I’m going to go ahead and call this the best Layer Tennis yet. Aaron Draplin, floor manager of the DDC, vs. famed Ohio graphic designer Chris Glass. One for the ages. More of a collaboration than a battle, witness the evolution of a brand for the newly minted International Design Workers Federation.
One of the coolest things at last week’s 99% Conference was the Cool Hunting videos they showed during breaks. Above, an inside look at Grafica Fidalga, a print shop in NYC. Love it.
Also see PapaBubble and Baggu Bags. Incidentally, the conference stuffed a Baggu bag with candies and a poster, so it was cool to see and hold products from these little spots. Nice touch.
“Digg sends a tremendous amount of traffic to sites that make it to the top of their front page, but it’s the worst kind of traffic: mindless, borderline illiterates. Good riddance, really.”
Ignite SLC is next Thursday – it’s an O’Reilly event that gathers over a dozen speakers, allows 20 slides each and just 15 seconds per slide. All local. Design + tech. Looks fun.
Joel Splosky’s How to be a Program Manager is a near spot-on description of our Design Manager / Interaction Designer position here, minus the pesky HTML/CSS role we keep clinging to.. UE + functional spec + customer liaison.
“A person who works six hours a day but with total focus has an enormous advantage over a 12-hour-per-day workaholic who’s ‘multi-tasking’ all day, answering every phone call, constantly checking Facebook and Twitter, and indulging every interruption.
It’s time we upgraded our work ethic for the age we’re living in, not our grandparents’ age. Hard work is still a virtue, but now takes a distant second place to the new determinant of success or failure in the age of Internet distractions: Control of attention.”
Pitchfork’s posted 51-100 of their 100 Best Tracks of 2008. This isn’t only a great list, they’ve finally added handy little MP3 players to hear or download tracks on the list. I guarantee you haven’t heard of over half of these artists. Go explore and find some new faves.
My tops: The Veronicas (87), Justice (76), Sigur Rós (71), The Whitest Boy Alive (64), Q-Tip (61), and some freakin’ Vampire Weekend at 56.
Dropcaps are a staple of magazine and newspaper design, but aren’t always the easiest to implement on the web. Using this little jQuery and CSS tutorial, you can easily add hot little dropcaps to your web articles without bothering your developers. This method will also let you sleep at night knowing your caps will degrade gracefully, displaying just fine in browsers without CSS or JavaScript enabled.
Please note, this tutorial is for those who are familiar with jQuery and CSS. No basics taught here. Also nerd alert.
Zoom far into a document in the new Photoshop CS4 and pixel lines automatically appear, a nice touch to help define specific colors and fine tune your designs. (Above is 18pt Caecilia LT Std at 3200%.)
Today we received an email from a concerned subscriber:
It’s a very sad day – I have always found NorthTemple a great, entertaining, and informative read.
But, today I am removing you from my feed, and will no longer be sharing with my team.
I cannot reconcile the Mormon church’s views and directives on Prop 8 with my own, and refuse to support anything associated.
Good luck to all of you – you have a great team.
Northtemple is made up of 30 someodd designers who do work for the LDS Church, yes. But our About page has said for 2 years:
Northtemple.com is not an official publication of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The websites linked, opinions expressed, quotes cited, and articles written do not necessarily express the views of the Church. We bear sole responsibility for, and firmly stand behind, the content featured here.
A few points I wanted to make clear this morning:
This is a design blog. We write about design.
We rarely, if ever, talk about politics. The occasional Obama link has always had a design or tech element to it. We have never voiced an opinion on Proposition 8.
The Church does not own Northtemple.com, and has no control over what we post. The site is not an approved publication of the Church, and is hosted and owned privately. We just all happen to work here.
To reject Northtemple because of the Church’s stance on Prop 8 is like refusing to watch the Utah Jazz because a Mormon owns it, or stay in a Marriott hotel because a Mormon owns it, read any of the Twilight books (or watch the movie this weekend) because a Mormon wrote it, listen to Glenn Beck or Gladys Knight, or watch any of the many professional sports teams that LDS members play for.
While we respect the political views of our readers, we just don’t care about them on this blog. If you care about design, read us. If not, don’t. It’s a design point, not a political one.
