Archive of published articles on 2009
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Screenshot of Typekit
Tonight I decided to give the new font service Typekit a try on my website. The service uses your browsers inherent ability to link fonts, and has worked out licensing with a number of font houses so you can link these fonts with no fear of legal action. The quote from Typekit below basically says it all.
Screenshot of the the USA Today jobs growth forecast visualization
USA Today created a nice visualization of jobs growth between 2010 – 2013. It’s interesting to see the varience in different states, cities and job sectors.
This is a sample page created by noted typographer Erik Spiekermann using WOFF versions of FF Meta and FF Meta Serif displayed in Firefox 3.6 beta.
In my opinion the web open font format could be one of the biggest additions to web design in many years. Imagine being able to design for the web with hundreds of new fonts. Mozilla and several type foundries are already onboard. For now we’ll just have to wait and see how many other browsers adopt this wonderful new standard.
Efforts to bring advanced typography to the Web have reached an important milestone. Type designers Tal Leming and Erik van Blokland, who had been working to developing the .webfont format, combined forces with Mozilla’s Jonathan Kew, who had been working independently on a similar format. The result of the collaboration is called Web Open Font Format (WOFF), and it has the backing of a wide array of type designers and type foundries. Mozilla will also include support for it in Firefox 3.6.
WOFF combines the work of Leming and Blokland had done on embedding a variety of useful font metadata with the font resource compression that Kew had developed. The end result is a format that includes optimized compression that reduces the download time needed to load font resources while incorporating information about the font’s origin and licensing. The format doesn’t include any encryption or DRM, so it should be universally accepted by browser vendors—this should also qualify it for adoption by the W3C.
From: Ars Technica and EmilyChang
This is one of the best creative quotes I’ve ever read, and directly relates to my own creative process.
“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photos, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: ‘It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.”
- Jim Jarmusch
If you love great design do yourself a favor and visit the Luxirare website.
“Luxirare is a weekly webzine dedicated to clothing and cuisine. At Luxirare, the typical notion of a seasonal fashion show or seasonal “menu” does not exist. Styles and recipes are presented as individual pieces that do not follow a strict theme but rather a flow of ideas. The Luxirare principle is to use the unique mobility of the internet to develop an enticing, unorthodox presentation”.
A post by Emily Chang.
“I’ve heard about QR codes for years and Googled for them long ago before they were readily available for consumers, but for some reason tonight, they popped into my mind again and I decided to look them up. I was excited to see that you can make your own QR code easily online. In simple terms, a QR code is a graphic 2D barcode that stores information, such as addresses, URLs, business card info, or anything else.”
The American Time Use Survey asks thousands of American residents to recall every minute of a day. Here is how people over age 15 spent their time in 2008.
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Let’s face it: do you really need drag-and-drop, resizable windows or sortable lists in your web applications? Websites are not desktop applications. They are different.
What you really need are tabs, tooltips, accordions, overlays, high usability, striking visual effects and all those “web 2.0″ goodies that you have seen on your favourite websites.
This library contains six of the most useful JavaScript tools available for today’s website. The beauty of this library is that all of these tools can be used together, extended, configured and styled. In the end, you can have hundreds of different widgets and new personal ways of using the library.
Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display until Sept 09 at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab (Please contact us if you want to show it next!). It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.
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jqModal is a plugin for jQuery to help you display notices, dialogs, and modal windows in a web browser. It is flexible and tiny, akin to a “Swiss Army Knife”, and makes a great base as a general purpose windowing framework.
Nexus is a Facebook visualization which creates an interactive image with your friends’ connections and their shared interests.
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“If you’re using Ajax, you should give hints to the user when a request to the server is being made, and you should tell him if something goes wrong. Gmail does this really well. Here’s how I coded it.”
This awesome project was created by Sebastian Deutsch to visualize Twitter streams sync’d to music using HTML5 and Processing.
“We’ve created a litttle experiment which loads 100 tweets related to HTML5 and displays them using a javascript-based particle engine. Each particle represents a tweet – click on one of them and it’ll appear on the screen”.
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“With browsers rendering JavaScript faster than ever before, it’s a great opportunity to get creative with jQuery. This tutorial will show how to create a scrolling 3D tag cloud…it’s not as difficult as you might think.”
“A simple visualization of IRC communication behavior: Who is talking to whom? Or, more appropriately: Who is namedropping whom?
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If you have used Google Reader, then you might have noticed the way Google Reader shows feed items, it loads up few items first when you click on a feed and as you scroll down to view more items, it fetches more items dynamically and adds it to the list.
“My final year project in information design. Two big (200cm x 90cm, 80 x 36 inch) posters show the variety and attitudes of members from an internet community like MySpace.
On the first poster you can see the functions used, as well as additional information such as age, educational background, family status, gender and how often they are logged in. So, all demographic data which are available from every member’s profile.
The second poster gives you an overview of the geographic position, based on a map. You can see where the members are distributed. The aim was to give the management the opportunity to know much more about the members than would have been possible with a simple scan of their database only”.
“The looks del.icio.us project is my first attempt to combine graphics design with programming. The concept is to see how users develop and sustain their tagging methodologies on del.icio.us.
“Bumpbox is another lightbox clone with a few advantages over other lightboxes – it supports not only all common media types but also PDF’s.
Yet, the integration and implementation on your own site is pretty simple. Just add the scripts to your head section, add classes to your links that should use bumpbox, define a rel tag with the size that the bumpbox should have and you’re ready to roll.
Bumpbox automatically detects what kind of filetype you wish to show in the box, so you do not need to specify the type, easing the process of integration”.
“The landscape of British eating has changed dramatically in the last three decades. In the above interactive visualisation, we’ve documented the changing face of our grocery shopping, whether it be the rise and rise of the banana, the decline of liver, the growth of the ready meal, or the determined plod of the pork sausage. The data comes from DEFRA, which keeps an extraordinarily rich, but mostly dormant, archive on its website. We’ve brought it to life with what we think is an innovative tool, produced with the help our designer, Marcin Ignac. The icons on the left represent 5 main food ‘types’ – fats, fish, fruit, meat and vegetables. Click on any section of the donut to see how consumption of that food group has changed, or scroll along the time line for any one food to see its percentage share change in the donut”.
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