- A Convergence of Convergences (sample above)
- McSweeney’s collects convergences, “an unlikely, striking pair of images, along with a paragraph or three exploring the deeper resonances.”
- How to become happier
- “Happiness is not the shallow state of feeling pleased and chipper all the time. Happiness is the state of a human being that has achieved cross-level coherence within herself, and between herself and the people, challenges, and institutions around her. Happiness comes from between.”
- Interview with book cover designer Peter Mendelsund
- “One of the things that I find most people misunderstand about cover design on ‘the outside’ is that so much of what happens is determined editorially, or in a marketing meeting. You try your best, but at the end of the day, most things are not going to turn out the way you liked. That’s why it behooves one to do a high volume of work. The law of averages suggests that you’ll end up with something to be proud of amongst the dreck at the end of the day.” [via JK]
- Paul Graham: Six principles for making new things
- “I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems© that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.”
- A bad business plan will trump good design
- “I just think it’s odd — and slightly disingenuous — of the champions of design strategy to fall silent when it comes to the failure of a company that’s very good at practicing it. Surely, if the roles were upended here, if it was Yahoo who was the dominant player, we would be regularly extolling the virtues of Yahoo’s design expertise. Perhaps we can’t expect design to save failing companies, but if not then perhaps we should be more judicious in talking up how design can make companies successful, too.”
- Let the code speak for itself
- “It’s hard to restrain metadata addiction once it begins creeping into a project, a team, or an organization…I think we can learn some lessons from code-commenting: don’t try to model everything! You need to step back and let the code speak for itself.”
- Don’t make me talk
- “If your pricing requires a call from a sales rep, it’s too expensive for me right now. And I don’t mean whatever your monthly/yearly subscription fees are, or the licensing cost. What I mean is that I don’t run my business using the telephone. For now, if we need to talk on the phone, I’m not the right customer for you.”
- SmugBlog on the S3 outage
- “Amazon’s communication about this has been terrible. It took far too long to acknowledge the problem. Fixing a major problem can take forever, which is understandable, but communicating with your customers should happen very rapidly. Amazon’s culture, internally, is very customer focused, so this is a strange anomaly. I will definitely lean on them some about it, and everyone who was affected should rightfully howl too.”
- FancyZoom 1.1 (used on the new Backpack marketing site)
- “This much-requested chunk of Javascript to zoom images inline, originally written for this blog but later rolled out to the Panic website and used for screenshots, is now polished up, bug-fixed, available for you to use on your website! Designed to view full-size photos and images inline without requiring a separate web page load, FancyZoom’s raison d’être (French for “raisin-determination”) is providing a smooth, clean, truly Mac-like effect, almost like it’s a function of Safari itself.”
- The evolution of tech company logos
- “You’ve seen these tech logos everywhere, but have you ever wondered how they came to be? Did you know that Apple’s original logo was Isaac Newton under an apple tree? Or that Nokia’s original logo was a fish? Let’s take a look at the origin of tech companies’ logos and how they evolved over time.”
John S.
on 22 Feb 08Interesting that you decided to use FancyZoom after your anti-lightbox post. I don’t see much difference in the techniques outside of FancyZoom not dimming the background. Care to elaborate on that decision?
Dave Stern
on 22 Feb 08FancyZoom lets you still navigate the page while the image is zoomed. Lightbox, with its darkening and such, screws up page flow on everything but the picture.
Also, I made a quick post about it to not even my actual blog that I try and get people to read, but the old livejournal I mostly use as a legacy thing for keeping in touch with friends, and Cabel commented on it within minutes answering a question I had. That was impressive service, and more than even the fact that I like the software better might be why I use FancyZoom rather than Lightbox if I ever decide that I want photo zooming on a page I design.
Alejandro Moreno
on 22 Feb 08I actually think that LightBox is good for some things, but after taking a look at FancyZoom, I have to say I’m impressed.
brad
on 22 Feb 08That is so cool about Apple’s original logo: you can see that their original vision was of Apple as a change agent, something that would drop on the head of unsuspecting dozers and making them “think different.” I never thought of the company’s name that way.
And on the convergence topic: I used to study mockingbirds, and one day in the lab we slowed down the song of a mockingbird on a tape recorder so it was both slower and deeper in pitch than in real life. The resulting song sounded almost exactly like the song of a humpback whale, which is another species that builds its repertoire of song fragments. So I took a recording of a humpback whale and speeded it up to see if it sounded just like a mockingbird, but no dice. Some similarities, but not enough to be convincing.
Jose
on 23 Feb 08Agree with John S., same thought came to my mind…
Tor Løvskogen
on 23 Feb 08FancyZoom is indeed fancy, but it is poorly designed. All the image resizing javascript out there have one huge design error, it’s missing the snappyness. Is the bandwidth so limited, that you can’t afford to preload the images in the article/page? Users don’t want to see a loading icon – they want to see images.
Thankfully David Hellsing has figured this out, and incorporated this in his javascript gallery Galleria, it is so obvious – yet, Lightbox 1, 2, FancyZoom and all the others just wrecks my user experience with seconds of waiting time, that’s just bad ux design.
clifyt
on 23 Feb 08I too am amazed that 37 is using FancyZoom considering how much they were complaining in the past about things like this.
This pulls me out of context much faster than something that shows you an overlay with ONLY what you need to see. This makes you have to look through the clutter and visually have to pick out what you need to focus on. The other way, your eyes adjust almost immediately.
I do like the way this looks though. It ain’t bad. Several tweaks and it could be a rival to the lightboxes.
Tom G.
on 23 Feb 08Combining how to be happy and a business trip…
I took a business trip recently and saw Mike Ditka speak; I wasn’t expecting much but the dude blew me away.
His talk was centered on ACE – Attitude, Character, Enthusiasm
One of the things he said about character I had heard years ago and I think its worth repeating (I wish I knew who said it):
Be careful what you think, because what you think becomes what you say.
Be careful what you say, because what you say becomes what you do.
Be careful what you do, because what you do becomes a habit.
Be careful of your habits because they define your character.
(I add) Be careful with your character as it determines your destiny.
He also reminded me to be enthusiastic. I have to say this has had a pretty profound positive impact on me the last few weeks.
RS
on 23 Feb 08Yes that’s exactly the key difference. FancyZoom doesn’t needlessly darken the page or turn your website into a strobe light.
clifyt
on 23 Feb 08You know you guys COULD just admit to being wrong every so often instead of pretending that you don’t like something when you’ve come around to it.
Unneedlessly darkening? You mean HIGHLIGHTING what you have obviously told the computer you want to focus on? Well, you could turn the LCD screen up 200% more for that…what? Can’t do that? So you darken the rest. Want back out…click out…it isn’t like you’re captive.
As for strobe? Most lightbox elements I’ve played with have allowed you to do a slow dimming based on the programmers preference. I honestly just used an animated gif with three levels and put the time in the image as opposed to complicating the javascript. No strobe. A quick dimming. One would thing the masters of javascript would figure out how to do this :-)
Vlad
on 26 Feb 08The Don’t make me talk link seems wrong.
This discussion is closed.