"Landland is a very small graphic design & illustration studio in Minneapolis that was started by Dan Black, Jessica Seamans & Matt Zaun in the spring of 2007. We had all been making things for quite a while before that, but 2007 was when we actually moved into a real studio and built the loft and the walls and a massive printing table, and learned how to install sinks and lights and all of that. Now it's just Dan & Jes."

"Knuth created TeX and Metafont because he wanted to extend the care he took in his writing to the design and printing of the physical books. He shared them with the rest of the academic community by putting them into the public domain and they’re still popular today, especially in the publication of mathematic and scientific journals."

"THERE IS BUT ONE GAME
& THAT GAME IS BASEBALL"

"Which CSS preprocessor language should I choose?" is a hot topic lately. I've been asked in person several times and an online debate has been popping up every few days it seems. It's nice that the conversation has largely turned from whether or not preprocessing is a good idea to which one language is best. Let's do this thing.

"Really short answer: SASS"

"A personal site is where you don’t have to compromise. Even if you lose some readers. Even if some people hate what you’ve done. Even if others wonder why you aren’t doing what everyone else who knows what’s what is doing."

"Here's why we need to always trust Kanye, forever. Back in January, awake and energetic and feeling chatty one cold winter's evening, Mr. West got on Twitter and rattled off a vision for a bold new venture called DONDA. The nuts and bolts was that Kanye was putting together a multidisciplinary design firm, named after his late mother, that "will galvanize amazing thinkers and put them in a creative space to bounce there dreams and ideas... To dream of, create, advertise and produce products driven equally by emotional want and utilitarian need.. To marry our wants and needs." And oh how we laughed and laughed. Well, guess what, jerks -- the joke's on us."

"Quatro Slab’s massive Ultra Black is a powerful force, especially in all caps. A little letter spacing goes a long way here, and helps the big forms breathe."

CSS Box with arrow.

"“THE ONLY PEOPLE FOR ME ARE THE MAD ONES, THE ONES WHO ARE MAD TO LIVE, MAD TO TALK, MAD TO BE SAVED, DESIROUS OF EVERYTHING AT THE SAME TIME, THE ONES WHO NEVER YAWN OR SAY A COMMONPLACE THING, BUT BURN, BURN, BURN, LIKE FABULOUS YELLOW ROMAN CANDLES EXPLODING LIKE SPIDERS ACROSS THE STARS AND IN THE MIDDLE YOU SEE THE BLUE CENTERLIGHT POP AND EVERYBODY GOES ‘AWWW!’”

"“It seems like you had it made,” an interviewer said recently on the Web magazine the 99%. “Why did you move on?”

"Mr. Curtis answered that he had always wanted to make films and had accomplished his goals as a designer. He detailed those goals in a 2002 interview: “The reason for designing new media is simple — to subtly and quietly change the world.”

"In the center is this outrageous sofa by Gaetano Pesce, which is a fusion of a salmon, a bear and a toucan. I was furnishing with Spanish Revival furniture, but I was getting bored."

"I’ve been asked to explain my approach to managing product development. This topic applies to individual designers and programmers as much as managers. The goal is not to take what we already do and do it faster or more efficiently. The goal is to have more information and flexibility in our process so we can make better decisions and better products."

“Design must be functional and functionality must be translated into visual aesthetics, without any reliance on gimmicks that have to be explained.”

"Super fast slideshow that only runs when hovered over."

"Our speaker at the March 2012 Portland/CreativeMornings was Aaron James Draplin (draplin.com). The event was generously hosted by Ziba (ziba.com) and sponsored by 52 Limited (52ltd.com). Many thanks to Pro Photo Supply (prophotosupply.com) for lending us the gear to capture the talk and to Paul Searle (psearle.com) for shooting and editing this video."

"This insistence that machines don’t care and won’t care about what we see, or about what seeing certain things does to us as organisms, is a deep—and I think deeply productive—problem for the New Aesthetic. There’s a yearning, a beseeching in our relation to machines, and I can’t help thinking we’ll find ourselves spurned, or cuckolded, or worse in the end. Learning to see through machines is not the same thing as learning to see as machines."

"...we’ve asked a few of our tech art friends to weigh in on the New Aesthetic and Sterling’s assessment."

"For a while now, I’ve been collecting images and things that seem to approach a new aesthetic of the future, which sounds more portentous than I mean. What I mean is that we’ve got frustrated with the NASA extropianism space-future, the failure of jetpacks, and we need to see the technologies we actually have with a new wonder. Consider this a mood-board for unknown products."

"One of the core themes of the New Aesthetic has been our collaboration with technology, whether that’s bots, digital cameras or satellites (and whether that collaboration is conscious or unconscious), and a useful visual shorthand for that collaboration has been glitchy and pixelated imagery, a way of seeing that seems to reveal a blurring between “the real” and “the digital”, the physical and the virtual, the human and the machine. It should also be clear that this ‘look’ is a metaphor for understanding and communicating the experience of a world in which the New Aesthetic is increasingly pervasive."

"They've won countless awards for their graphic work, but now it's time to dive behind what makes America's most venerated general interest newspaper stand a world apart. Graphics director Steve Duenes and his team of 30-some journalists at The New York Times turn around images at a breakneck daily, if not an hourly, pace, sorting and sifting through reportage to provide the clearest visualization of data possible."

"So the talk became “Waving at the machines”, a 50-minute, 120-slide vector through the idea, an idea that still seems massive and nebulous, but which it is possible to fire a laser through and illuminate some motes. I’m not sure I managed to phrase the camouflage stuff quite right, and the need for an ending always feels like a cop-out, but nevertheless, I cover many of the bases. (Web Directions have also transcribed the entire talk, should you be so crazy as to attempt to read it.)"

"This is one of those moments when the art world sidles over toward a visual technology and tries to get all metaphysical. This is the attempted imposition on the public of a new way of perceiving reality. These things occur. They often take a while to blossom. Sometimes they’re as big and loud as Cubism, sometimes they perish like desert roses mostly unseen. But they always happen for good and sufficient reasons. Our own day has those good and sufficient reasons."

"In the months since my biography of Jobs came out, countless commentators have tried to draw management lessons from it. Some of those readers have been insightful, but I think that many of them (especially those with no experience in entrepreneurship) fixate too much on the rough edges of his personality. The essence of Jobs, I think, is that his personality was integral to his way of doing business. He acted as if the normal rules didn’t apply to him, and the passion, intensity, and extreme emotionalism he brought to everyday life were things he also poured into the products he made. His petulance and impatience were part and parcel of his perfectionism."

"There’s a feeling of thinness that I believe many of us grapple with working digitally. It's a product of the ethereality inherent to computer work. The more the entirety of the creation process lives in bits, the less solid the things we’re creating feel in our minds.[3] Put in more concrete terms: a folder with one item looks just like a folder with a billion items. Feels just like a folder with a billion items. And even then, when open, with most of our current interfaces, we see at best only a screenful of information, a handful of items at a time."

"Rediscovering the Ghent Altarpiece."

"Our aim is to locate, document, digitise, and provide access to all archival materials related to Nelson Mandela. This is a work in progress. Here is a selection of materials arranged in exhibits for your enjoyment."

"If you started out building a dating site and instead ended up  building a video sharing site (YouTube) that handles 4 billion views a day, then it’s just possible you learned something along the way. And indeed, Mike Solomon, one of the original engineers at YouTube, did learn a lot and he has given a talk about it at PyCon: Scalability at YouTube."

"The concept of design ”patterns” is widely misunderstood. I want to give you a solid understanding of what patterns really are and how they reflect what designers already do every day."

posters

posters

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"The Little Coder’s Predicament arises from the following problem: We live in world of astonishingly advanced technologies, easy to use and all around us. Your grandmother has a smartphone. Your 2-year-old can play with an iPad. But the technology behind such marvels is complex and invisible, abstracted away from the human controlling it. Nor do these technologies offer us many ready chances to do basic programming on them. For nearly all of us, code, the language that controls these objects and in a way controls our world, is mysterious and indecipherable."

"In my six months as a signal, I’ve worked with Jason F. on numerous design explorations for the new Basecamp. These sessions are always fun, and a few of them helped transform difficult problems into the UI you’re using in the final product. (One famously tricky one was the new Projects screen.) Our design process isn’t formal, but we’re fast and methodical. We scope most of our work into a week or two."

"I can’t pretend to know what’s going on under the hood, but Fluid Simulation with Turing Patterns is a relaxing way to bend your mind for the next 30 seconds. Fire up your favorite Grateful Dead track, double click anywhere to get rid of the text overlay, and then start moving your mouse. Trippy. Click here to see it in action. (Note: Requires Web GL. Simple instructions on how to install it for Safari.)"

If something is going to be better, it is new, and if it’s new you are confronting problems and challenges you don’t have references for. To solve and address those requires a remarkable focus. There’s a sense of being inquisitive and optimistic, and you don’t see those in combination very often.

Rather than forcing them to represent themselves as they are, which I think is Facebook’s major goal, Tumblr allows them to represent the romantic self (or selves) they wish to be.

A couple of months ago, I created a jQuery Vertical Parallax Demo that manipulated CSS to make multiple backgrounds move at different speeds relative to the users movement of the scroll bar. This type of effect is slowly appearing across various websites on the web, achieved using many different techniques. Nikebetterworld took the idea to a new level.

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, and, depending on their dimensions (and options for layer initialisation), they move by different amounts, in a parallaxy kind of way.

The most contested and complicated dimension of Timeline's design was determining how time compression would work. Understanding the distinctions between various models of expansion on posts, aggregates and highlights took an enormous amount of concentration. At one point we designed a prototype that could mimic all 16 options we were considering. This exercise helped to remove many options, but the mechanics remained in flux until we could get real data into our models.

Table of Contents is a Brooklyn-based storefront offering books, records, magazines and small editions. From electronic music to minimal design and experimental video, each collection spans the length of a single table in the store.

In addition to stocking media from assorted artists and labels, Table of Contents also features in-house publications via Media Catalog.

Short narratives in film & photography.

Philip K. Dick claimed that “a person’s authentic nature is a series of shifting, variegated planes that establish themselves as he relates to different people; it is created by and appears within the framework of his interpersonal relationships.”

The Feltron 2010/2011 Biennial Report explores this notion by overlapping facets of Nicholas’ behavior to visualize how his personality varies based on location and company.

Complexity is easy. It’s fun to come up with new ideas and it feels great to say yes to everything, to avoid making trade-offs.

It’s simplicity that’s hard. To make a great product, you have to define its core – a single challenge – and painfully, painstakingly eliminate creative features to stay true to the product and its purpose.

Bret Victor invents tools that enable people to understand and create. He has designed experimental UI concepts at Apple, interactive data graphics for Al Gore, and musical instruments at Alesis.

I've been using SASS for pretty much everything I do recently. Here's some musings on the journey. From hold-ups, to trip-ups, to turn-offs. From apps and teams to workflows and syntax.

Stories online aren’t really stories right now. They’re like fragmentary reactions to things for the most part. They’re like little nerve firings. Very rarely are they fully formed thoughts and expressions and so on. So, I think creating a space that’s more about slowing down and contemplating and being introspective is a prerequisite for getting people to tell stories that have impact. When you design a space that encourages short, reactionary verse, people are going to give you short, reactionary verse. Maybe when you design a space that’s not encouraging that, people will use more depth in their self-expression.

UNDER THE LINE is an independent platform for video and short films.

We use it as an instrument for communication between designers, photographers, models, editors, audience and clients. Usually we find additional interesting information under the line. UNDER THE LINE is just like that. We publish interviews, portraits, music promos, fashion and videos in general, with a certain personal attitude and strong point of view.

Bootstrap is a toolkit from Twitter designed to kickstart development of webapps and sites.
It includes base CSS and HTML for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, and more.

Olaf Hajek at Home in Berlin

Bootstrap is an open-source front-end toolkit created to help designers and developers quickly and efficiently build awesome stuff online. Our goal is to provide a refined, well-documented, and extensive library of flexible design components built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for others to build and innovate on. Today, it has grown to include dozens of components and has become the most popular project on GitHub with more than 13,000 watchers and 2,000 forks.

Here we’ll shed some light on how and why Bootstrap was made, the processes used to create it, and how it has grown as a design system.

I spent the first 10 years of my career saying things like, “If I could just do this work the way I know it should be done…” and convincing myself that someone else was keeping me from making better choices. I’ll often be reviewing work with another designer and they’ll say, “Well, if I were doing this…” I stare back at them in astonishment until they realise what they’ve said. What is this strange gene that makes designers handicap themselves?

“Gamification” treats people like children — children who need to be manipulated, who need to be tricked into doing what’s good for them.

And it makes bad software.

The sexiest thing is being comfortable, and if you’re making a statement, knowing what that statement is.

Enter the url to your site - local or online: both work - and use the controls to adjust the width and height of your viewport to find exact breakpoint widths in pixels. Then use that information in your media queries to create a responsive design.

JESS3 is a creative agency that specializes in data visualization.

I spend my time thinking about, designing and building things that live at the intersection of form, function & aesthetic.

Kafka handwriting font