I’d like to offer my design services to the Occupy Cardiff movement for the purpose of creating a one-shot newspaper for the protest. This would be a great way to connect with people outside of Cardiff, and those not wired in to Twitter and Facebook.
With some creative guerrilla distribution tactics, this could get a lot of information into a lot of hands.
The first chapter of the Music Box Chronicles is a glimpse into the timeless life of Twinklebox, a music box caught in an infinite world, set to his own melody.
Twinklebox is a short film about the mechanics and music of time. The third film from Luniere brings yet another lost toy back to life in an animation that plays with scale, sound, and timelessness. The Music Box Chronicles is an ongoing collaboration into the parallel development of image and sound, inspired by a ‘Write Your Own Melody’ Music Box.
For my recent post about the terrible quality adverts appearing on WordPress.com sites I created a nice high resolution blue glossy version of the WordPress logo. Then I was inspired to make a few variations.
They’re made avaliable here as 1000x1000px PNGs, with transparency, under a CC BY-NC-SA licence. Feel free to share and enjoy, but please remember to give credit (to Foomandoonian), ideally with a link back to this page.
Buyer beware: A recent iOS update seems to have broken the shortcuts this app produces. I haven’t investigated any fixes/alternatives yet. I probably won’t bother.
Icon Project (£0.69) is an iPhone app for designing iOS style icons to use as shortcuts on the homescreen.
These icons can be used as shortcuts for making calls and sending SMS or email messages to specific contacts. You can also create shortcuts to web pages or web apps, just like you can from within Safari, but with your own icon. This is where things get interesting…
It’s been nearly two months since I switched halfblog.net from Posterous over to WordPress, and I’ve been generally very positive about the change, with some reservations. The truth is, I don’t think I will be recommending it so strongly to potential new bloggers any longer (as I have done at Social Media Surgeries).
The various reasons probably justify a separate blog post, but one concern is looming particularly large right now…
On the subject of inequality, this TED talk by Richard Wilkinson makes good use of data to show that unequal incomes can have a dramatic negative effect across society.
The charts below are from a September 2011 New York Times article, The Limping Middle Class. I moan a lot about shoddy infographics on this blog, but this isn’t one of those – this takes some complicated information and turns it into a story to make a very powerful point.
An informational graphic. See how it’s supposed to work?
I wonder if a similar presentation of UK data would be equally eye-opening?
Today Occupy Cardiff protestors set up camp in the pouring rain outside Cardiff Castle, before being forcibly removed by the police in the evening. Meanwhile, from the comfort of my flat, I aggregated all the information I could gather on Storify.
This curation was later embedded in a Wales Online / yourCardiff story.
Below, I’ve published a freeze-frame of the curation as it stands at the end of the day.
For further updates, be sure to read the Occupy Cardiff Storify page itself.
I had a typical spam comment on my logo design post from yesterday:
thank you for the wonderful posts its my glad to see such a nice resource…
Deleted now, of course.
I had a second comment (on my post about an orb weaver spider I saw, which actually gets pretty good search traffic), only this time the spammer dumped his entire spammy payload in a single comment.
I’ve deleted the original comment, but am reproducing it here for, um, posterity?
Last year I designed a logo for a conference to be held at the University of Birmingham called Inner Worlds, Outer Worlds [PDF], with a variety of talks and workshops on the subject of ‘developing personal and institutional narratives in support of LGBTQ students’.
I was pretty happy with the metaphor behind the final logo, and I think the conference put it to good use. You can see my exploration and development process below.
The Philosoraptor is probably my favourite advice animal image macro meme series.
The graphic was created for a t-shirt design, but quickly turned up on 4chan as a blank image macro template. Apparently the creator, Sam Smith, was happy to see his work being used, and applied a Creative Commons licence.
I’ve picked a few of my favourites…
Simple can’t come to the UK soon enough! It’s about time banking had some innovation.
Just look at the care and quality that has gone into their website, their app, even the package they send your card in.
Compared to this, using HSBC internet banking is a trial. They don’t even have an app for regular customers yet.
The other cool personal finance product I would like to see come over from the States soon is Square, an iPhone accessory that lets merchants swipe credit cards.
To any of you who have followed my cartoon penguin saga, I can happily report that Google has recently re-discovered my illustration, and have seen fit to return it to the search result pages. Just like nothing happened, I am suddenly getting an extra 100+ visits per day from ‘cartoon penguin’ seekers. There is one small difference however: In its finite wisdom, Google has decided that this stub page is the best result now, not the actual blog post which includes a much larger image.
Whatever.
Would you be comfortable with an atheist president? 2011 US survey says…
Overwhelming majorities of Republican and Democrat voters say that they would be uncomfortable with an atheist serving as president (80% and 70% respectively).
And as the Friendly Atheist blogger points out, 14% of Democrats would actually be more uncomfortable with an atheist president than a Muslim president!
Common Crawl: 5 billion web pages indexed, ranked, graphed and the data made freely available.
Today […] we have an open repository of crawl data that covers approximately 5 billion pages and includes valuable metadata, such as page rank and link graphs. All of our data is stored on Amazon’s S3 and is accessible to anyone via EC2.
Common Crawl is now entering the next phase – spreading the word about the open system we have built and how people can use it. We are actively seeking partners who share our vision of the open web. We want to collaborate with individuals, academic groups, small start-ups, big companies, governments and nonprofits.
(via Common Crawl Enters A New Phase)
It seems like you could do pretty much anything with this data, including getting a head start making your own search engine. Blekko have a cool Grep the Web section which is full of ideas for the kinds of information you could discover if you had access to such a database. Basically, any kind of semantic analysis.
A brilliantly written deconstruction of the ‘social graph’, which Maciej Ceglowski argues is neither a graph, nor social. Essential reading for social media types.
We have a name for the kind of person who collects a detailed, permanent dossier on everyone they interact with, with the intent of using it to manipulate others for personal advantage – we call that person a sociopath. And both Google and Facebook have gone deep into stalker territory with their attempts to track our every action. Even if you have faith in their good intentions, you feel misgivings about stepping into the elaborate shrine they’ve built to document your entire online life.
Open data advocates tell us the answer is to reclaim this obsessive dossier for ourselves, so we can decide where to store it. But this misses the point of how stifling it is to have such a permanent record in the first place. Who does that kind of thing and calls it social?
We sat down with Khoi Vinh, former Design Director of NYTimes.com to discuss the subject that has made his work most noteworthy: the grid. And in his case, the “g” almost deserves to be capitalized. The result is an illuminating conversation about Khoi’s plans for the future, first interest in the field of design, and even the grid’s complex relationship with emotion.
These ‘Bayhem’ infographics strike a good balance of style and substance.
After extensively examining Michael Bay’s filmography, I have ascertained that his movies have a lot of explosions and death.
Me and anyone else who has seen a Michael Bay movie.
Here’s an interesting generative typeface, created by averaging a large collection of fonts on a computer: Avería.
Then it occurred to me: since my aim was to average a large number of fonts, perhaps it would be best to use a very simple process, and hope the results averaged out well over a large number of fonts. So, how about splitting each letter perimeter into lots of (say, 500) equally-spaced points, and just average between the corresponding positions of each, on each letter? It would be necessary to match up the points so they were about the same location in each letter, and then the process would be fairly simple.
The result is a surprisingly readable typeface, with an appealing hand-drawn quality.
halfblog.net 