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 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 February 8th through February 9th:

• Blog: Thom Glick – Thom Glick is a great artist. Thom Glick came from space. Seriously. He escaped from a horrible mucky planet, where all forms of art were forbidden and everyone had to eat puppies. It was a sad place.
• jQuery plugin: Tablesorter 2.0 – tablesorter is a jQuery plugin for turning a standard HTML table with THEAD and TBODY tags into a sortable table without page refreshes. tablesorter can successfully parse and sort many types of data including linked data in a cell.
• Sorted Column Highlighting Widget for jQuery TableSorter Plugin – Since Bill Beckman switched to using client side sorting for my tables via the tablesorter.js plugin created by Christian Bach, the one thing he have missed from the server side method he was using before is the highlighting of the sorted columns. He created a nice widget for this.
• Basically, just some architecture porn. (or why building new types of buildings is a good thing) – Herzog & de Mueron won the architecture profession's highest honor, the Pritzker, in 2001; last summer their iconic "Bird's Nest" stadium was beamed into a billion homes during the Beijing Olympics. But unlike other starchitects they haven't been recycling old ideas (Frank Gehry, that's you). They just keep getting better. Witness a new museum/library/community center they just unveiled in Tenerife, Spain.
• Spaceship Yamato. – Vincent Cheung makes the Spaceship Yamato. This is fantastic. I remember this fondly from watching as a kid, and I recently just started rewatching via Netflix. Nice timing. (via Neatorama)

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

• How to Design the Perfect List – Lists are a beautiful way to display content and information in a very easy to scan, easy to read method. Lists are found on most blogs to list posts, comments, tags, or links. In this post we will be exploring the modern practices of lists as an element of web design and they will be showing you how to design better lists to add to the overall design of your site.
• Slave reunion photo from 1916 – Wow. This is a photo from 1916 of 4 former slaves. They're all over 100 years old. James Madison was president when they were born, and America was 36 years old. And here they are in a relatively "modern" photo. I'm blown away.
• Harry Eng – Master Bottle Filler – One evening Harry was in a London hotel and decided to visit the Puzzle Museum the next morning. When he and his friends had finished their bottle of wine, he took the bottle up to his room. He then filled it with a book of matches, menu, and the pack of cards as a gift for us. This is a particular favorite as he assured us that the only tools he had were a pencil and rubber bands.
• The Sexy Curls jQuery Plugin by Elliott Kember – You know that page-curl effect you get sometimes on sites? This is how to do it with jQuery. Not bad.
• Coaches view of Madison Square Garden – Rangers Coach Tom Renney describes the view form behind the bench at Madison Square Garden.
• Stainless steel teeth – John Gilpin makes himself some stainless steel teeth. Quite amazing.

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

Dan Wellman has written an excellent article, The Definitive Guide to Creating a Practical jQuery Plugin. He takes you step-by-step through the entire process.

In this article we’re going to be building our very own jQuery plugin step-by-step from scratch; jQuery makes this task exceptionally easy for us, giving us a simple method of packaging up our scripts and exposing their functionality, and encouraging the use of scalable and reusable object-oriented techniques.

Writing a jQuery plugin makes sense if you have code you reuse a great deal. You can drop code into your site and have it work right away with little or no tweaking of the code.

He takes you through the Adding Configurable Properties, building Constructor Methods, and adding to the plugin’s API.

It’s a very well written tutorial, easy to follow, easy to help you along.

Jon Hobbs-Smith has written an excellent article on 25 ways to improve your jQuery.  It’s a quite well-written list of tips and tricks.  

It’s not written for super-advanced users, nor beginners, rather intermediate users. So you won’t find entry-level tips here, nor will you find advanced explanations on why you should enclose items, or the fastest way to render something to the DOM.  It’s a series of real-life, useful, in-the-trenches-kind of tips.

My favorite tip so far is tip #23: Add a JS class to your HTML attribute.  By adding a class to your HTML attribute on the javascript load, you get a CSS declarator that is valid only if JS is turned on, which allows you a very easy way to hide things if JS is turned off.

Very slick.

The entire article is worth reading, and worth bookmarking.  Nicely done.

These are my delicious links for December 11th:

• Allan Jardine | Visual Event – A Javascript bookmarklet called Visual Event which visually shows the elements on a page that have events subscribed to them, what those events are and the function that the event would run when triggered. This is primarily intended to assist debugging, but it can also be very interesting and informative to see the subscribed events on other pages.
• Make your own Pruno – Pruno, a prison wine created from fruit, sugar and ketchup, is such a vile and despicable beast in the California state penal system that prisoners can't eat fresh fruit at lunch.

These are my delicious links for December 4th:

• Beautiful sIFR Replaced Text with a jQuery Plugin – The jQuery sIFR Plugin is an addon for jQuery that makes it easy to replace text in a web page with flash text (sIFR, Scalable Inman Flash Replacement). It gives you a function in javascript to replace text in a web page dynamically with sIFR text, using native jQuery functionality along with the jQuery Flash Plugin.

These are my delicious links for November 18th:

• prettyGallery – by Stephane Caron – A nice image gallery script written in jQuery.