It's where I share interesting info with other web geeks
Helveticards are a set of über minimalist typographic playing cards by designer Ryan Myers.
I love these! I designed a set of playing cards several years ago while at university, but I certainly didn't think of doing this.
Via Laughing Squid.
Earlier this week I discovered Solarized, "a sixteen color palette […] designed for use with terminal and gui applications".
Bundles are available for all the popular editors; I went ahead and cloned the Coda bundle. While the code on my screen immediately looked very nice, a few of Justin's colour choices didn't sit well with me.* I spent an hour or two trying a large number of different combinations until my JavaScript file was harmoniously highlighted.
I wanted an even intensity, but didn't allow myself to deviate from Ethan's prescribed colours. I'm happy with the result: the soft highlighting makes the code easier to understand without being a distraction. Only regular expression literals leap forward, but these tend to occur infrequently.
Coda users may be surprised to see method invocations highlighted. That's one of the minor enhancements I've made to the default mode. If you're interested, have a look at Javascript.mode on Bitbucket.
* Blue escape sequences within red regular expression literals are too striking for my liking!
Simple design executed beatifully.
The article from which this photograph is lifted, entitled Bike Shelf, is over on Knife & Saw.
From Wikipedia on Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building:
[An] interesting feature of the Seagram Building is the window blinds. As was common with International Style architects, Mies wanted the building to have a uniform appearance. One aspect of a façade which Mies disliked, was the disordered irregularity when window blinds are drawn. Inevitably, people using different windows will draw blinds to different heights, making the building appear disorganized. To reduce this disproportionate appearance, Mies specified window blinds which only operated in three positions – fully open, halfway open/closed, or fully closed.
This, taken from Werner Blaser's Mies van der Rohe, is also brilliant:
The plan of the brick villa is a good example of the way in which Mies van der Rohe developed the art of structure from the very beginning. The structure of a brick wall begins with the smallest unit into which the whole can be divided: the brick. The dimensions are calculated in terms of the basic unit of the brick.
Gmail currently serves up two possible favicons, a 16x16 shortcut icon and a
32x32 icon. I've no idea why the latter is included, but my browser is happy
to accept either version, which can lead to a rather amusing situation.
Most days when Gmail loads I get the favicon, but I've had a couple of extended periods of seeing the other version instead. I'd even wondered whether Google was undertaking some A/B testing, although this seemed rather far-fetched. I now believe that there's a race condition, and that the smaller image usually wins this race.
I far prefer the 32x32 version (it makes the favicon look anaemic), but when I had a close look at it I was upset by its sloppiness.
Sebastiaan de With would not stand for this!
The media have to learn […] that the spectacular things are not the important things – the unspectacular things are the important things, especially in the future.
via kottke
While creating documentation for Dice Cricket, a game a friend and I designed many years ago, I produced a set of diagrams which represent the segments of a cricket field. The isolated nature of this small design challenge provided a refreshing break from the various and interrelated considerations involved in designing for the Web.
You're free to make use of these images (they're transparent PNGs). Attribution is appreciated but not required. :)
Recently I've been on a mission to minimize the number of HTTP requests made while loading pages on this site. Until yesterday, the archives page was making an HTTP request for each of the tiny calendar icons used on the page. Therefore, up to 31 HTTP requests were required just to retrieve the calendar icons. Not good.
The same result can be achieved with a single HTTP request through the use of a sprite:
An update to this post has been published: Tiny calendar icons sprite.
I've always enjoyed creating icons in Photoshop. Not the gorgeous, often richly detailed icons that grace OS X applications — although I would love to learn to create these as well — but icons designed pixel by pixel for display at very small scales.
Working with a tiny canvas and a limited palette (I restrict myself to hexadecimal colours that can be written in shorthand) is a challenge, but I find the experience rewarding. I recently redesigned this site's archives page, for which I created a set of 16 x 16px calendar icons.
You are welcome to download the tiny calendar icon set.
One of my flatmates linked me to this clip recently. It's titled Design, discovery and humor and certainly delivers the entertainment it promises. It's well worth a look.
I came across this recently while browsing Mark Boulton's site. The style and control of Job's hand is played off against the exuberance of his son's approach. An upbeat soundtrack accompanies the performance.
From the director:
Job and Gradus are both ambitious concerning letters. Spontaneous jam sessions in our studio inspired us to make this film about the fun [of] drawing letters.