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 June 18th through June 19th:

• Beck's Record Club. Beck covers an entire album in a day… – Beck ropes in various musician friends to record an entire album in a day. For the purposes of scrappy immediacy, nobody will rehearse or arrange anything beforehand.

  After that day of furious recording, Beck will slowly let the record out into the world via his website (as well as the websites of the other musicians involved), uploading a new song once a week. He'll kick this party off with The Velvet Underground and Nico.

• YUI 3 – The YUI JavaScript Library is going to version 3 (beta) hopefully this week. In an effort to make the library as flexible as possible, YUI 3 introduces an all new plugin architecture that allows you to add your own functionality to nodes and widgets.
• All the Small Icons You'll Ever Need – A large collection of small icons that should fit most of your design needs.

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 March 31st:

• Solving a Rubiks Cube. – My sons Rubiks Cube just got all messed up. I could get the top two layers, but not the bottom one. I cheated, and found this handy reference chart online. I totally need to learn these moves.

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

• "I Look Straight into Linus' Weasel Eyes…" – Charlie Brown, as done by Frank Miller. brilliant.
• Ski Dump Bathroom. – Now THATS a bathroom. And of course when we're talking about wacky bathrooms, we're talking about one nation, right? Right. A Japanese coffee company, Goeorgia Max Coffee, modified the bathrooms of ski areas around Japan to promote their coffee energy drinks. This is definitely a high-octane bathroom.
• edith zimmerman plays with her food. – Edith has some fantastic photos of her food sculptures. The mantis and tangerine are really good.
• Approximate Conversion from Points to Pixels – I was being lazy this morning, and needed a quick way to convert some points into the appropriate EM size. Viola'. This chart helps out immensely.
• New York Architecture Images- black and white new york – Amazing collection of images of early New York. From 1894 on, just a real solid trip down history.
• 100 Free Useful Applications for Mac, Part I | Tools – A nice list, maybe a bit over-the-top, of useful Mac Tools. Some are obvious (Quicksilver, etc,) but there are some hidden gems in there.
• Floorplans of Sit-Com Houses. – By the same guy that brought us the Trilogy Meter, we are treated with another brilliant piece of charting and infographics. This time he's laid out, painstakingly I might add, the floor plans of many sit-com houses.
• Vintage air raid defense posters – In 1938, the Japanese Red Cross worked with government authorities to create a series of posters to teach the public about the new Anti-Aircraft Defense Law, which was enacted in seeming anticipation of air strikes following the outbreak of the Japan-China War (1937-1945). Among other things, the new law required citizens to take protective measures against gas attacks and prepare for disinfection, evacuation and relief.

  These AWESOME posters are the result.

These are my delicious links for February 26th through February 27th:

• The Design Process Diagram – An excellent diagram from Todd Warfel on the Design Process. So many times clients want to JUMP ahead to the visual comps, this will help you show them how much is needed before that point.
• Tap Boards for my future Kegerator – This is slick. Chalkboard tops for your tap to pour your favorite frosty beverage. I've been wanting a kegerator, and this would sit nicely on top.
• Infragistics Quince: UX Patterns Explorer – The app is basically an organized collection of various interface patterns. Each pattern is part of a ‘problem’, and several examples are usually provided as viable solutions. Each of these problems is also accompanied by a bit of text describing the solutions and providing tips on things like accessibility.

  It uses Silverlight, and the UI is a bit over the top (LOTS of eye candy for eye candies sake.), but good info in there.

These are my delicious links for February 4th through February 5th:

• A Snake of Unusual Size – Neatorama – HOLY CRAP BATMAN! This snake, this monster measured 42 feet long, weighed about 2,500 lbs., and slithered through the rainforests 60 million years ago devouring crocodiles.
• Great retro Helvetica ad from Linotype – This is fantastic.
• Monks in Space (an Aliens3 movie that never was) – There were many iterations of the Alien 3 script. One of the more exotic ones was the Vincent Ward & John Fasano "monks in space" script, illustrated here. Looks fantastic.
• Infrastructure for Modern Web Sites – A great list of ways to address some of the pain points of building and maintaining a modern website.
  List is split this into two sections. The first he calls “below the line,” which are more system level (some things straddle the line) The second section, which he calls “above the line” are common application level components that typically depend on one or more of the components above.

These are my delicious links for February 4th:

• Blambot Comic Fonts and Lettering – Comic book lettering has some grammatical and aesthetic traditions that are quite unique. What follows is a list that every letterer eventually commits to his/her own mental reference file.

These are my delicious links for January 27th through January 28th:

• CSS Font Stacks – A compiled a list of font stacks that will both open up more font possibilities for web designers, and hopefully offer more appropriate substitutes. Defintely not the Dreamweaver defaults you see all over the place. This is a good list.
• [ws] Color Scheme Designer – This is great, easily find out your mono, complement, triad, tetrad, analogic and accented analogic color schemes.
• Fluid 960 Grid System | 16-column Grid – A good demo page showing a fluid 16 column grid, in conjuction with mooTools.
• The Milky Way Over Mauna Kea – Stunning photo. I remember as a kid being able to see the Milky Way back at my grandfathers house back in the woods. I wish the light pollution today wasn't so bad, and that this was a more common sight.

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.