Categories
Everyday

Vivaldi Web Browser

Vivaldi is a new web browser, built with the purpose of making your internet surfing easier. The only downside right now is that it doesn’t have the extensions I need, but an interesting project.

Categories
Web Design

Top Pens of 2014 on CodePen

Top Pens of 2014 on CodePen are just that. There is a pretty impressive range of code and features in the selections. Definitely worth a look.

Categories
Music

Top 10 Albums of 2014

Top 10 Albums of 2014 is a damn fine list of great alt music from 2014 by Thomas Schrijer. Most of my favorites or honorable mentions are present for sure and a few surprises are there as well. All albums provided as Spotify links so you can get to the listening immediately.

Categories
Apple

The Software and Services Apple Needs to Fix

The Software and Services Apple Needs to Fix is an in depth look at Apple’s seemingly insatiable thirst to update their products with broken versions. I have been recently pushed to build a PC rather than buy a new Mac. Unfortunately I don’t believe this trend by Apple will end anytime soon.

Categories
Everyday

Happy New Year 2015

I can’t believe that 2014 is done. It has been one hell of a year; I got married, started teaching, and really started taking my career seriously. Each one of these are worth going into in great depth… but I won’t.

Thanks for being awesome and catching up! How are you guys?

Categories
Web Design

CSS Guidelines

css guidelines

CSS Guidelines: High-level advice and guidelines for writing sane, manageable, scalable CSS. Pretty great advice here for those constructing well documented collaborative stylesheets.

Categories
Everyday

Jodorowskys Dune

Jodorowskys Dune is a new documentary by Frank Pavich about the singular vision, of Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, to make Dune into a film. From the trailer the visuals for the 1975 movie would have been breathtaking. This looks like an amazing story. Opens today in select theaters in NY and LA.

Categories
Design Film

Designing for The Grand Budapest Hotel

Designing for The Grand Budapest Hotel (Creative Review) is a fascinating look at the incredible and whimsical work of Annie Atkins, a Dublin based designer. (via The Fox is Black)

Grand Budapest Hotel Collage

Categories
Diary

Drakkar Noir

In high school, I longed to be sophisticated in the way that all pubescent boys longed to be sophisticated – looking sophisticated to girls. Back in high school, my tools of appearing sophisticated ranged from:

  1. Reading Thoreau’s Walden to look independent and well-read because it was mentioned once on My-So-Called-Life, but hating every page.
  2. Listening to the Pixies which said, “here’s a guy who’s part of the counter-culture,” when all I wanted to do was listen to Paula Abdul.
  3. Writing for the literary magazine because I had things to say.
  4. Dying my hair blue because here’s a guy who looks like a dork but is inside a punk rocker.
  5. Writing angsty, understanding of feminist ideals, poetry.

In short, I was a complete poser. I was trying to please everyone else because I never truly felt at home in my own skin. I thought what I liked was stupid, so I co-opted the popular alternative lifestyle of the time. Something akin to Jordan Catalano meets Tribe Called Quest frontman Q-Tip. The unfortunate truth is these two personalities were both completely unconvincing on me. I was that dork who didn’t want to be a dork.

These days that may be difficult for modern-day dorks to understand, but before popular culture accepted dorks, they mercilessly hunted us down and mocked us. We were the awkward trailblazers who eventually grew up running every major corporation and conglomerate. It turned out while being awkward wasn’t, being smart was pretty cool.

So when unpacking a box of things I had stored before going away to college, I was greeted with a familiar smell – Drakkar Noir. The little black bottle had been sophisticatedly stewing for 17 years, awaiting its triumphant return to the teenager it had once defined. True to its tough and rugged scent, nothing had changed with the black matte bottle. Seventeen years and… nothing had changed. It smelled exactly the same as I remembered.

It, unlike my younger self, was so blindly sure of itself – it remained the same, impenetrable over the years. It was an instant reminder of all my missteps. Hell, it was an instant reminder of the missteps of a generation of pimple-faced boys who simply wanted to be loved and thought a new smell might just be the ticket. So, to all the (now) men who once nervously visited a drug store and had an employee open a glass case to purchase a bottle of Drakkar Noir instead of condoms, I raise my glass of Malbec* and solute you. All of us dorks salute you – smelling all the sweeter.

*It is actually Pinot Noir, but the similarity was too much, even for a blog post.

Categories
Design

Massimo and Lella Vignelli Talk Design

One of my favorite graphic design teams Massimo and Lella Vignelli talk about creativity, design, and social responsibility. One of my favorite things about Massimo is that he only uses around 5 typefaces – that’s it. The typefaces of his entire career can be summed up with the same precision as his work.