This family in japan owns a pet king penguin, and they’ve trained it so that it will walk all the way to the fish market with its little backpack to get fish everyday. it’s super cute…
Via @jina
The Pet Penguin
Host Your Own Awful Party For Windows 7
Microformats DevCamp
This is a fantastic opportunity to come out and mingle with other microformatters, learn what it’s all about and share your ideas.
When and Where
Microformats DevCamp
July 25, 12:00pm – 5pm
Automattic
Pier 38, The Embarcadero between Brannan and Townsend
San Francisco, CA 94107
Sponsored in part by: Object Adjective
ufbday4 Recap
First and foremost, thanks to everyone who made it out to the Microformats 4 Year Birthday Bash, in San Francisco. It was a huge success and it was great to see you all, new faces and old. And a really big thanks to the other sponsors of the event, Ribbit and Spinn3r.
Sponsored in part by: Object Adjective
Microformats 4 year Anniversary
Celebrate the 4th birthday of microformats.org!
Come out and join us in celebrating 4 years of doing it with class. This evening, Friday, June 26, 2009 at 7:00pm is the Microformats.org fourth birthday bash. In honor of the great achievements the organization and its voluntary community of contributing developers have made, there will be a party at B Restaurant and Bar in San Francisco. If you love portable data and semantic markup, we’d love to see you there.
To help out with or attend the party, please add your name and RSVP.
When and Where
microformats.org 4th birthday party!
2009-06-26 at 19:00 to 2009-06-26 at 22:00
B Restaruant and Bar
720 Howard Street, Yerba Buena Upper Terrace
San Francisco, CA 94103
Sponsored in part by: Object Adjective
Noteboek
Noteboek (English title: Notebook) consists of 4 short experimental films where Evelien Lohbeck tries to confuse the reality. In these films, illusions and expectations are challenged.
Noteboek from Evelien Lohbeck on Vimeo.
Algorithmia
Algorithmia: An exhibition about problem solving
Algorithmia Opening Reception: Saturday March 14, 2009 at 7:00pm. Object Adjective’s own Lauren Scime curates an exhibition that explores the relationship between math, science, programming, and the effect these have on our relationship to the changing world.
When and Where
Algorithmia: An exhibition about problem solving
March 11, 12:00pm – March 28, 4:00pm
Root Division
3175 17th Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
Unlike many math oriented shows of the past, this exhibition does not draw the line at simply defining algorithm as the use of a mathematical equation, but rather opens up the door to a broad array of artistic interpretations, both literally and conceptually referential.
Just as the algorithms of nature constantly work in flux to solve and create problems, so does the human use of algorithmic processes towards advancement. The science fictions of yesterday are rapidly becoming the realities that shape our everyday. From iPods shuffling our favorite songs and videos, to web applications that allow us to do everything remotely online, to the “smart bombs” that target enemies of the corporate world, we are surrounded by the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of computational progress.
Algorithmia consists of both physical and web-based work, presenting diverse procedures for problem solving, and explores the ways these methods, in turn, program us.
Curated By: Lauren Scime, Bryan Hewitt, Vita Mei Hewitt.
Cup Of Brown Joy
Banned from 13 of the colonies for ‘unspeakable scientific experiments’, yet heralded as something of a deity in a great many more.
Elemental. The quintessential English fellow, explorer, scientist, exotic dancer and some might say raving lunatic.
Moog teamed up with Elemental after he was lured into his laboratory under the promise of laudanum.
The laudanum never appeared.
This video however, did.
Why We Bend Lines
Another great essay by Patrick Dowell over at Bend the Line on what it takes to make great, innovative computer applications.
Patrick examines what makes an application indispensable to users and why companies mistake incremental improvements for innovation. In this examination he hones in on the real hurdle for developers, which is trusting in your own ideas and following through with them.
LOL Bots
If a lolcat is an image combining a photograph of a cat with a questionably humorous and idiosyncratic caption, a lolbot is an even more questionable attempt at humor. But, we luvs the lolcat and we supr luvs da robots. So, here you go.
Welcome in LOL BOTS, a website completely dedicated to this new art form. As they put it:
Robots are the new kittens
I CN HAZ TOKYO – Mothra’s Diner, www.lolbots.com
I HAS BLING – Indeed you do!, www.lolbots.com
12 resources for getting a jump on HTML 5
Cameron Moll comes out of the gates with a round up of articles on HTML5. While the world of the internets may not yet be ready for HTML5, Cameron points out some useful and practical steps we can take now, in preparation for that day.
“The world isn’t ready for HTML 5 at large just yet, but we can begin preparing for it by using common, semantic selector names (header, nav, section, etc.) — or even new attribute names — derived from HTML 5 within our HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.x documents.”Cameron Moll
Parlance au Naturale
Far be it for me to criticize anyone for not understanding what I’m saying, at any given time. It’s to be expected. However, if that anyone happens to be software, I set the bar much higher.
If I have to do more than strike a key or click a mouse to accomplish a given task, I feel put out. I realize this is not a realistic expectation in many cases, but it’s inherent to the hard-nosed character required to be a user interface designer. If I am asked to do more than this, when interfacing with a program, my mind immediately starts thinking of ways in which the process could be simplified.
It is from these high standards, that my frustrations with both desktop and web applications emerge.
3 Analog Minutes in a Digital Life
There’s no question about it, I’m a film enthusiast. However, I’m finding it more and more difficult to make time for keeping up with and watching films. Fortunately, for those in close proximity of San Francisco, there is the 3 Minute Film Festival.
This year, for the 6th Annual 3-Minute Film Festival, Lauren and I are not only attending, but we’re also featuring our own original film, Regular Expression.
There will be art, live DJs and of course, an exciting menagerie of short films. I hope you all come out!
When and Where
For more information, visit the Root Division website.
hamburger helper
Being at loss of words lately, has led me down some strange paths of distractions, none of which ended at this blog. I’ve been wanting to get back in the swing of things for while, blogwise, but I’ve just found myself at a complete lack. Of interest? Of energy? I’m not really sure.
Yesterday I started a post and mistakenly obliterated everything I had written (and yes, I should draft my writing in a word program, but I don’t) when I was interrupted and failed to successfully hit ‘⌘ + T’ to open a new tab, and navigated away from my post page. Fortunately, I hadn’t saved anything (it wasn’t going anywhere worth while).
So, instead of starting over, I started mucking around with refining my search results page. They had been left half finished months and months ago.
Anyway, this leads me to my point. While making these refinements, I was testing a few random searches and one these queries happened to be for the term “hair“.
I realize I’m setting myself up to be shrinked, especially given the title of this post, but “hair” was simple and easy to type, and that’s why it came out. The title, it was simply carried over from the previous post (completely different topic, of course) I managed to lose.
Back to what I was saying, I was in all accounts, completely expecting my query for “hair” to return zip. But it didn’t. In fact, it returned 3 posts. Now that’s not a lot by any means, but hair, when have I ever written about hair? I was curious, so I checked. And what do you know, I was writing about hair. More precisely, about pulling my hair out.
I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me before, but you might say it’s a sign. Vacation anyone?
the tennis ball hack
There are times when you wish there was a clean, elegant way to go about a thing and there are times, as we all know, when this just isn’t possible. Such, is my state of mind at present. We all know what it’s like to take something that is beautiful and clean, and have to bend and contort it to work in environments it really shouldn’t be subjected to. Such is the peril of the web designer and developer. And such is the profound necessity of standards.
In times like this, I can’t help but wish we, as designers and developers, had something for our practice, akin to the good old tennis ball hack.
Without a doubt, I’m ranting about Internet Explorer. I know, it’s a tiresome subject, but we, nevertheless, exhaust countless, valuable hours contending with the legacy Microsoft left behind.
one good rat
I don’t write very much about my personal life on this site, but one of the few exceptions I’ve made has been for our rats Abbi and Addi.
This past weekend, while cleaning out their cage, I discovered that Addi had a lump under her front left arm. We made an appointment with the vet for Tuesday, to have it looked at. Given the particular size of the tumor, it was necessary to schedule surgery and have it removed. Unfortunately, they discovered the tumor was much worse than first expected, once in surgery. Addi held on for a couple hours after the surgery, but in the end, she just didn’t have the strength left. Addi passed away at 2:46pm, Tuesday, February 19th, 2008.
Lauren and I are devastated and miss her very much.
These pictures were taken just before surgery, at the Veterinary Hospital
Good Cookie, Bad Cookie UI Design
I’m not one to think of products like soap or tube socks, as having a user interface, but in the practical sense, they do. We tend to lump product user interface design, into the parent category of product design. None-the-less, there is a distinction here. In some products, we can refer to the user interface as Ergonomics, such as the chair I’m seated in. In others, this doesn’t seem to be appropriate, such as a bag of cookies (or, in my case, a can of cookies).
Thursday night, after a nice meal at Yo Yo Sushi, we decided to stop in and pick up a few things at the drug store. While we were standing in line to check out, Lauren buckled at an impulse rack and purchased some cookies that were on sale 2 cans for $5.
I have to say, they didn’t look bad. They were described as Delicious Caramel Toffee Cookies, and two for five bucks. Okay, maybe the sake from the restaurant was helping this impulse, but the deal was sealed and we never looked back.
Fig. 1
That is, until the following morning when we were having a hankering for some delicious caramel toffee cookies. That’s where the bad cookie UI design comes in.
First, Lauren tried opening the can. She removed the strip of tape from around the lip of the lid and proceeded to try to pull the lid to the can off, with her fingers. Grunt, Moan, Whimper! Next, being a man (and feeling I should do something about that), I decided to step in and offer my manly strength. Grunt, Moan, Whimper! ( ego crushed ).
So indeed, serious problems call for serious solutions. Out comes my all-in-one, portable cookie tool ( pictured at the top ), which by the way was purchased from an impulse rack as well.
Bang, Crunch, Slice! ( see Fig 1.)
Ah, cookies at last (wipes sweat from brow). They were lousy by the way. But as I reached in for another, I noticed the cause of all my frustration, Poor UI Design!. Seriously. This wasn’t like a bag of potato chips you can’t open. That’s just poor manufacturing or wrong materials. This was a case of poor design. The lid, you see, did not fit over the top of the can, as you might expect, seeing as the lip was on the outside. It actually went inside the can and then curled over the top of the can to form a pinched lip. This is similar to how the top of a can of soup is sealed to the can. The difference being, they expect you to use a can opener to get to your soup, not to your cookies.
Edwardiascopic
On Friday night I attempted step outside of the world of digital media and information superhighways and attended the The Edwardian World’s Faire, here in San Francisco.
The Edwardian period fascinates me for the fashion and adventure our modern lives seem so miserably to lack. The outing we planned, was intended as a brief departure into this world, and to my surprise it was very nearly approaching successful. I left behind all traces of my contemporary life, barring my iPhone and six one dollar notes, all minted in the last 3 years.
My inability to part with my iPhone, for a night in the early 1900s, is excusable by my standards, but my reasons and the resulting outcome turned out to be quite contrary. There are a dozen or more reasons why I love my iPhone, but the camera was never among them. It is fine, in all practical senses, but I have never purchased a phone for it’s camera. And I’ve never considered a mobile phone camera to truly manifest any of the prerequisite qualities of an actual camera. The evenings excursion, however, proved the iPhone camera otherwise.
designer vs. teflon
When the #%*@ just won’t stick and your deadline is fast approaching, being a designer is not fun. It’s a problem every designer has faced, many times. And if you’re looking for inspiration, everyone and their uncle is ready to tell you how to find it. Even me.
But, when it comes down to it, when it’s just you and a blank, flourine-polymer, Photoshop canvas, what does any of this really mean? It’s your hump and you have to figure out how to get over it.
from BUFFALO with <3
2007 leaves behind a blistery stint in Buffalo, NY and, thankfully, my last ever phone pictures (below) taken from my never-to-be-missed Pocket PC.
From this vantage point, the new year could only look spectacular in the least (not that I have anything against Buffalo).
Dystopic snow scene from Buffalo, NY
Looking forward to the semantic web trending we should see in 2008.
Over Worked
My life as of late, has been nothing but work. I’ve been caught in this vicious loop that interconnects my bed, my computer and my bar tender. Seriously, I’ve been that pathetic. I’ve been so over worked that past couple weeks, that it’s all I can do to muster up enough energy to drag my sorry self to the local bar to “unwind”.
My day is like this:
- 5am Wake up to girlfriend making breakfast (we have an open loft, sound travels).
- 6am Lightly start to doze off again.
- 7am Wake up (for real)
- 7am – 7pm Check email, email clients, fix crisis, email, call project meeting, phone conference, reply to email, and maybe (if I’m lucky) design.
- 7pm – 7.5pm Stretches (while discussing with the girlfriend where to go this evening).
- 7.5pm – 8.5pm Go to Dovre for a pair of dirty martinis.
I like a good adventure, a change of pace. I just haven’t had the energy. So every night, for the last few weeks, we have ended up at the Dovre. Don’t get me wrong, I like the place. We treck all the way across the city for a decent dive bar and they don’t get much better than that.
This, lack of having anything that could even remotely resemble a life, next to a dry stick in the mud, has led to a small problem.
Ripples, Believe It or Not!
Earlier this month I posted a short Photoshop tutorial about the ever changing header on this site. It’s a quip study into the nature of evolutionary branding, from an absurdist’s point of view – in my opinion, the backbone for viral marketing. The tutorial was not designed to actually help anyone who wants to learn Photoshop, so much as it was to manhandle this message.
This morning, however, I woke to find this lovely message in my inbox:
Hello Jeremy,I’m Julia Agnes from Tutorial Kit.There are some nice tutorials on your Repeatpenguin.com website, so we dared to create your author account at Tutorial kit and submit it (www.tutorialkit.com)…I hope you won’t mind listing your tutorial at Tutorial Kit. Please let me know what you think about that.
So I had to check and there it was.
Is the virus spreading? It’s a brilliant tactic in viral marketing, if I don’t say so myself. A tutorial teaching others to create your logo. Spread virus, spread. I can’t help but wonder if there might just be one kid out there, making a ‘penguin’ turkey card for Grandma this Thanksgiving.
Bon-Appétit:repeat
Designers’ Cookbook: How to make a penguin ‘turkey‘ dinner in under 30 minutes
You may have noticed over the last seven or eight months, that the graphic at the top of this site changes every so often. I started this project back in May and have been trying to change the header graphic each month, slowly adding to it, making it bulkier, more “over the top”, in a manner of speaking. If you haven’t noticed, I have a glib sense of humor. Call this my little experiment into “evolutionary branding.”
Seeing as this is a month to give thanks, and in keeping with the spirit of making Indian vests out of brown paper bags, I thought I would share with you, my recipe for making this months Penguin ‘turkey‘ Dinner.
Step 1: Basic Shapes
The Conversation Goes Like This . . .
I’m not one to put myself through extensive pains finding the right title for business cards. I am a designer. I design for the web. Simple enough, right? The truth, however, is that it really isn’t. It’s a curious thing when, after all this time, the title web designer isn’t specific enough. On more than a handbag full of hands, worth of occasions, have I had the following conversation:
person: So, what do you do?
me: I’m a web designer.
person: So, what do you do?
According to A List Apart’s Web Design Survey Results, only 19.9% of people surveyed in the industry identified themselves as “web designers” by title. This could of course be in part due to the fact that the others are not web designers, but rather web developers or UI designers. So where is this line drawn? I am a web designer, a developer, a programmer, a user interface specialist, an information architect etc. etc. Do we just have too many ways of identifying ourselves?
The Web Presence Therapist
At times, I think the most appropriate title for myself would be “Web Presence Therapist”, because that’s just what it feels like. Have a seat. Take a load off. Tell me all about your web based troubles. Let it all out . . . but don’t you think that has more to do with how YOU want people to experience it, as apposed to how they want to experience it?
In the end, your web person ( insert title here ) is likely performing tasks clearly outside the scope his or her title eludes to. I’m convinced that the phrase “wearing multiple hats” didn’t carry the same meaning prior to the web designer / developer. We are expected to be the one stop solution to all “your” problems. Aside from the unbalanced fact that a majority of early web designers and developers were geeks to the core, it’s no wonder early titles of the code writing guild, like “web master”, emerged in the fledgling state of this industry. It’s a ridiculous term on every level, no doubt. But somehow, in retrospect, I think it may have been the most fitting. Here’s to you, Web Masters of the world!
Geekipedia
Every so often you come across something that conveys a point so well, you have to stop what you are doing and take note. So when we received this months WIRED and supplemental Geekipedia, I was very excited.
So what’s wrong with this picture?
the show
Back in March of this year, a great period in web history came to pass. After months of having my plate piled as high as a Vegas buffet, I wanted to circle back and take a moment to reflect. At the time this started, I had a weekly radio show. We were one of the first radio stations regularly podcasting our shows. I never thought much of it: over the air waves, streaming across the web and now internet archives. I had a tape recorder, yes a tape recorder, as in compact cassette recorder, no big deal right? But then zefrank came on the scene with the show.
Example of the ever changing starting screen for the show
Report on the Meaning of the Moment
This week one of my clients sent me an email, responding to some design comps I had sent. The gist of the email was this:
. . .these look too much like websites.
Fighting my initial impulse to pound out a reply “They are websites,” I took a minute to think about what she was saying. In the first place, she was right. They did look like websites, but that wasn’t what she was really saying. What she was saying was that the designs I sent her looked too much like any other website. They were nice, well designed, very detailed and otherwise utterly boring. When did we get to the point where everything looks like everything else? I look around on the web and it’s much worse than just a handful of design trends that are being repeated over and over. There is this sense of despair. It’s almost like web designers are feeling so uninspired, design is following the API mashup trend and we’re seeing some pretty strange looking stuff. Hey, if this looks good and this looks good, they’ll look good together…
iPhone accessory for touch-screen accuracy: Introducing iThumb
First and foremost, the iPhone is just really cool. Even with the extraordinary blunder Apple made by partnering with a single wireless provider (and probably the worst, at that), the iPhone is just so cool, I’m willing to make sacrifices. Not many companies put out products that can do that. This is one thing Apple has going for it.
One of the major issues with the iPhone, however, is the touch-screen interface. Don’t get me wrong, for 90% of what you can do on the iPhone, the slick, touch-screen actions of sliding and tapping work so beautifully, it’ll make you cry. The other 10% is a concern for many users. To start with, the number one set back, according to Chicago-based usability consultancy User Centric, is the difficulty users found in sending text messages (SMS).
Participants uniformly found text entry SMS and email to be difficult. They were frustrated by the forced use the vertical keyboard and the lack of visibility for editing the middle of a word or sentence.
- UN, 18 July 2007
Not to mention, the keys are just too close together and small for many people to navigate accurately, since you can’t use touch to distinguish one key from another. For this reason, I am proposing the introduction of iThumb, an iPhone accessory designed specifically to achieve touch-screen accuracy for the medium to large thumbed.
iThumb accessory kit and packaging
WordCamp 2007
395 Attendees, 17 Speakers, 2 Days and 1 Men’s Room
And that’s where WordCamp 2007 started and stopped feeling like “camp”. This is not the YMCA.
The Skinny
After letting everything soak in for the past week, three key things from WordCamp 2007 jump out at me.
- Blog from your heart
- You want your readers to be like you
- Don’t complete your thoughts
Maybe I’ve over simplified it a bit. You might as well return to writing in your 5th grade journal. Actually, after having some time to reflect, I’ve realized all 3 of these key points have 2 things in common. 1) They are all tips for the blogger. and 2) They are all points made by Lorelle VanFossen’s presentation on kick ass content. Brilliant, Lorelle.
I was a bit surprised that these three things stuck with me more than anything else in the conference. During the conference, I was much more engaged in the philosophical and cultural implications of blogging vs. journalism, in John C. Dvorak’s and Om Malik’s presentation. I think the reason is quite plain. When all is said and done, I went to WordCamp for me (as one should) and I wanted to learn how I could be a better blogger. Selfish and simple.
Highlights
WordCamp started off Saturday morning, with the practical. Dan Kuykendall, developer of PodPress gave a great presentation on Podcasting. I’m not a Podcaster, so Dan probably captured my attention the most when he started playing Weird Al’s White and Nerdy.
The Amish don’t make good web designers
Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t rule it entirely out, but chances are…
Anyway, this week I got to thinking, you know those moments where you just know you’re pushing things in the wrong direction? Like trying to back a car into a tent, or, I guess, pushing a cart up a hill? Sure, it might work, but chances are… Let me be the one blogger who isn’t going to talk about the iPhone or mini-feeds or Quicktime updates this week. No. I’m going to talk about something much more rudimentary and much more important to designers: inspiration (and not forcing the square peg in the round hole)
Sometimes, the absurd is the best channel for inspiration and when the peg doesn’t fit, most people will first try using force. When that fails, they will just give up. The hacker, on the other hand, will whittle the peg down so it is nice a round and will slide right in. The web developer needs to do better. The developer needs to assess the situation and understand that holes and pegs all need to work together and then come up with a set of standards.
I went to Buffalo and all I got was this lousy punch
I recently got back from a trip to Buffalo, NY for a friend’s wedding and I’m left feeling like I narrowly escaped being sucked into a time portal back to 5 years ago. Don’t get me wrong, for a city in the midst of the rust belt, Buffalo is not an impossible place for a web developer to continue the work of the Intergalactic Web. There are safe havens like Spot Coffee, offering free WiFi, that will help see you through the industrial muck. For someone like me, even the slightest interruption in internet connectivity is like cutting into my oxygen supply, so more than ever I found myself deliberating on city-wide free WiFi plans and wondering what the hells taking so long? Google has been talking about this for over 2 years, but is this the right way?
40 and fabulous
By the time you turn 40, you really are grown up enough to get your own place…Chronicle Books
Dear me, but I hope so, but just in case you had any doubt.
This week I’ve been working on the new blog for Chronicle Books, to celebrate their 40th Anniversary. Here are the highlights from last nights carousal.
Worn, Torn and ‘Vintaged’
It just won’t go away
No turning back now. Grab your goggles, you’ve seen it before. You’ll see it again. You’ll see it when you really wish you wouldn’t. The worn, torn, vintage look just won’t go away. And, we kind of like it ~mostly
While working on designs for a client as an example, I thought I’d to put together some simple steps to help you achieve the scraping, scratching and trashing you desire, using only native Photoshop tools.
Your essential tool set
Basically, you only need 3 tools and a little elbow grease to accomplish what you desire.
First up:
the burn tool.
The burn tool will give you those wonderful oxidized edges that will give your design the appropriate aging.
Next up:
the eraser tool
It’s that simple. With a little care and the right brush, you can tear, rip and tatter your edges.
The only thing left is to add a little texture to give your design some substance. Texture should be used with discretion. It’s not necessary to give everything texture. A little bit goes a long way. Photoshop with a few built in filters you can use out of the box, Aristic Filters and Pattern Overlays.
With the right layering and patterns, you can achieve very unique looking textures, without much work at all. If that’s not doing it for you, try laying down colors using different paint brushes and then apply the Artistic Filters. You don’t need to worry too much about color or what you lay down to start. It can all be fixed with filters.
The key to mastering these techniques is experimentation. It’s always best to start small and work your way up. I prefer setting my opacity for both the burn tool and the eraser at around 9-13% to start. This will give you the subtle changes you need to get the most natural weathering.
If you’re still looking for better filters and less work, check out Mister Retro. They’ve developed some ver convincing machine washed filters that will do the trick. Just a note, Machine Wash Filters are not yet compatible with CS3 for Mac. The upgrade is due out this fall.
Happy trashing!
traumatic morning
This morning was very traumatic. After spending most of the night working, I got up at 6AM on a Sunday, to straighten up a bit before my house guests arrive. For those of you who don’t know, Lauren and I keep a pair of rats. Yes, “rats in the bathroom,” as Mark says. Their names are Abbi and Addi (we thought we’d make it challenging).
Part of my morning preparations was cleaning the poor girls cage, which I had sadly neglected for far too long. I scooped them out of their cage. Placed them in the usual medium sized box and proceeded, with the cage, to the patio to scrub a way. Obvious lack of judgment aside (in retrospect), I have to say, I’ve done this a hundred times and never had a problem. Not so, this morning.
The cage may have taken just a little bit longer to clean. Or maybe I was just moving a little bit slower than normal, but when I returned Abbi had managed to get out of the box and onto the floor. She must have been as startled as I was, because when I entered the room she bolted. Now, there wasn’t really anyplace for her to go, or so I thought, but she managed to find a tiny crevasse between the counter and the floor.
Okay, I told myself. This is not so bad. She’ll come out. But the fact was, I had no idea what was between the counter and the floor. To give you an idea, we live a very large redev warehouse, so no real telling what lies between walls.
To top it off, in my frazzled state of rattled nerves and lack of sleep, I came up with a brilliant plan to go to the kitchen and get some peanut butter to lure her out. Of course, I ran out leaving poor Addi alone in the open box. When I returned with said peanut butter, the little bugger had wedged herself between the brick wall, a 6×6 steel beam and a tight little drop of several “rat” mile to the floor.
By this point, all plans for my expected guests had gone completely out the window and at the hight of my brilliance, I was trying to rescue Addi from slipping into the dark abyss of the crevasse, by dangling a USB cable as a rescue line.
note to self: spend less time with computer and more time with rats.
the rescue
Some clever thinking, a small cardboard box, a pair of scissors and some masking tape later, both Abbi and Addi were recovered and are doing just fine and my frazzled nerves can rest.
looking for something NEU in design
I’m poising to get myself out the door within the hour to go meet up with some friends. I don’t take this lightly, since I haven’t found my out of my studio in (and counting) 62 hours. Really. Not even to check the mail.
Fitting the April Fool’s legacy, I thought I’d raise the question, is new design possible in an era where we design for appropriation, to design anything at all, much less something new?
Dan Perkel asked the basic question in his recap of GroupTalk meeting Designing for Appropriation. “Is it possible to design for appropriation and unintended uses? If so, how? If not, why not?”
Concern over appropriation of design seems to have taken a sharp turn north, since. There actually seems to be a sense of gratitude by many designers I’ve talked to, when they see their work finding its way into different facets of culture. It’s something that makes me proud, from a cultural stand point. The question, however, still remains. “Is it possible to design FOR appropriation?
I’ll leave you with this. Have we not ALWAYS designed for appropriation?. From the very beginning, the relationship of the designer to the client/customer/user, the artist to the audience/curator/critic.
Have a great day of the FOOLS
Some fun from Yahoo.com
drink with the fishes
Thurs. 15 March 2007, 6PM
the steinhardt aquarium
875 Howard st. San Francisco
the first of a series of monthly meetups
Come drink with the fishes, meet the designers at Object Adjective, mingle with the latest and the greatest in the Bay Area, for developing new and interesting web technology!
Crap, I can’t believe I wasted another sentence saying this
Hey, it’s repeatPenguin! I’ll give you a brief introduction, so you will know if you’re up to the challenge, meh (or rather, if you’re willing to let me distract you for a few minutes with my rambling).
I am a designer and web developer in San Francisco.
“Oh no, another web developer BLOG,” you say?
Fortunately, YES! There just aren’t enough of them, so I’m doing my part to bring you the goods. um…
The point of all this is to share my experience. So what’s on the plate?
Open Wiki Documentary Project
Truth in Numbers: The Wikipedia Story
In late January Michael Gibson, director of 24 Hours on Craigslist, approached my design firm Object Adjective to get involved in the making of his new documentary, Truth in Numbers: The Wikipedia Story (due out in spring 2008).
The objective is to create an open wiki that will allow the public to shape the development of the documentary film, in the making. We are enthusiastic to take on the project, considering our passion for wikis, free exchange of information and the open source movement. Not to mention, Michael is a prodigious geek and we are huge fans.
We are currently transferring the wiki to it’s new home. It will go public in the next few days. Please visit our project page for updates. We will make an announcement when the new wiki is up and we look forward to your contributions.
About the film: Truth in Number: The Wikipedia Story is a global film exploring how the concepts of open source and collaboratively-created information systems (particularly Wikipedia) are fundamentally changing media, academics, politics, culture and, well, basically everything.
Please Participate in the effort: Use the link below to donate to the production. You will be redirected to a secure page on the supporting Non-profit organization, The Free History Project’s website. When making a donation, please type “wikidoc” in the ‘Payment For’ box.
If I had something more, something clever to say here, I certainly would. Let me think…
The intent of this text, on the other hand, is to provide a sense of what actual text would look like here. It’s pretty futile, indeed.
If I were to have an image I wanted to post, it might look something like the photo to the left (if you could be so lucky).
About
Jeremy Anderson is a user experience and interaction web designer and developer, hailing out of San Francisco.
He is also founder of
Object Adjective.
Recent Projects
Auditory Afflictions
Recent Bookmarks
- blender
Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License. - Kitten in a Banket
Kittens in a Blanket. Baby dills wrapped in cream cheese and wonder bread, chilled and serve with dirty martinis or sauvignon blanc.