This is where I write for the web.
Tina Roth Eisenberg aka swissmiss shares her insight about her business Tattly which just turned one year old yesterday. All seven of them are great advices, two of my favorites were:
Don’t outsource things you care about.
Grow a thick skin + hustle.
Just read the rest of them here. Come on now, hustle.
Wikiweb an app to visualize Wikipedia, just like Visual Thesaurus. Love the logo, UI, and functionality, so I guess everything about it.
(via swissmiss)
Marco Arment wrote this two years ago:
I never make technology-buying decisions based on future promises, rumors, or potential. I let other people be the bleeding-edge extremely early adopters, and I stick with what I know will work and stay out of my way. I don’t buy things that are “getting better”, because they usually don’t. Whatever caused them to be lacking in their current release will usually prevent them from being great in future releases.
I buy things that are great today. They’re usually things that have been great since day one.
This will holds true to other things in lives.
Nest Happy Homes commercial, try not to smile watching it. :)
Tiny Wings 2 by Andreas Illiger handmade trailer. Adorable.
A courtly and stylish man of wit and charm, Mr. Pininfarina taught car body design at his alma mater for several years, and was often invited to speak to engineering and design groups in the United States. On one visit in 1981, an interlocutor asked, “What makes a good design?”
He replied with a long list of criteria, including “good harmony, classic style, proportion, grace — and honesty,” adding with a small smile, “Then, if you have good taste, the battle is won.”
Good taste, indeed. Also see his legacy in pictures.
Microsoft is in a major overhaul in every possible way from their business strategy, and thankfully in their design philosophy as well. So in this new website redesign, Microsoft have gone all Metro, which are really good design and execution. The site also responsive, go ahead try resize your browser. Still in preview, though.
Update: It’s been taken down.
(via Daring Fireball)
From one of my favorite design agency, – I gotta work there someday – Pentagram. Celebrating their 40th anniversary with 40 posters:
Pentagram was founded 40 years ago today, on June 12, 1972, in London by the designers Alan Fletcher, Colin Forbes, Theo Crosby, Kenneth Grange and Mervyn Kurlansky. The company was formed when Pentagram’s predecessor, Crosby Fletcher Forbes, added two new partners, Grange and Kurlansky, expanding the multi-disciplinary partnership to five.
For the anniversary the 19 current Pentagram partners, under the creative direction of Harry Pearce, have designed a series of posters for the 40 years since Pentagram’s birth. Each partner created posters for two or three different years, and the only parameters for the series were the use of black, white and red.
Great source of inspiration.
John Scalzi quotes a few one-star reviews of Redshirts, his latest bestseller. And he says:
It’s part of the territory, and the sooner one as a creator comes to grips with it and accepts it as part of the process, the better off one will be. I think as a creator you owe your audience your best efforts, but if at the end of your best effort some of them are still not happy, the best response is, oh, well, maybe next time. You will never make everyone happy. If you try, you’ll likely create something mediocre, and then nobody will be happy. Least of all you.
(via Brent Simmons)
Fathom created an experimental project using found fonts from PDF documents:
An edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein laid out using characters and glyphs from PDF documents obtained through internet searches. The incomplete fonts found in the PDFs were reassembled into the text of Frankenstein based on their frequency of use. The most common characters are employed at the beginning of the book, and the text devolves into less common, more grotesque shapes and forms toward the end.
(via Carolina de Bartolo)