Designer Is Not A Profession
heydonworks.com
Heydon Pickering:
Designing is deliberating; reasoning; justifying. It is joining up the dots.
Heydon Pickering:
Designing is deliberating; reasoning; justifying. It is joining up the dots.
Sara Soueidan:
Using the color wheel to pick colors has many benefits. One of the main advantages of HSL is that creating color harmonies becomes a piece of cake.
Sam Greer, for Eurogamer:
Some games are so big, and yet we engage with such a small percentage of their space in a meaningful way. When time isn’t an obstacle, why not have miles and miles of samey fields? “More is better” is such a common characteristic of big budget titles and the result is big spaces, filled with repetitive content and scarcely anything memorable. Our interactions with so many gaming worlds is passive. Even when they’re pretty enough to make us stop and snap a screenshot we’re still not learning them or unravelling them. They just want to get us to the next item on a checklist.
Eric Meyer experiences internet access in rural Uganda:
For geosynchronous-satellite internet access, the speed of light become a factor in ping times: just having the signals propagate through a mixture of vacuum and atmosphere chews up approximately half a second of travel time over roughly 89,000 miles (~152,000km).
But that’s not the real connection killer in most cases: packet loss is. After all, these packets are going to orbit and back. Lots of things along those long and lonely signal paths can cause the packets to get dropped. 50% packet loss is not uncommon; 80% is not unexpected.
A local caching server, meant to speed up commonly-requested sites and reduce bandwidth usage, is a “man in the middle”. HTTPS, which by design prevents man-in-the-middle attacks, utterly breaks local caching servers. So I kept waiting and waiting for remote resources, eating into that month’s data cap with every request.
Ken Kocienda recounts the process of designing the iPhone keyboard:
I started to think about improvements, and to help me keep my keyboard goal literally in sight as I sat in my office, I measured and cut out a small piece of paper, about 2 inches wide by 1.3 inches tall, a little smaller than half the size of a credit card turned on end. I pinned up this little slip of paper on the bulletin board next to my desk. I looked at it often. This was all the screen real estate I had available for my keyboard.
Watching this footage only made me more impressed with the stunts in the film.
See also: How Tom Cruise Learned to Fly a Helicopter Stunt for Mission: Impossible - Fallout.
Watched 4 August 2018
There is a shot in this film that, for a split second, managed to trick my brain into believing Tom Cruise was about to die. I didn’t smile and think “that’s cool.” Folks, I audibly gasped in a movie theater.
(I’m talking about the helicopter scene)
Rewatched 3 August 2018
It’s clear why kid me thought this was the coolest thing ever. I was pleasantly surprised to find that all the iconic moments I remembered still hold up. What I wasn’t expecting was for the rest to be so… messy? The more expository scenes feel very half-assed, to the point of being a bit silly.
Toshi Omagari at TYPO Berlin 2018:
Limitation is a fantastic ingredient for creativity. In the early days of video games, you did not have a luxury to use retail fonts on screen and developers had to make their own in a pixel grid of multiples of 4, the most common being 8*8 pixels in monospace letter width.
Paul McCann:
Nobody was sure where they came from. These are what came to be known as the ghost characters (幽霊文字).
I’ve been working with CJK characters for the first time for the Open House Macau website, and finding everything about these writing systems to be fascinating.
Dan Golding:
Across the entire franchise, there’s still an unmistakable sound to the music of James Bond. So why does James Bond sound like James Bond? And how do you write a new Bond song?
Played 22 July 2018 on Mac
I played it in fits and starts, but I was charmed every time, and always envious of the brilliant ideas on display. The design is just so economic and straightforward, yet presents so many possibilities for variation. Deserves to be in some design museum’s permanent collection.
Ben Porter, developer of MoonQuest:
So how can you take 7 years to make your game? Here are some important tips and tricks for taking your sweet time.
Rewatched 16 July 2018
I will never not be amazed that this movie exists. There is a very rare quality to the animation work here — you never forget it’s hand drawn, yet it’s always alive.
Jeremy Keith:
Frankly, the whole point of prefixed CSS is that is not used after a reasonable amount of time (originally, the idea was that it would not be used in production, but that didn’t last long). As we’ve moved away from prefixes to flags in browsers, I’m seeing the amount of prefixed properties dropping, and that’s very, very good. I’ve stopped using
autoprefixer
on new projects, and I’ve been able to remove it from some existing ones—please consider doing the same.
Browser prefixes seem to be slowly going away. I stopped using Autoprefixer last year and haven’t missed it.
Jeremy Keith at Webstock 2018:
I also think we should remember the original motto of the World Wide Web, which was: let’s share what we know. And over the next few days, you’re going to hear a lot of amazing, inspiring ideas from amazing, inspiring people and I hope that you would be motivated to maybe share your thoughts. You could share what you know on Mark Zuckerberg’s website. You could share what you know on Ev Williams’s website. You could share what you know on Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey’s website. But I hope you’ll share what you know on your own website.