Simian Design

These are my delicious links for June 24th through June 26th:

• Touched by an Angel – The story of how the Farah Fawcett poster came to be.

  "…t may be the most famous pinup poster of all time. Farrah Fawcett's smile is a row of impossibly white teeth so perfectly aligned they look machine-made, her hair a windblown blond tangle that swallows her slender hand.
  Then there is her nipple: a salacious nub straining against the nylon of her red one-piece. Its appearance marked the advent of "nippling." Whenever a model applies ice to her breast before a photo shoot, she's paying homage to Farrah….."

• The Bug, the Worm and the Death Star – As professionals, we prefer logo, logotype, mark, symbol, wordmark, icon, visual identity or signature. With this many choices it is no wonder others have settled on the irreverent bug. Incidentally, a long-time friend in Mumbai told me of some of the general names for logo in India include pintu (pint sized), chintu (tiny), dabboo (fat) and kaka (small one). (But depending on the specific region, language and even community in India, kaka also can mean poo-poo, as elsewhere. I guess context is everything, when calling a logo kaka in India.)

  But whether we designed it, manage it, or just live with it, having a name for the logo appears to fulfill some human need. Some companies provide a formal name, such as The Monogram (GE). Here are a few logos and their officially sanctioned names:

• How many colors? Wrong. – Richard Wiseman comes one of the best color optical illusions I have ever seen.
• Fun with a spray-gun, a field and perspective. – Nice project, doing POV Perspective on a field, the photos are quite nice.
• Volcano from Space; or how I would kill a man to stay in the ISS for a bit. – A chance recording by astronauts on the International Space Station has captured the moment a volcano explosively erupted, sending massive shockwaves through the atmosphere.
• 10 Ways to Instantly Increase Your jQuery Performance – Nettuts+ –

These are my delicious links for May 5th:

• Making a Booger Ball. – My son is quite fascinated by the idea of Booger Balls. In fact, he want's to grow up to be a scientist to study these strange phenomenons. I can now make him one.

These are my delicious links for April 28th through April 30th:

• Ferris Bueller is the "Fight Club" theory – This just blew my mind. I never thought of the movie in this way, but it makes it SO much more depressing.
• Traffic – Rush hour in Los Angeles is synonymous with gridlock, but the sheer enormity of the situation can be tough to grasp. Fortunately, there is the architecture photographer Benny Chan, whose Traffic! series depicts the scale of overcrowded lanes of rush hour traffic from high overhead.
• How To Be A Successful Evil Overlord – #12: One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.

  #56: My Legion of Terror will be trained in basic marksmanship. Any who cannot learn to hit a man-sized target at 10 meters will be used for target practice.

  #85: I will not use any plan in which the final step is horribly complicated, e.g. "Align the 12 stones of power on the sacred altar then activate the medallion at the moment of total eclipse." Instead it will be more alone the lines of "Push the button."

• This girl REALLY wants to be a horse. Or a pony. Or something weird. But the legs are kinda cool. – Kim Graham has made these Digigrade leg extensions. They are made of steel and add 14 inches of height to the wearer. But these are not ordinary stilts; they give a person the uncanny and graceful appearance of an animal. It is really cool! The movement of the legs is genuinely graceful and naturalistic. It is a great deal of fun being so much taller.
• FullCalendar – Full-sized Calendar jQuery Plugin – FullCalendar is a jQuery plugin that provides a full-sized, drag & drop calendar like the one below. It uses AJAX to fetch events on-the-fly for each month and is easily configured to use your own feed format (an extension is provided for Google Calendar). It is visually customizable and exposes hooks for user-triggered events (like clicking or dragging an event).

These are my delicious links for April 20th:

• Webphemera: Franklin: The Lost State of America – What led to the creation of the State of Franklin and why isn’t around today? Even more to the point, why hasn’t anyone ever made a movie out of this strange but remarkable story? My parents would live right near the State of Franklin if it were around today.
• Amateur Snapper | 10 Top Photography Composition Rules – The only rule in photography is that there are no rules. However, there are many composition guidelines which can be applied in almost any situation, to enhance the impact of a scene. Below are ten of the most popular and most widely respected composition 'rules'.

These are my delicious links for February 19th through February 20th:

• Why is my private folder visible in / ? – Mac Forums – I had this problem turn up the other day. Rather annoying, but a simple Terminal command will take care of it. "sudo chflags hidden /private" (the /private is the folder you want hidden).
• If you watch it backwards. – If you watch the Brady Bunch backwards, you find out they killed Oliver, and the grief over his "disappearance" caused the family to split with the mom taking the girls and the dad taking the boys.
• Cool Tools: NeoCube – A 6×6x6 cube of 216 small neodymium-iron-boron magnetic spheres which can be arranged into an amazing assortment of geometrical and non-geometrical shapes. You can create various polyhedra, even Buckyballs, and all kinds of familiar shapes, too. It's basically a 3D tangram on steroids.
• Tiny Art Director – Bill has been doing art based on the direction of his little girl, who then critiques the hell out of it. It's immensely hilarious, and well worth spending some time browsing his art.

These are my delicious links for February 7th:

• Room Sized Camera Obscura – This post will explain how to easily make a room sized camera obscura by placing a lens on a window and having the outside view projected onto the opposite wal

These are my delicious links for January 13th through January 14th:

• Movie Poster Remakes. – Olly has decided to create a series of movie posters reinterperated in a kinda minimalistic post modern German-ism style. Six posters (The Dark Knight, Die Hard, Deer Hunter, Rain Man, The Great Dictator, and American History X) are listed here. The Deer Hunter and Die Hard are probably the best in my opinion.
• Fancy Aquarium setups. – Not so much fancy in terms of glass shape, but fancy in terms of what's inside. Brilliant lighting and growth make for stunning underwater landscapes.
• Select Cuts Off Options In IE (Fix) – If you set a static width on the <select> element, any <option> elements that are wider get cut of in IE 7 and below. There is no good CSS solution for this that I can come up with or find. It has been tackled with JavaScript a number of ways.
• iPhone Wallpaper. – Extraverage has a nice collection of iPhone wallpapers. Worth checking out.
• Facebox 1.2 – Facebox is a jQuery-based, Facebook-style lightbox which can display images, divs, or entire remote pages. It's simple to use and easy on the eyes. You'll need a loading image, close label, four corners, and solid border images in addition to the javascript and css files

These are my delicious links for January 11th through January 12th:

• 40 Amazing 3D Fractals Using Apophysis | Webdesigner Depot – Wow. Apophysis. It’s a free Windows program for designing and rendering fractal flames. You can download the software for free at SourceForge. You can create some amazing fractals with it.
• Sparkleballs. – They're odd, whimsical, and look like they're great fun to make and have around. I think I'm going to start collecting up the material and make one with the kids.
• Movie Trivia: The Princess Bride – The Princess Bride, a classic movie. Here is some trivia about this fantastic film. I like the one about Rob Reiner running into Jon Gotti's henchmen myself.

These are my delicious links for January 7th through January 8th:

• Book Cover Archive – For the appreciation and categorization of excellence in book cover design
• Worlds undersea cables. – Nice chart showing how the world's wired up.
• 10 Killer WordPress Hacks – Nice collection of hacks and examples for WordPress.
• Lego Star Wars. – brickplumber's photostream is a fantastic collection of lego Star Wars figures and creations. Fun fun fun.
• Andy Griffith theme/Beyonce mashup – This is so incredibly captivating, just brought a wide smile to my face. Party Ben's Single Ladies (In Mayberry) (Beyoncé vs. "The Andy Griffith Show" Theme) is just the thing to start your day with.
• 100 (Really) Beautiful iPhone Wallpapers | Graphics | Smashing Magazine – Great collection of images to spruce up your iPhone.
• Air Force Releases 'Counter-Blog' Marching Orders – Bloggers: If you suddenly find Air Force officers leaving barbed comments after one of your posts, don't be surprised. They're just following the service's new "counter-blogging" flow chart. In a twelve-point plan, put together by the emerging technology division of the Air Force's public affairs arm, airmen are given guidance on how to handle "trolls," "ragers" — and even well-informed online writers, too. It's all part of an Air Force push to "counter the people out there in the blogosphere who have negative opinions about the U.S. government and the Air Force," Captain David Faggard says.
• Vertoramas – Ralph Cooksey-Talbott is a landscape photographer who studied under Ansel Adams in Yosemite in the 1970's. Cooksey is currently doing vertical panoramic photography that is reminiscent in composition to monumental Asian landscape ink-on-silk paintings. He calls them Vertoramas and I think they are exceptionally beautiful. Besides selling prints, Cooksey provides many of his images as free desktop pictures.

These are my delicious links for January 5th through January 6th:

• Build a box with a hidden compartment. – This box has an inlaid wood exterior with a custom mermaid design, padded satin lining, and secret compartment in the bottom that is held closed magnetically and only opens if you know how to do it. I looked at a lot of historical furniture pieces for inspiration – Jefferson boxes, letter boxes, captain's desks and spice cabinets were all often built with very clever hidden compartments. The mechanism I used isn't based on anything historical, but it works well and isn't noticeable if you don't know to look for it.
• TiltShiftMaker – Create your tilt-shift picture – Easily transform your existing digital camera photos into tilt-shift miniatures using tiltshiftmaker.com.
• Top 36 Cool Backgrounds and Patterns Resources for all Designers – Searching for that perfect background for your design can be pretty difficult, from these resources you can browse through 1000s upon 1000s of backgrounds and patterns. Hopefully this will make your search that little bit easier, mind you with this number of resources it may make it harder.
• Top 50 movie special effects shots – Den of Geek – This is not a list of 'iconic' SFX shots, such as the opening shot in Star Wars or the final shot in Back To The Future, etc. There are many fantastic SFX shots in cinema history that are artistically 'awesome' without qualifying here. For the purposes of this list, a shot has to be either a) exceptionally convincing, b) ground-breaking or c) an exemplary execution of an oft-used technique. Only one shot is allowed per film.
• Stonehenge beneath the waters of Lake Michigan – Mark Holley, a professor of underwater archaeology at Northwestern Michigan University, discovered a series of stones – some of them arranged in a circle and one of which seemed to show carvings of a mastodon – 40-feet beneath the surface waters of Lake Michigan.
  If verified, the carvings could be as much as 10,000 years old – coincident with the post-Ice Age presence of both humans and mastodons in the upper midwest.
• 10 Promising Free Web Analytics Tools – Six Revisions – Web analytics is the process of gathering and analyzing your web content’s data in order to glean meaningful information about how your site is being utilized by your users. There are plenty of Web analytics applications out there, and you probably already know the big guns such as Google Analytics, Crazy Egg, and remote-site services such as Alexa and Compete.

  We go off the trodden path and explore a few lesser-known Web analytics options. In this article, you’ll find 10 excellent and free tools and applications to help you gather and analyze data about your web content.