Great resource
Getting stuck on Pinterest
An invite to the beta of a new site called Pinterest.com landed in my email box about a week ago. I get a lot of these so I generally tend to ignore them but I remembered hearing a few different people recently talk about the site so I thought I would check it out. Like the name implies the site is a virtual bulletin board where you can virtually “pin” images of the things you like as you cruise around the Internet. Those collections of images are put on “boards” that can then be named so the content is made into collections of themed content. Pinterest then add in a Twitter like element to the site where you are then able to follow other people to see all of the content they pin or just follow one of their boards to only get updates on a specific subject matter. The best place to start finding content is by linking to Facebook or Twitter to see how may of your friends are on the site and beyond that I would recommend just searching for specific terms because some of the collection are massive with people who have over 100 different boards and over 10,000 pins.
At first I really didn’t think this was going to be a site that would have much of a lasting appeal and I think a lot of that opinion was based on my friends who were already on the site as their content wasn’t that compelling. I pushed on to explore some more and I started to find things that really did interest me and I’d never seen before. That is a pretty rare occurrence for me and before I knew it I had 13 boards and over 100 pins – I was hooked. So those of you who are already on the site feel free to follow me and my wide but generally design focused collections and if not shoot me an email and I’ll send you an invite to the site so you can check it out for yourself.
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BUCK NAKED at PhotoPlus Expo NYC
If you are headed to the PhotoPlus Expo at the Jacob K. Javitz Center in New York this week be sure to check out BUCK NAKED: The Secrets Behind Master Photographer Chris Buck on Friday from 1:30 – 3:30pm. Chris is a genius portrait photographer (you can check out his portfolio here) who has shot some of my favorite celebrity portraits of all time and someone I am lucky enough to count among my friends. He will be giving an entertaining session talking about those crucial early years where his unorthodox decisions led him to the success and creative freedom he enjoys today. He has promised to keeps no professional secrets as he takes you through his colorful career so do yourself a favor and check it out.
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Adobe and Big Spaceship create The Expressive Web
It is obvious that Adobe continues to be a part of the HTML5 conversation in a big way from the launch of their preview of Adobe EDGE to their recent launch of a new web site called The Expressive Web. The site is both a resource and showcase that highlights some of the most creative and expressive features being added to the web today focusing on twelve new HTML5 and CSS3 features. The design is based around colored blocks that rearrange and animate for each different section of the site and makes extensive use of new features such as CSS3 transitions, CSS3 transforms, web storage and more.
I found it interesting that the site is labeled as a beta and when I dug a little deeper I found out that they decided to launch it this way because the sites has some bugs on older browsers and some devices. So they decided to launch the site as a beta so they could share the resources and information with the community and then share some of the lessons they learned developing the site. You can see their list of lessons learned here which has some good insights and information.
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Spur your way to better web design critiques
Over the years I’ve seen a lot of different site and tools that want to help you be able to critique your web site designs and for none of them have been anything but a passing interest that I eventually delete. There is a new site I have found myself using quite a lot lately called SpurApp.com. It is a collection of 7 different different tools that help you look at and dissect your design in different and unique ways.
When you first come to the site you could easily mistake the lone text field for a search engine and I think this is one area where the site could really improve because you have to hunt for the button to tell you more about the site. You can either upload the URL of a live site or upload an image you would live to critique. The site takes a minute to load the image and then displays it with seven different tools you can apply to the design.
Grayscale
This does just what it says by taking the color out of the design which will help see if the areas of focus and hierarchy of the page will still hold up.
Intersections
You can pull our guides like in Photoshop to help you see the grid your design is using, ensure consistent interaction points and see areas where you could tighten up those space to create a more compact design.
Contrast
Bumping up the contrast of a design can help show what areas are really jumping off the page when someone first sees it.
Blur
We all know that people don’t read – they scan. By blurring the design it gives you a good sense of what stands out and what people will key in on when they just take a few seconds to scan down through your design.
Mirror
By flipping the design over you get a sense of how your page feels without readable copy. Areas you might not expect can jump out at you, and misalignments become more obvious.
Rotate
The traditional concept of the fold on a computer monitor is dying because of mobile and tablet devices so it’s valuable to see how your page holds up on its side, or upside down.
50% Zoom
Here again your site may not always be viewed at the full size you designed it for how will it look when it shows up on the screen of an iPhone? It also helps you see if elements look balanced and if people are still be able to get the gist of what they’re seeing.
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Cross country adventures in letterpress printing
My education in typography was as old school as it could possibly get since I grew up learning this beautiful art on a cast iron letterpress in my parents basement. My father and I wrote, illustrated and printed my storybooks which was a truly magical way to start out as a young designer and typographer but lead to a very confusing experience when I got to Kindergarten and realized all the other kids read books written and created by someone else.
So you can imagine my delight when I found out that artist Kyle Durrie has embarked on a cross country adventure in her custom outfitted 1982 Chevy Step Van AKA The Type Truck which is a fully outfitted letterpress studio. Her tour of the country started in June and end in January of next year as she goes to different events, museums, universities and craft fairs giving people the chance to create their own letterpress works of art. I think this is an incredibly cool idea so if she coming to your city do yourself a favor and experience this incredible art and if not them drop a few dollars to support this genius idea.
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Adobe launches Edge – their Flashless HTML5 animation tool
After being previewed for about the past year behind closed doors, Adobe released a preview of their new Flashless animation web tool called Edge this morning. They describe Edge as “a new web motion and interaction design tool that allows designers to bring animated content to websites, using web standards like HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3.” and ”Content created with Edge is designed to work on modern browsers including those on Android, BlackBerry, Playbook, iOS, HP webOS, and other smartphone mobile devices as well as Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer”.
At a high level Edge will be like a Flash-like program that will output HTML5 but it gets a little tricky when you get into the specifics. This is because HTML5 as a technology platform is still changing so it makes developing a tool that uses that platform much more difficult. Adobe is trying to address that by releasing the software into previews much earlier than normal but it will mean that there may be significant changes and additions to the program before it releases a final release state. This is also why you will see that the preview version only currently does animation but Adobe has said that this will be shortly followed by shapes, expressivity and coding, and then interactivity and graphics will arrive for testing in the public pre-beta before an expected final release of the product in 2012.
Since Adobe let Apple dominate the Flash vs. HTML debate we all knew a move like this was coming. We will all just have to wait and see how powerful this tool can become to truly be something we can use as an HTML5 replacement for Flash.
You can download your free preview today at Adobe Labs and get some sample files to experiment with here.
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Google creates multi-dimensional search love
I have been really interested in multidimensional search results for a while. They are sites that start off like a normal search engine by take a single search term but return results in multiple forms (text, photos, videos, maps, blogs, etc.) from multiple sources on one page. Google has just launched WDYL.com which uses this multidimensional search concept. It asks you the simple question of “What do you love?” and the one page search results show pictures, alerts, patents, videos, statistics, books, translations, 3D SketchUp, latest news, blog searches, locations, group discussions etc. all pull from Google content sources of the thing you love.
I think you will continue see multidimensional search results grow in popularity until we hit a tipping point and one of the main stream search engines adopts it is their search result format. Yahoo! would be the closest since you can get a similar effect after doing a search when you can click the different mediums like photos, videos, shopping and news that appear above the search box and the results will change to the corresponding medium.
My favorite site to tackle the problem is still Addict-o-matic which I first wrote about two years ago and I like to more than WDYL.com for two reasons. The first is that I can customize the sources the site uses to return results which makes a huge difference in personalization and the quality of the search when you are dealing with so much data. The second is that I can browse broad news categories like politics, food or gadgets and the results are drawn from predetermined sources that are the most relevant for that subject.
In both cases I really like that they are challenging the traditional convention of search results because online content is much more diverse and much richer than it used to be and as a result people aren’t just looking for text links when they do a search.
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What’s your social media Klout?
I came across an interesting new site that is still in beta development this week called Klout.com that measures your overall online influence. You log-in using Facebook or Twitter and after authorizing it to look at all your social media services that use 35 different variables to give you an influence score ranging from 1 to 100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence.
You can look at how they arrived at the score through a metrics driven visual dashboard broken into true reach, amplification probability and network influence. True reach calculates the influence for each individual relationship taking into account factors such as whether an individual has shared or acted upon your content and the likelihood that they saw it. Amplification probability looks at your ability to create content that compels others to respond and high-velocity content that spreads into networks beyond your own is a key component of influence. Network influence measures actions like retweets, @messages, follows, lists, comments, and likes to measure the authority and the quality of your content.
Your score and social media behavior then put you into one of sixteen categories. They range from the low level Dabbler who is just starting out in social media to the Thought Leader is who a visionary in their industry. I am categorized as an Explorer which is “Someone who is actively engage in the social web, constantly trying out new ways to interact and network. You’re exploring the ecosystem and making it work for you. Your level of activity and engagement shows that you “get it”, we predict you’ll be moving up.”
The quality of the score analysis is very detailed, very interesting and vert good. The site also cuts the data into interesting displays and graphs like Klout Style which create a 4 dimension visual map showing your score and category against key people you follow.
But nothing everything is so wonderful as you clearly see other areas are clearly still in Beta. The most noticeable beta data results for me was the topics sections that lists the top 5 topics you most influence. For me it was creativity (I’d really hope that was number one) followed by soda, KFC, diabetes and marketing. How they came up with two through four is beyond me since I never eat at KFC, have given up drinking soda and have written anything about diabetes. I may have written about KFC and soda advertising campaigns two or three times in nine years.
If Twitter and Facebook aren’t funding these guys they are idiots because the introduction of game mechanics into the social media landscape makes it even more addicting as you want to post more content, get more followers so you can see your score and classification rise.
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T Minus: Your personal award show deadline tracker
It’s been the same fire drill at every agency and company I have ever worked for. You are sitting around going through your day to day routine and you get an email from the Executive Creative Director’s assistant the the submission for Canne or the Webby’s or some big award show are due the next day. Everyone runs around like a chicken with their head cut off printing boards, making videos and writing project descriptions. And every time the insanity is over you swear that this will be the year you make an Excel with all the award shows and their deadlines so next year will be different. We all know it never is.
But this year might actually be different thanks to T Minus which is your personal award shows deadline tracker. You can log-in with any Google account and customize your calendar from over 120 different award shows in Europe, North America, Asia, Africa and Australasia. Once you select the shows that you want to enter you can see the results in a big visual online dashboard or a screensaver that displays each show as a color coded shape letting you know how far away you are from the submission date.
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Wacom Bamboo: An iPad stylus I can actually use
Like most creative types I know, I suffer from a debilitating problem where I’m rarely able to make it through a meeting without being able to describe an idea without having to draw some part of it. This historically meant that I carried a velum tablet and Sharpie everywhere and the desks of my designers are littered with these notes and sketches. Enter the iPad and my thought that I could evolve this process but I’ve really had a hard time finding a good sketching application and more importantly a stylus I actually like and can use on a regular basis.
Through course of my travels and speaking at various conferences I’ve been given a number of different stylus to try out and none have made it more than 24 hours before I gave them away to someone else because I didn’t like them. The latest was the Griffin Technology stylus which always seemed to get good reviews but when I got my hands on it I was really surprised to find it was really tiny. Think the stubby little pencil you used to use at miniature golf courses when you were a kid to keep score tiny. So it lasted less than a day before I got tired of feeling like I was drawing with a kids warn down crayon.
A solution to both of my problems can from someplace I didn’t expect but probably should have – Wacom. The same people that made the Intuos tablet I have been using to design with for years created an application and stylus that I really love and now use all the time. The Bamboo Stylus is shorter than a full sized pencil but it’s big enough that you can use it without it feeling undersized. When I started using the stylus it needed some time to get broken in. At first there would be about a one second pause before the stylus would be recognized by the iPad but the more I used it the better it got and now there is no delay at all when I draw with it.
The more important part of the solution is the Bamboo Paper iPad application which was created for sketching ideas with features like multiple colors and pen types, multiple types a lined and graph paper, undo / redo and the ability to easily email your sketches instead of so many other applications that more of a fine art focus. The one downside of the app is that you are only able to create one notebook which is kind of a pain as it would really be nice to be able to create multiple notebooks broken out by client, project, etc.
The Bamboo Stylus runs about $30 and the Bamboo Paper app is free so if you have been looking for a great iPad sketching solution I really recommend this one.
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