A transmission from the deep south.
I think we were all thinking, ‘Man, I wish something new would happen. I wish someone would take a chance.’ And whenever I say that, I always go, ‘Why don’t we? Why don’t we be the ones to do something, to take a chance or whatever?’
— Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips. (via Frank Chimero)
Most important things happen at a table. Food, friends, discussion, ideas, work, peace talks, and war plans. It is okay to romanticize things a little bit every now and then: it gives you hope.
— Take a few minutes to read Frank Chimero’s advice to a graphic design student in its entirety. Plenty of sage advice and wit. I like the closing line: “This about sums up everything I know.”
The screen mimics the sky, not the earth. It bombards the eye with light instead of waiting to repay the gift of vision. It is not simultaneously restful and lively, like a field full of flowers, or the face of a thinking human being, or a well-made typographic page. And we read the screen the way we read the sky: in quick sweeps, guessing at the weather from the changing shapes of clouds, of like astronomers, in magnified small bits, examining details.
— Robert Bringhurst, writing in The Elements of Typographic Style, which you’ve all read, right? (via Frank Chimero)
To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.
— Leonard Bernstein, just in time for the madness that will be FullCodePress this weekend. Wish us luck. (via Meagan Fisher)
Old, but good. David Lynch on the iPhone film experience. (And from the related videos, why he turned down Return of the Jedi.)
As an industry, we need to understand that not wanting root access doesn’t make you stupid. It simply means you do not want root access. Failing to comprehend this is not only a failure of empathy, but a failure of service.
— Mike Monteiro writing about Apple’s iPad. (via John Gruber)
Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.
— Henri Cartier-Bresson. (via Claes Källarsson)
Jeffrey Zeldman writes for 24 Ways on the vast, real problem of getting embedded type to render consistently across browsers and platforms. He explains why the appearance of type in Safari looks so different — Apple appears to have implemented its own hinting engine that ignores data in embedded font files in favour of its own rendering rules — and is rather glib about the likelihood of an easy cross-browser solution:
There are ways around this ugly type ugliness, but they involve complicated scripting and sniffing — the very nightmares from which web standards and the simplicity of
@font-facewere supposed to save us. I don’t know that even mighty Typekit has figured out every needed variation yet (although, working with foundries, they probably will).
Ugly rendering by browser makers is the key reason services like Typekit and its ilk are still a tough sell for most projects. Unless your audience is overwhelmingly using Webkit, results like these are hard to avoid. The tragedy of this is that Typekit is a terrific service doing its darnedest to conquer these issues through technical smarts and by working with type makers.
Update: I’ve edited the last paragraph to better convey my thoughts.
When I arrived to pick up Ollie from Poppa’s place later that afternoon, they were both at the table, with two steaming pots of noodles in front of them. … They had compared the contents of the flavour sachets, and were conducting a taste test worthy of a 3-star sommelier.
— Ben Gracewood takes a break from tech to write about the importance of answering kids’ questions.
Why do we Tumbl? In the end, we use Tumblr not because it’s a great way to connect with our readers (though it is that), or because we believe this or something like it is a part of a new way forward for interaction between publishers and audience (though we think that too). We use Tumblr because it’s fun and while, you know, you can’t eat fun, or trade it in for fistfuls of dollars to fund serious journalism, we believe there’s a value in doing things we like simply because we like to do them, and that hopefully our fellow Tumblrs will too.
— Newsweek on why they use Tumblr. (via Meaghan O’Connell)
Written and designed by Matthew Buchanan. Colophon. Please give credit. Email
