Under Construction
I make things on the internet
I haven’t posted much material related to Intelligent Design, mostly because the argument seems so stupid. It shouldn’t even be called an argument. This Esquire article (full text) was too good to pass up though. It focuses on Intelligent Design, but also touches on the broader dumbing down of America.
The Creation Museum ranks up there as one of my favourites from this whole debacle. This is a photo of one of their displays, featuring a giraffe and Adam naming a Sabertooth tiger. Nice kitty.
This may be faulty logic, but follow me through. The Globe and Mail is supposed to be Canada’s high-brow, more intelligent newspaper, the New York Times of Canuckland if you will. As such, you will find me doing the challenge crossword on any given day of the week (like any good igloo-dwelling citizen). Now, we all know the Times invented the crossword, but they stay away from cryptics — it promotes a weird level of pomposity. For good cryptics, you want to turn to the New Yorker and Fraser Simpson (he authors the Saturday cryptic in the Globe).
So, what does all this newspaper name-dropping have to do with comics? Well, the Globe publishes a view comics next to their challenge cryptics. We can only assume that’s it’s some vain attempt at reproducing the cerebral air of the New Yorker’s strip. Long story short, the Backbench comic next to the cryptic wasn’t particularly funny until I made a few changes. See if you can spot them!
We have loads of new Seal Club action coming at you. First off, a quick redesign. Got rid of the old look in favour of a cleaner, whiter layout. The page is now entirely swathed in Garamondy goodness or some other serif font.
Now for the fresh meat. Two new interviews for 5Q: Naz Hamid of Absenter and Joen Asmussen of NoScope. They’re fairly short and won’t take too long to read. While we’re on the subject here’s a quick visual recap of the five interviews so far:
That is all.
The last month or so has been an interesting one for the site. I started the redesign about a month ago and it’s still going strong. This time around, it’s not just about looks, most of my efforts have been concerned with structure; thinking about how people visit the site and ways to keep them around. It’s not easy. If you’re really interested, read the change log. The site will never be finished but this layout should stabilize within the next few weeks, I still haven’t figured out how Michael is actually quantifying his progress.
Despite my best efforts at becoming a structural whore, eightface has managed to pop-up on the radar of a few CSS gallery sites — most notably, CSS Beauty, Design Shack and Fadtastic. So, hello to all the new visitors and thanks for the constructive comments and feedback. I’ve made a few changes a result, namely toning down the grunge on some of the headers.
A few people have mentioned their love/hate of the grunge stylings. I’m inclined to agree that a lot of the grunge and erasure sites popping up are a direct response to the austere 37 Signals school of design that we see so much of these days. And yes, it is a fad. One of those things that floats across the internet every few years. Usually in response to an outpouring of corporate work and people wanting to do different things with their personal sites. The vintage, worn look is very forgiving and has been one of my staples since the days of Photoshop 4 on the family P90.
I needed something new for my desktop, was starting to get sick of the photo that was there. Of course the results are posted here for your pleasure.
The image links to the file on flickr. I also have two versions available here: 1024px and 1280px. Made use of the second brush set from the howiezine site, mostly for the arrows and dots. It took 3-7 hours depending on how you feel like counting time.
The NYTimes is running an article about life hackers. This quote sums it up perfectly, “Information is no longer a scarce resource – attention is”. A large portion of my HCI classes were spent discussing how to notify people without actually interrupting them (aka attentive user interfaces / more). It’ll end up being one of the larger problems facing the computer industry for at least the next 10 years.
We’ve reached a threshold in terms of information availabily and devices to interact with that information; be it iPods, cellphones, laptops, whatever. What we need are devices that work for us. A microwave is pretty convenient, but wouldn’t life be a lot easier if your frozen dinner had an embedded RFID chip that told the microwave exactly how to cook it? What about that punk kid on a skateboard listening to music? Should you hit him with your car, or have it send a message to his iPod? The ability to invade music devices probably isn’t that smart, but you get the idea.
The time has come for me to write a book. Yes, you heard me correctly and no, it’s not crazy talk. The reason: Seth sent me an email about the NaNoWriMo challenge. I was going to dump it in the trash, but the brain started ticking away. Basically, it involves writing 50,000 words over the month of November. I remember Wes trying to do it a few years ago. It’s doable if you break it up in managable chunks.
I haven’t done too much on the creative writing side of things since my tenure at Golden Words ended a year and a half ago. So, there’s no point half-assing things with a few short stories, may as well dive right in.
There’s a large community aspect to the challenge (if you’re into the workshopping sort of thing). I probably won’t do too much of that, it’ll be hard enough for me to avoid distractions long enough to pump out a few thousand words every day.
This announcement is mostly to prevent me from jumping out of the frying pan before this shindig gets started. Now, I need to finish off some work that pays the bills. Stay tuned for further details.
Apparently, Nintendo is (or will be) running this commercial (4mb mov) for the Gameboy Micro here in Canada. It appears to be the work of QMG. The ad directs viewers towards Too Much Fun, but there’s only a place-holder page that redirects you to the main Nintendo page.
Some may say it’s a bit risque for Nintendo, but I’d just say it’s just something you’d usually see in another market (like parts of Europe). I was watching actual television over the Thanksgiving holiday, and found that Canadian commericals were becoming bearable for a change. There was a point not long ago, when most of them seemed like they were created by the drooling 3-year old nephew of an advertising exec.
I’ve been taking a few photos with a Canon Eos Rebel G, on loan from my brother Pete (who’s headed to med-school in Bristol). I haven’t used film in awhile, but the lcd on my digitial camera is broken so I’m shooting blind either way. At least you get a lot of control with the SLR. The downside is the cost of developing, although they’re trying to remain competitve with digital and offering up photo cds with you prints. Anyway, here’s a funny shot from a black and white roll that I just received back from processing.
High winds from the tail-end of a hurricane brought down some trees around here last week. Apparently the car was a rental, I can just imagine how the phone-call with the agency must have gone. Also check out this photo of a man on a bike and some graffiti.
I’ve been working on a number of web-based projects lately, some that pay, some that don’t. At this moment, I’d like to officially announce one of those projects: Seal Club, a small art and design group. It’s not an agency or anything like that, just a few people that like to make pretty pictures. Really, it’s been operating for a few weeks now but we haven’t been promoting it. There have been some hints around here, namely the Conform Project domain redirecting to Seal Club and the del.icio.us feed in my links.
The site is essentially an old-school ftp-style design site, glued together with a bunch of new tools. We all used to be members of art groups in the pre-y2k web (Swanky, Suffocate) and have some desire to relive those days. Mostly, it’s the motivation of having other people to kick you in the ass when you’re not getting anything done. Everything is done by hand via ftp with some efforts to stay standards compliant. We use del.icio.us to help us maintain our lists or links within the site and the forum is powered by flickr.
WordPress.com is one of the latest entries into the field of hosted weblogs. I signed up for an invite awhile ago and received one sometime last week. My site over there probably won’t see too much action, but it’s useful for testing purposes.
Right now, the service lacks somewhat in customizability (mostly on the appearance front) but it does offer a preview of what WordPress 1.6 will have to offer on the administration side of things. It’s also an example of the WordPressMU (multiuser) install, although most people probably don’t care too much about that.
I have an invitation to the service to give away, figured may as well offer it up here. If you’re interested, just drop me a comment and let me know why it should be yours. I’d rather give it to someone who actually wants to start their own weblog or migrate from blogspot instead of someone who’ll use it sporadically like me.
Hey boys and girls. Time to rip the site apart and redesign it. I’m talking pull the guts out and start again. The current layout is an evolution of an evolution of some metaphorical layered object. Actually, it’s based on a version of Kubrick from around December last year when I first installed WordPress. There’s a lot of legacy, there’s a lot of mess. I’ve been putting it off for awhile and may as well do it now.
If you were an adventurous soul that actually looked under the hood, I commend you. I have trouble keeping track of what I’ve done. Someone asked me about releasing this layout as a theme. After I get the new layout up and finish up some client work, I’ll try to clean up the style sheet and pags and release some semblence of a theme for WordPress.
I’ve been frustrated with the format of my own website. I need to make some bits of information more prevalent. The layout of the site will likely go towards something like one main entry and five quick posts on the main page, with a footer highlighting other content on the site. That footer would like appear in some shape or form on all pages.
Anyway, it’s going to be a live work in progress. Things might not work particularly well in the next few days. We’ll get through it. I’ll try to keep track of some updates in the Change Log.
Update: Templates are stripped down for the most part, working on structure and basic layout of the site right now. As far as design goes, I haven’t started anything in photoshop, so that will be coming later (11:22pm EST).
Update 2: I’m getting there, header graphic is up now. Still a bit of old code to clean up. Have the comments to work on and start delving into some of the sub-pages. (Sep 27 – 1:45am EST)
