A lot of (mostly positive) chatter going around about the standards that Adobe is proposing.
David Kimmelman — Pictures of Parisian taxidermy artist, Mathieu Miljavac, with a Q & A by Autumn Whitehurst.
“It feels like a bubble, but it’s really just a hot market.” — Launch
Or to put it another way — the inside of a bubble feels a lot like a hot market.
“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself… Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”- Chuck Close
Matt Gemmell posted a thorough tutorial on how to set up your iPad 3 with your Mac and preview how OS X may look on a retina device. If anything, it is worth definitely worth following these steps just to set up your iPad3 as a second screen off of your laptop.
Domus interviews lead designer Nicholas Felton about filtering the noise of social media and mirroring personal memory.
The Scale of the (known) Universe.
Also, I have an IFTTT task set up to send me an e-mail each day from their feed.
Wonderfully rendered watercolor and toner map tiles for use on OpenMaps and Google Maps.
How to Hire a Programmer — Advice that goes well beyond just hiring programmers.
Your system needs to jitter to avoid the thundering herd:
If your system doesn’t jitter then you get thundering herds. Distributed applications are really weather systems. Debugging them is as deterministic as predicting the weather. Jitter introduces more randomness because surprisingly, things tend to stack up.
1. The audience is fickle.
2. Grab ‘em by the throat and never let ‘em go.
3. Develop a clean line of action for your leading character.
4. Know where you’re going.
5. The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.
6. If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.
7. A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They’ll love you forever.
8. In doing voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience already sees. Add to what they’re seeing.
9. The event that occurs at the second act curtain triggers the end of the movie.
10. The third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until the last event, and then — that’s it. Don’t hang around.
— from Billy Wilder’s tips for screenwriters, (via A List of Note)
How to play Calvinball. Brilliant game. Well played.
Assumptions
A running list of assumptions about the future.
Move the Web Forward – You can make the web as awesome as you want it to be.
Little Printer – I can think of a thousand better uses for this around the house and in the office.
Coming in 2012.
Blogs Worth Reading
A running list of blogs that I find compelling enough to subscribe to, read and share.
Amazing. A script for grabbing the dominant color or color palette from an image. In 2006, Joshua Davis gave me a php script that pulled dominant colors out of images and it changed my life and the way I incorporate color in a design. This script looks to be a little more applicable to web applications.
“I am solely interested in the effect of sound on people.” – Tony Schwartz
Tony Schwartz is a perfect examples of a life lived under the influence of curiosity and wonder, and I want to be reminded of his work on a daily basis.
Beginning in the 1940s, Tony Schwartz made tens of thousands of recordings of the sounds and people of New York City. Schwartz’s “endangered sounds” were included in numerous WNYC radio broadbcasts and record albums over the years
Sam Roberts on City Room has a really outstanding post that helps to detail more of the accomplishments and cultural impact that Tony Schwartz had on media and telling stories with sound.
Mr. Schwartz recorded tour guides, singing children, fire engines, fog horns, merry-go-round calliopes, cabbies and other urban folkloric sounds that produced the city’s collective voice now archived at the Library of Congress and collected in his albums. He defined the sound of speech as “the body language of the written word.”
You can see and hear more of Tony’s work in a retrospective this Wednesday:
Mr. Schwartz’s advertisements, 30,000 folk songs, poems, conversations, stories and dialogues that he recorded, along with his 27 years of radio programs on WNYC and WBAI will be the subject of a retrospective Wednesday at the Gotham Center for New York City History at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Matthew Barton, curator of recorded sound at the Library of Congress will conduct an illustrated exploration of “Tony Schwartz and the Sounds of His City.”
Cory Doctorow — There is no copyright policy, only Internet policy; there is no Internet policy, only policy.
There just isn’t such a thing as ‘‘copyright policy’’ anymore. Every modern copyright policy becomes Internet policy – policy that touches on every aspect of how we use the net.
And as we make the transition from a world where everything we do includes an online component to a world where everything we do requires an online component, it’s becoming the case that there’s no such thing as ‘‘Internet policy’’ – there’s just policy.
Worth reading.
Simplify. Don’t give your users the shit work. (via Brent Simmons)
First Snow
It is October and the first snow has arrived over Prospect Park in Brooklyn.
We Can All Become Job Creators
Joe Nocera’s column today, “We Can All Become Job Creators”, is must read:
Starbucks is going to create a mechanism that will allow us citizens to do what the government and the banks won’t: lend money to small businesses. This mechanism is scheduled to be rolled out on Nov. 1.
And here’s how it will work – (more…)
Brooklyn Beta: A Three-Day Workshop on Making Something You Love
I was one of the fortunate few to purchase a three-day pass to Brooklyn Beta, an intentionally small web conference with a considerably large following. It is the second year that Brooklyn Beta has run. Last year they ran it for a single day, and it drew so much attention from entrepreneurs, designers, developers and speakers from around the globe that they decided to run it for three days this year.
Over the next few days, I will be compiling notes here about the conference, the people I meet and what the ideas being shared at Brooklyn Beta say about the way we live, work and create today. (more…)
Memories Worth Writing Down
The New York Times Magazine published a great list of well-known people talking about memorable or life-changing educational experiences they’ve had.
I like the writing and find it inspiring, but what I like more than that is that the idea itself. I feel like I too have had many influential educational experiences, and that mine are worth writing down, though not because I really want to share them with others, but because I want to remember them, describe them and learn from those experiences. I am saving this idea for a future blog post. (more…)
Tavi Gevinson’s Rookie
Over the last 30 days, I have been very fortunate to play a part in the realization of a remarkable project by the 15-year-old style blogger Tavi Gevinson.
The new project, titled ‘ROOKIE,’ is imagined as a hybrid between a magazine and a blog and will publish 3 times a day — once after school, once at dinner time, and once before bed. Tavi explains it like this:
Rookie is not your guide to being a Teen. It is not a pamphlet on How to Be a Young Woman. (If it were, it would be published by American Girl and your aunt would’ve given it to you in the fifth grade.) It is, quite simply, a bunch of writing and art we like and believe in. While there’s always danger in generalizing a whole group of people, I do think some experiences are somewhat universal to being a teenager, specifically a female one. Rookie is a place to make the best of the beautiful pain and cringe-worthy awkwardness of being an adolescent girl. When it becomes harder to appreciate these things, we also have good plain fun and visual pleasure. When you’re sick of having to be happy all the time, we have lots of eye-rolling rants, too.
Working with Tavi has been really amazing. She is more put together than most editors twice her age. She has an amazing ability to think multiple steps out in a project and play out various editorial, production, and communication scenarios. She knows the nuances that come with every mode of communication. And most importantly, she knows how to say ‘No’ with grace and re-direct an idea towards her vision. These qualities are made all the more exceptional by the fact that she is only 15. Most people three times her age in her industry have yet to grasp all of these talents in as genuine a way as she has.
Tavi’s vision for the site and what it could become drove many characters to take part in making Rookie a reality, in under 30 days.
- Anaheed Alani is a former fact checker for The New York Times Magazine. She has been tirelessly editing works by teenagers for teenagers for months and there is no better person for this role than her.
- Emily Condon was the office manager at This American Life up until a month ago when she took a temporary leave to help get Rookie off the ground. It is safe to say that Emily has had the world’s fastest crash course in the business of online publishing. She is going to be a very powerful woman in media, if she is not already.
- Rookie was godfathered along by Ira Glass. His e-mail original e-mail to me with the subject line ‘Tavi Gevinson’ started off like this: “I’m writing you with a business-related question. Not for my business, but for a teenager’s.” I said yes in my mind before reading any further. Ira is married to Anaheed.
- Rookie was fortunate enough to have Choire Sicha and John Shankman from The Awl helping them navigate the complicated world of ad sales, and eventually enlisted New York Media to handle that end of the site.
- The real father and guardian behind all of this is Tavi’s father and manager, Steve Gevinson. The first weekend that I started talking to this crew, Steve and I talked on the phone for a few hours while I reassured him that I would be able to find the best people in New York to design and build the site, even though I wasn’t 100% sure I would be able to.
- Rookie was designed by the amazing and tireless Renda Morton and Zack Seuberling at Rumors. Renda helps run one of the better design studios in New York and has amazing people skills. The two of them were really the right people, both in character and and talent for the job.
- The site is hosted on Happy Cog Hosting.
Comments can be left over at Rookie on one of the many articles that just went up. Comments on this post in particular are being taken on Google+.
Jeremy Zilar is the Blog Specialist at The New York Times.