is way more fun) to make something out of it that wasn’t originally intended.
So where else can we find an example of that? Well one thing are the LOMO cameras. Those cheap, old, film-based russian cameras became an instant hit for trendy hipsters, emo kids, and artistic souls. Taking blurry snapshots of a moving arm, a shoe, a fruit bowl. Then posting it everywhere. It all became a sort of artistic revolution, because the camera’s faults made up for the originality of the outcome. And that’s what matters.
And since we’re talking pictures – there’s the iPhone. Sure 90% of the phones in the market now have better cameras. That’s beside the point. iPhone has a bad, cheap camera but it has one advantage. Apps! People made hundreds of photography apps, both “new camera” apps and photo retouch, editing, effects, filters etc. So you can have an iPhone Lomo, an iPhone HDR (well sort of) and plenty of amazing looking pictures (and if not amazing then at least creative). Because the built in camera “thinks for you” while taking a shot. But with some clever apps and an open mind you can do exactly what you want to, when you want to. And since you have the camera with you because most of us carry our phones with us all the time, you can take a photo anytime, anywhere.
Iphoneograpy is the term for the iPhone app’s photograpy and it’s represented by sites such as :
Iphoneography.com
And also our friends from hype4.com have made a photoblog with their iphone pictures (some unaltered) at
CreativeBuzz.org
Be sure to check those out!
Facebook as the second internet
Wednesday, March 24th, 2010
The threat!
So here’s the deal. Right now A LOT (that’s an estimated number ;) of people are facebook users. And they share A LOT (also an estimate ;) of data daily. That is pretty impressive. But why? What’s so cool about farms, mafias and all those other stupid tests? Sure they work for a while but how to draw people in and keep them in ?
- More than 200 million people?about one-fifth of all Internet users?have Facebook accounts. They spend an average of 20 minutes on the site every day.
- By Facebook’s estimates, every month users share 4 billion pieces of information?news stories, status updates, birthday wishes, and so on. They also upload 850 million photos and 8 million videos. All of that is carefully shielded from Google.
Well they got it all figured out with external links that are viewable inside the facebook web app. Basically you can listen to a soundcloud song file, view youtube (and other) videos and read some news stories without ever leaving the page. And how do you get that stuff? Well your friends post it, and your friends are pretty much the only type of advertisement you as an experienced web user trust anymore. Aren’t they?
So basically you get all your funny videos, and all your most recent news from one place and you can comment and “like” it all in that one place, allowing other your friends to see it and spread the word. So facebook is becoming slowly a way to discover the internet and not only the social network of friends. Because before that we used aggregating websites to find certain type of content (funny videos, marketing tips, games) and right now they can all be embedded to become a part of the facebook machine.
Who should be scared?
The analysts at Hitwise claim that celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton now gets more traffic from Facebook than from Google – more than 7 million pageviews from Facebook alone. If that trend increases, then the current wisdom about web traffic is about to get turned on its ear.
Yes, it draws people away from google, and I think they’ve noticed (a little too late probably) and launched Orkut / or whatever it’s called now. Google Buzz? That’s it! It has potential of course (because it’s google) and it’s gonna be plenty useable combined with all the google cloud apps but it’s hard to break something that already works fine. And what’s more important it’s SUPER HARD to change the habits. Maybe they’ll succeed. Or maybe in a few years the internet will be facebook and content supplying “facebook apps” for it. Let’s all hope that won’t happen!
The problem with google is that it’s just a machine based on probability and algorithms to deliver you content. And social networks are based on the idea that no machine stands between you and the content. No. It’s chosen by the people you know and trust, and that’s why it’s actually better tailored to your tastes (well unless you’re spamming for thousands of friends you don’t know that is)
Monday typography #4
Monday, March 22nd, 2010Another one of our weekly installments of typographic insanity. As usual remember that clicking on the image will take you straight to it’s autor (well in most cases at least). Enjoy!
Typography by ~DamagedInnocence on deviantART
The rate of (r)evolution
Sunday, March 21st, 2010
How many of you remember adding “back” arrows in your websites about 10 years ago even though browsers back then had a “back” button? Or when gradients came into play and became super-popular around 2002 didn’t we abuse them for a while? Now they’re either used with style or are an example of a lack of thereof.
The web design model transformation
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010Yeah. I have noticed recently that the previous model of how things are done in the web design world has shifted slightly. What’s more important, it appears to be still moving in that direction, thus making an impact that will probably be visible in a couple of months. The current division on a bell curve would look somewhat like this:
Monday Typography #3
Monday, March 15th, 2010And as usual on mondays we give you some clever examples of creative use of words and letters that yield some unique results. Click on an image to go to the authors flickr page.
Useful Mac OS X tricks
Saturday, March 13th, 2010The funny thing is that it’s usually all in the OS documentation. But who reads this stuff? Why do they even make “instructions” if nobody reads them ? ;) Well we don’t read them and sometimes we find out about some stuff either by accident or in some web article (this is what you’re doing right now, ha!). First of all let’s take the dock. The dock (in my case it’s a custom Onyx dock but it works just as your regular “shelf” in Leopard…) you have a bunch of icons and a couple of stacks probably like your Documents, your Downloads, some people (like me) also have their applications in a stack for easy access. The trick is :
Press Command, hold it and click on anything on the dock
That takes you to a finder window with the file selected. You can easily find where exactly is that app, that file dragged to the dock, or any element in stacks because if you open a stack and Command + click on an item in it it will open a finder window with that item highlited. Pretty cool huh ?
Photoshop tutorial – light trails / curved beams
Friday, March 12th, 2010
Today I’ll show you how to create those ubiquitous light trails or as I think of them “curved beams of light” that can either go around a character or be just in the front looking like “light painting”. We will create the image above and it will take about 10 minutes to do so because it’s all about the PEN tool in photoshop. If you don’t really know how to use the pen tool then find a tutorial that shows you the basics of the tool before you proceed.
Fold ‘em when you need ‘em
Thursday, March 11th, 2010What is the mysterious “fold” ?
There’s this very big issue among many designers of making all the necessary information above the fold (that being a standard of about 600 / 700 pixels high). So they try and they try to fit everything that’s “important” in there. In a typical layout that gives us 960 x 660 pixels of space that the most users will instantly see. Which is about this much of this website :
