Very infrequent updates from an otherwise distractible guy.
Pictures will be mine, unless credited otherwise. Same for words. All thinking and consideration of these things belongs to me.
Intrade. Y u no speculate whether Obama will launch a #responsive whitehouse.gov on Inauguration Day? github.com/WhiteHouse/for…
— Nick Simson (@nsmsn) January 19, 2013
I think this may have been the nerdiest thing I ever publicly tweeted, because of the references to the following items:
Prototype for a 3 foot by 5 foot 100% nylon flag.
I think I found a company on the internet that might be able to make one of these for me.
![So this is the second finger-point/crazy face/presidential candidate/Colorado location photo-op this year. Here’s the original
theatlantic:
Here Is the Only Picture of Mitt Romney at Chipotle You Will Ever Need
[Image: AP]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mba7m91Htp1qcokc4o1_1280.jpg)
So this is the second finger-point/crazy face/presidential candidate/Colorado location photo-op this year. Here’s the original
Here Is the Only Picture of Mitt Romney at Chipotle You Will Ever Need
[Image: AP]
Book within a book.
Participating in Illustration Friday again, flexing my icon and dissolve brush skillz.
The London Olympics logo is a little like the Suzuki GSX-R logo.
(hat tip nsmsn)
You should follow A Little Like, and not because I am a contributing logoforensicologist.
Time Magazine’s website is web traffic candy. It is not designed to provide nourishing information, but to trick you into clicking away from the story you are reading and enter other parts of its website. I went to Time.com to read some story about higher education, and ended up finding out about a cable TV-cutting trend, a running-your-car-into-the-ground trend, and “the New Trend of Used Clothes”.
I don’t know if this is supposed to make me feel on the cutting edge, because I have been living this way ever since I moved out of my parents’ house 8 years ago. My wife grew up without cable and has been thrift store shopping even longer than me. Only this past year, has our combined income placed us in the global 1%. Now that living a modest lifestyle within your means is finally cool, my wife and I will have to prepare for the inevitable “secondhand economy hipster” backlash.
This is a website critique. In an actual critique, I would probably not use so many ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ statements. My goal in writing this is to get better at assessing design decisions with a critical eye, and (hopefully) make better decisions when designing my own websites.
I first became aware of science writer Jonah Lehrer in 2008, after Proust Was a Neuroscientist came out in paperback. I liked that book. Later, I listened to the audiobook of How We Decide, a book about decision-making. I have yet to read or have read to me Imagine, his latest offering, but it follows the same format: short, digestible essays combining Gladwell-style profiles of famous people and summaries of cutting-edge research, making brain science accessible to the layperson.
To the website, designed by Phillip Niemayer:
Look and Feel
The look of the site is fitting to it’s content—the combination of bold type, bold borders and limited color conjure up science textbooks I had in grade school, and the kind of diagram you might see in a “Call for Posters” at your local state university. For a website about words, I appreciate how graphic it is, and how it achieves this by using very few actual images. It is reliant on many of the same graphic elements found throughout of Paul Sahre’s work, which I’m also a sucker for.
The site also responds to your browser screen size to display the amount of content. I particularly like how the book spines are “shelved” in the tablet/laptop/desktop views, and “stacked” in the mobile view. All of this is achieved quirkily and in no way would be confused with something over-designed. It falls more on the “honest” side of the Honest-Slick Rubric, and I love that about it.
The about page is a slight departure from the other sections of the site, but uses the full-page profile photo web design trend in a fine way. Not really sure why anyone besides a memoirist would insist on using a childhood photo, but that is an entirely different rant.
Functionality
With a magazine writer’s website, there is always a question of who owns the work. Most big magazines will not allow to republish their words in their entirety on your website, even if you provided those words to them. Your options are either to aggregate all the content in one place or to link out. This site does both, kinda. The “Now” section of the homepage is really a aggregate of Jonah’s Twitter feed. Awkwardly this section of the site wasn’t doing anything for me, maybe because his last tweet was more than two weeks ago.
The primary goal of this site is to sell more copies of Imagine, and so the requisite Amazon, Borders, Powell’s et al links are provided. Jonah’s magazine writing has appeared in Seed, WIRED, and now The New Yorker, where his blog is actually hosted, so it makes sense to link out to these divergent outlets. The audio/video section of the homepage also links out to divergent sources. It may have been cooler to use APIs to embed video and audio within the site, but that would certainly require a complex solution, since the content is hosted on various channels: NPR, Viacom, Vimeo and YouTube. What we have is par for the course in a mobile browsing experience, but it is jarring for me to rely on the back button so much in the desktop experience, especially for sites that use Wordpress natively.
The shining feature of this site is the “Ideas” section, which demonstrates a simple and effective way of using the “categories” tool in Wordpress. The writing Jonah links to is organized into organic “themes”, rather than rigid categories. The presentation is very clean, but again, I really dislike having to rely on the back button to navigate to the other ideas. I actually appreciate the visualization as all of these “themes” being interconnected on the homepage, and would have liked to see that somehow continue into the sub-section navigation.
Assessment: A practical site that beautifully fits its author’s voice.
Final Warning: You may have a shitty feeling after clicking the Frontal Cortex link and reading the Editor’s Notes that preface each entry.
Via Design Envy
So you are spared from having to read it:
There is a “crisis” facing America. I will neither analyze nor allude to what might have “caused” this “crisis”, nor offer any “solutions”. Instead, I am I am only going to focus on how it affects 63% of the population.
*David Brooks’ words, not mine
Flickr is probably still my favorite social network. While it’s not loaded with functions the way Facebook and google are, it does it’s one or two things better than I’ve seen anywhere else on the web:
Photosharing publicly in a searchable way, leaving open the possibility of discovery (read: delight).
Scores pretty high in it’s privacy settings and low on gimmicks. You can opt out pretty quickly from sharing your geography, unless your the type of tourist that likes to brag. My mom sent us her vacation photos as a private album. My wedding photos were shared with family members who couldn’t make it without hurting the feelings of acquaintances we couldn’t invite.
A community of users that is very appreciative and overall, pretty positive, compared to YouTube commentary or the anonymous trolls on your local newspaper’s site.
A good translation of the photo album/art gallery experience in a way that makes sense to the web and digital experience. You can flip through fairly quickly, and give more consideration to that which commands more time and attention. Best of all, noone is competing for your attention.
True to the photo album experience, I feel pretty guilty not keeping my flickr updated. I can’t make this cae for twitpics instagram or even Facebbok photos, which are more like Polaroids (which is not a bad thing)
There you have it, my case for flickr as social media barometer. You probably will not invent the next Facebook or Twitter, but make us another Flickr, I’ll happily oblige.
(typed with an iPod touch, a much inferior way to blog on Tumblr than a real keyboard)
