BASEMENT.ORG
Posted by Richard Ziade on August 28, 2008, 01:35PMjParallax
jParallax "turns a selected element into a 'window', or viewport, and all its children into absolutely positioned layers that can be seen through the viewport. These layers move in response to the mouse." Very nice, though I'm not sure of its utility. Built atop the consistently awesome jQuery.
Designers Revolution
Designers Revolution is a handsome new design site with Photoshop, vector resources and some nice portfolios. Check it out. Posted by Richard Ziade on August 25, 2008, 11:22AMBansky On Advertising
Via PicoCool:
Ouch. Hey, we gotta make a living somehow. Heh.
Posted by Richard Ziade on August 21, 2008, 04:14PMThe Design Grand Slam
For years, I refused to purchase an iPod for a certain someone in my life (hint: she gave birth to me). I tried your $29.99 deals you find on sites like Computer Geeks. I tried one of the older generation iRiver players. In essence, anything but an iPod. Of course, she eventually went out and bought one on her own.
The other devices all worked well and good (for the most part). But the thing that really bugged me was that my mom called every one of them "iPods." I found it slightly annoying and amusing all at once. I wrote it off as part of the first-generation immigrant experience. My family came to the United States in 1975.
My family comes from a (third) world where brand names of innovations became the generic words that represented those products. For example, growing up I remember "corn flakes" being synonymous with breakfast cereal. "Frigidaire" is a refrigerator. "Kleenex" is the word for facial tissue. And the list goes on.
While companies invest to build and differentiate their brands in modernized societies, barraging you with logos, slogans, colors and typography, their impact on less industrialized cultures is far more drastic. This happens a few reasons:
- Mass marketing hasn't really taken hold in certain societies. So when someone kicks off a brand campaign, it's not a stick of dynamite, it's an atomic bomb.
- The product or service never existed before. If the first refrigerator in your village has a big metallic "FRIGIDAIRE" plastered across it, and this thing keeps your food cold, then a refrigerator is a frigidaire (lower-case 'f').
- A product or service is so obviously useful and aesthetically appealing that people embrace it, brand and all. To do this, such a product must transcend cultural boundaries and connect in a very basic way with people. People have to get excited about it. If they don't have it, they have to want it. They have to identify with it.
Fast forward to yesterday evening. I'm walking to pick up my car from the lot here in New York City, and I'm greeted with this:
So much for stereotyping my mom as a naive Third World immigrant.
If read literally, that sign still holds the parking lot responsible for my lost Archos 605 or Creative Zen player. Of course, by "iPod's" (note the attention to the lower-case "i" and upper-case "P") they mean any digital media player.
If you reread that third bullet above, you begin to appreciate how powerful design can be. People speak of better ROI, competitive advantage and improved brand perception, but the design equivalent of a grand slam is far more profound. If something immediately evinces its utility and appeal and provides satisfaction and pleasure to those that come upon it, it will be rewarded with it's own classification and place in our lexicon. Over time, it embeds itself in our culture and collective identity.
If there were ever an argument about the merits of design, this would be the trump card. When a grand slam is hit in marketing, it makes noise, creates buzz and eventually fizzles out. But when it happens in design, it transcends the commercial sphere and becomes part of life. Your competitors? They get reduced to oddities and anomalies. So the next time you're pitching that "design phase" that everyone rolls their eyes at, talk about the grand slam.
Now if you'll excuse me, a box of corn flakes (lower-case 'c', lower-case 'f') awaits...
Posted by Richard Ziade on August 20, 2008, 09:25AMExcellent Typography Blog
I may well be late to the party on this one, but the Darden Studio site/blog is a real treat. It's a shrine to typography. I love the white glove treatment on magazines.
Posted by Richard Ziade on August 18, 2008, 10:22AMThe 2008 Cold Mud Brownie Olympics!
I was going to blog about the definition of "design" or the end of Pandora, but those will have to wait. Glory awaits. A team of chocolate "experts" have been scouring the globe to find the world's greatest brownie and now that we have an impressive roster of candidates, we can now begin.
We're also proud to announce that this event is being co-sponsored with Cold Mud. Cold Mud is a cool food news portal based in Australia.
And now, the opening ceremonies! (insert bombastic trumpet music here). Here are the competitors so far:
- Dancing Deer Baking Co. (Chocolate Chunk)
- Mari's New York. ("Classic")
- Chocolate Room
- Pret A Manger Brownie
- New York Brownies
- Geoff & Drew's Brownies
- Schmerty's
It is not too late to recommend another competitor for the Cold Mud Brownie Olympics. Just email me if you're interested in competing. Just a few things to keep in mind:
- They have to be brownies. Not fudge. Not chocolate cake. Not scones (what the hell is a scone anyway?).
- No home recipes or homemade brownies. We're looking for only commercially available brownies that ideally can be ordered online or by phone.
- No flavored brownies. This is a controversial rule. We're looking for chocolate perfection. So please hold the raspberry, caramel, walnut, etc. We do accept chocolate chunks/chips and the like.
So who will be the Michael Phelps of brownies? Stay tuned!
Posted by Richard Ziade on August 12, 2008, 01:04PMCentralized Headaches
Gmail had its biggest failure yesterday. Both Google Apps and regular Gmail users were affected. For many people at work here at Arc90 - there was no way to get to your email. The outage affected tens of millions of users.
Email is not about sending and receiving messages anymore. It is about storage. It is about your professional and/or personal archive that you dip into many times a day. With a solution like Gmail, we've chosen to centralize everything: the user interface, our history of information (both messages and attachments) as well as the all-important task of sending and receiving mail. And here lies the flaw around such over-zealous centralization: when it goes down, it all goes down. Let's just be thankful that our data returned this time around. The worst-case scenario is the permanent annihilation of our email history.
Centralized Data
There is no reason why our email history should be soley centrally stored and tapped as needed by a web browser or mobile device. For all time, email lived in numerous places, especially in enterprise environments. Outlook may tap Exchange server for messages, but it mirrored your content locally. If your Exchange server went down, you had your data. Now everyone is talking about how we all need Google Sync for Gmail so we can recreate the benefit of mirroring local and cloud storage. A common, widely-available feature in enterprise email is now highly sought after again in an unduly complex, roundabout way. Syncing is a pain in the ass.
Centralized Interface
Imagine your IMAP or Exchange server going down and the outcome isn't just no email but no email client. If the mail server goes down, Outlook or Apple Mail won't load at all. Again, we drank the centralized browser-centric Kool Aid and failed to see how we actually took some steps back. I don't need a server to send down buttons and levers around my information each time I access email. Marc
Which Direction Are We Coming From And Which Way Do We Go?
So which way do we build out? Do we work our way back and out of the browser with tools like syncing and such or should we web enable existing client apps? Microsoft's Dare Obasanjo touched on this very point:
When it first shipped I was looking forward to a platform like Google Gears but after I thought about the problem for a while, I realized that such a platform would be just as useful for "online enabling" desktop applications as it would be for "offline enabling" Web applications. Additionally, I came to the conclusion that the former is a lot more enabling to users than the latter.
The culture of web applications, with its focus on "shipping software" and "access anyware," has gleaned over key features that while not sexy or enticing, really show their value when the s%#t hits the fan.
Yesterday was a low probability/high impact event. They are going to happen. What we can do is tweak the chain of dependencies so the failure isn't so centralized and far-reaching. Oddly, it may require that the "revolutionary" culture of Web software take a good look at taking a backseat to desktops for once.
Posted by Richard Ziade on August 7, 2008, 09:29AMMichael Eastman's Photography
Michael Eastman's online gallery of photographs makes me want to quit taking pictures. Really stunning. Don't miss the Vanishing America series.
Posted by Richard Ziade on August 6, 2008, 01:45PMBackground Pattern Maker
Mmmm....wallpaper. BgPatterns is a nicely designed and easy-to-use background pattern generator (via Authentic Boredom).
Yugo Nakamura's Fontpark 2.0
I'm not even sure what category to put this. Yugo Nakamura's Fontpark 2.0. You pick out some Japanese fonts and then, um, move them around and bend them like pieces of rubber. You can record and share your manipulations. It's hard to explain...but fun. Just go play with it.
Posted by Richard Ziade on August 4, 2008, 05:19PM2008 Logo Trends (So Far)
Yeh, we're only halfway through 2008, but so what? We're already trending - at least as far as logos are concerned. Logolounge does a nice roundup of logo trends for 2008.
Help Wanted
I'd like to use the massive(?) population of basement.org readers here to help out Arc90's recruiting Master Plan. We're looking for strong software people with a good grasp of web technologies (HTTP, REST, Ajax, Frameworks, PHP, Java, you-name-it). Specifically we're looking for:
- Software architect. Someone who can own an effort from architecture, API, technology/platform decisions down to the nitty-gritty development.
- Web Developer. Someone who can quickly digest requirements and build tools/apps/web interfaces. The more versatile the better.
As you can see, our quote-unquote job positions aren't very formal. That's sort of by design. We're just looking for smart, creative thinkers that appreciate working in a loose, dynamic environments. It is, after all, one of the greatest jobs in the world (or Midtown Manhattan).
If you're interested, don't hesitate to drop me a note (or resume, or portfolio).