devolute.net

An algorithm was used to calculate the colors in pictures uploaded to Flickr. The resulting diagram highlights the prevalent colors across the seasons. Pretty.

Flickr Flow (via Kottke)

The Eisenhower interstate roads were built so that, in the event of invasion, America’s armies could quickly move to the part of the union that was under attack. This diagram in the style of the famous H.C. Beck London Underground diagram (shout out to BoingBoing) helps you see what cities these roads pulled together.

via Kottke

Like most new BBC television programs, Design for Life takes its name from a 90s pop song. The Manics, durrr. Like ‘Life of Riley‘ and, erm, I’m sure there is something else… well unlike most Caroline Quentin vehicles, Design for Life isn’t shit.

As is the norm now for most new BBC television programs, it takes about 7 minutes to get started. Those first 7 minutes of the show are catching up, explaining what happened in the previous episode. In this day of Sky+, HDD recorders and (more importantly) iPlayer, is this necessary? I know it makes the show cheaper to make, but for crying out loud. Just make it a little shorter if you’re going to piss around so much.

It’s shot beautifully well and we get to see plenty of the beautiful bits of Paris, as apposed to the hours and hours of shots of that bloody Gerkin thing in London that anyone who watches the Apprentice has forced upon them. When talking about this show, I’m going to compare it to the Apprentice, because the similarities are obvious (and I’m lazy). It features a team of designers (business men?) who fight to show they are the best designer (most shouty business man?) to prove they can work with designer extraordinaire, Philipee Stark (Suralun?).

the Design for Life participants

Participant Nebil is the most ‘Apprentice like’, because he patronizes everyone he gets to talk to. This probably is an attempt to look better than everyone else but at least he does know his shit. I’m sure that to anyone who actually has their design game-face on, his “let me just explain this too you, thicko” tone will probably make him look like a bit of a dick. Still, he gets a lot of screen time because he has a lot to say and even his dick-ishness is minor compared with the mega-cocks that rut around in any given episode of the Apprentice. He gets his come-upance tho, which is another reason why I love this show. It’s obvious that the shows producers set him off against the other stand-out, Ilsa, because she’s got a pretty good set of claws and will bite back.

I guess a large part of the show will boil down to “do you like Philipee Stark”. I do. Him and his bloody chairs, or whatever the hell he’s supposed to be most famous for. He’s pretentious, but y’know he’s a brilliant designer so he can afford to be and after all, this is design. You’re supposed to be pretentious. He also dismisses the participants easily, based on some seemingly whimsical idea he has. Again: he’s a designer. I’ve had designers happily shit on my ideas in the past and non of them were exactly Phillipee Stark. At least when he drops people he’s really nice about it. I’d love to be sacked by him. None of this catch-phrase “You’re fired” crap. I also like his attitude towards ‘wasteful’ design. He’s green without being sickly. Personally Alan Sugar really gets on my tits because turned Amstrad into crap (I love my old CPC6128) and I tire of his attitude and his stupid Labour ‘business-tzar’ beard.

Further contrasts to the Apprentice are easy to highlight. The participants are young, attractive and probably smell quite good. They are also very, very white. And middle class uni-graduates. They actually get very visibly nervous, which makes you feel a little more sympathetic. Hell, in the 2nd episode one of the participants has a genuinely great idea: Polly and her water-level meter. What have the Apprentice chimps ever done, but chuck crap at each other? Design for Life actually talks about design. Pitching, ideas, briefs, presentations and all the bullshit in-between. That’s some real genuine content from the BBC.

The show is at 9.00pm on BBC 2, Mondays but you can follow the show here, on iPlayer.

As an aside; it’s narrated by Adam ‘Adam + Joe’ Buxton. I look forward to the DVD release where Joe does a funny-man voice-over.

Design by Humans run a Threadless-style shop where they take designs from a large number of designers and print the best ones. I couldn’t resist this one:

Stay on target T-shirt by tastyhills from Design By Humans

Yes, those are F4U Corsairs taking the place of the usual X-Wings in the attack on the first Death Star. There is a P40 on the back as well, which I’d imagine takes the place of the Y-Wing. Obviously this is all going to make me very popular with girls, right? Nothing like a good 1940s/Star Wars mash-up.

I bought another tee too and spent enough money doing so (got hit by stupid import taxes, gah!) to warrant a quick review. They’re well printed and a good fit, but the quality of the fabric seems a bit disappointing. Certainly, it’s less than American Apparel tees that brands like this often print on. Time will tell how they fare. It’s available here at DbH, should you share my questionable taste in clothing.

All the kids love Wu-Tang, but some of the album art for the album covers is pretty crap. I’d actually say that album art for hip-hop albums is probably worse than other genres, on average. I don’t know why that is. Maybe designers don’t like hip-hop? Maybe artists and labels concentrate more on the music instead and consider good design an unnecessary expense. Maybe typography is a naughty word. Designer Logan Walters has taken it upon himself to redesign some of the old Wu albums. They’re a bit reminiscent of old Hitchcock movie posters. I think they’re a great improvement on the originals:

36 Chambers remix

I can’t slag the original designs off without saying that I’ve always thought one Wu-tang album has excellent album art: Bobby Digital in Stereo, a side-project by the RZA. It’s probably my favourite cover and a pretty good album to boot.

View pt 1 of the collection of ‘new’ Wu-Tang albums at Logans blog. I hear he’s planning a pt 2.

When I was at a school we ‘learnt’ about magnetic fields in what felt like hundreds of physics lessons. We’d be given a load of iron filings and some magnets and make a great big grey mess of the science labs. People would try and wash the filings off with tap water, which didn’t work and so every desk was wet and metally. I’m not sure what it taught me, a visualisation like this excellent video may have helped a little more (or even explained why my massive speakers do funny things to my monitor):

Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

Of course I have never experienced anything like this sort of ‘design by committee’. Ahem. Very reminiscent of Make My Logo Bigger! don’t you think?

via function

This couch is awesome. Designer Christian Zuzunaga made it for Italian company Moroso.

Pixel sofa

I’m tempted to buy this tee-shirt. It’s mainly true, but not as true as it should be sometimes. Of course I would say that, I work in design (well, technically). In fact, I could very well be lying. Design is certainly lying if it claims that it’s not using overusing common typefaces with solid block backgrounds as an easy way to create a strong visual identity. I’m looking at you, Vodafone and Channel 4 OD!

Found at fffffound

First things first, I think Apple make some great stuff. Work recently put a 24″ iMac on my desk and it’s great to work with. Sure it’s not exactly crash-proof (although this is more Adobe’s fault) and the keyboard is awful, but the Apple/OS X experience is pretty good, especially with that lovely vibrant screen. I was recently in the market for a new laptop and was going to buy a 13″ Macbook. In the end a friend of mine stepped in and let me have his old 13″ Sony Vaio for much less, so I bought that instead. I think maybe in his wisdom he was trying to save me.

This trailer for an upcoming film about Mac users called ‘Macheads‘ is terrifying. I’m a pretty huge geek who uses a range of Windows, Linux and OS X machines, but the thought of getting quite as attached to a computer as any of these people makes me glad that I only use a Mac during office hours. As someone with a keen interest in design, I can sympathize a little with someone who collects old Macintosh boxes, but lines like “I have never knowing slept with a windows user” are just disturbing.

At least in the old days (before the iMac) all the hardcore Mac users had beards so were recognizable. Now they have started shaving. God help us all. I still want to see the film though.

See the trailer in question here (found via Gizmodo)

It’s been low-blog count limbo round here for a while. I’ve been over-rung with websites to maul at work so I’ve been somewhat terrified to even look at a TinyMCE text entry box. What else have I done? Well, I’ve been all the way to Westminster in London Village to try and help raise some more funds for soon to be internet-sensation Catch21 Productions. Well, we hope. We’re certainly going to try. I reckon we could do some pretty exciting stuff with it anyway. More on that, hopefully much more, later in the year.

I’ve also been to a wedding, a stag do, paintballing (ouch), go-karting (crunch) and to see some downright awesome bands like 65daysofstatic (for the 4th time!) and A Silver Mt. Zion (for the second time, but this time wasn’t half as good – slackers). I went to watch ‘28 Weeks Later‘ which was disappointing, but not surprisingly so. I just loved the prequel far too much and naturally the usual disappointment in a sequel followed. I also watched the start of Big Brother UK Series 384, but I’m too ashamed to talk about that…

BBQ this weekend down ‘sarf. Maybe next week I’ll reveal some shiny new website designs I’ve been working on. Oh larks oh lawdy! Hurrah!

A colleague pretty much ordered me to install the new(-ish) Firefox plug-in Firebug onto my machine at work. Now it’s on my machine at home. Why? Because it makes my job at least twice as easy as it was before. I won’t bore you with details; I’ll just say that even alongside other helpful tools such as the Web Developer plug-in, it’s super-handy if you’re building pages, regardless of whether you’re an amateur, a pro, or someone who fools himself into thinking he’s both. The drill is basically as follows: Hit F12. Press ‘Inspect’. Hover over any element on your page and click on it to see what css values that element is using (or not using). You can even change values ‘on the fly’ and the page will update in front of your very eyes (locally at least). It’s the perfect bug-fixing tool.

I’m now going to go do a little bit of fixing elsewhere. Previously, I wouldn’t have been arsed to bother with it had Firebug not made re-understanding previously forgotten old tag soup so easy.

Get Firebug here. If not for me, then for your own sanity!

Well, it’s finally happened. I’ve got a job. No… more than that, I’ve got a job I actually want. I’ll be working for a small Sheffield company called Rocket Science. They make websites and I’ll now be responsible for helping them do this. What seems exciting about them is that they have the similar passion about creating the sort of standards-compliant, accessible sites that I do (please don’t go and attempt to validate my page now and see it failing, that’ll be terribly embarrassing). Of course, this all means that I have to once more relocate myself to the other side of the Pennines, back in Yorkshire. Last time I did this I ended up in Hull, but Sheffield isn’t quite that far. I’ve been to Sheffield a number of times (the best visit was when I saw Belle & Sebastian supported by an as yet unknown Franz Ferdinand) and it seems to be a pretty decent city. Still, I admit to being a bit intimidated by it all. I’ve moved away from home before, sure. But that was university! Everyone’s in the same boat there and lets face it, for many it is a 3 year drinking binge (myself included? maybe not). This is different. I’m trying to find a house/flat share and this is pretty hard work. I visited on Wednesday and saw a few places (one of which was worse than the worse house I saw whilst a student in Hull) and I’m visiting tomorrow to check some more possibilities out, one of which is temporary. Fingers crossed ‘eh? I want a place sorted soon, because I’d like to get working and make myself part of the company, I don’t like the situation I’m in now; seemingly strung between two towns and without very much to do.

Anyway, hopefully I’ll be busy but not too busy to let you know how I’m getting on. Wish me luck!

I like Banksy. Okay, sometimes it feels like everything he does is “a pathetic cry for help” but it’s a consistently funny pathetic cry for help. His latest stunt? Replacing copies of Paris Hilton’s new album with a doctored copy. 500 copies apparently, spread across the UK. The changes are a little less than subtle but he’s left the original barcode on so they can still be purchased. The music has been replaced by a basic beat and some choice Paris Hilton ‘catchphrases’. The cd cover and inlay are all doctored and include Paris with a dogs head and some choice wording, my favourites being “Every CD you buy puts me even further out of your league” (qft!) and “Why am I famous? What have I done? What am I for?” Poor Paris. She is taking rather a bit of flak recently. I wonder why that is? Jealousy over her fortune? Her well-photoshopped good looks? Musically I’ve heard worse pop-music but maybe she just personifies all that people hate about the current state of celebrity? Hey, I guess this means Jennifer Lopez can continue unchecked now then.

Picture shown is not the Banksy job, I should warn you that his is a little NSFW. More details in the Indie and thanks to Flickr user Sharl for this wonderful set where you can see Banksy’s alterations in the flesh (as it were).