If you had access to a 3D printer and could create only one thing out of plastic, from scratch, what would you make? An implantable human ear replacement? A filter for pumping clean water in thirsty third-world nations? What about forming something fun and whimsical like, say, an acoustic guitar? Or, would you take the tunnel of least resistance, and the road of the lowest common human morality, and choose to print a plastic gun for killing people?
I appreciate good design and aesthetic challenges to the common core. One new trend I’ve noticed in credit card design from some of the bigger, more daring, banks is to eschew using raised account numbers on their credit cards. My new Chase Sapphire Preferred card is quite beautifully designed in shape and substance, but it is a little less daring than the same card that was issued only a year ago.
Continue reading → Rise of the Flat Numbers: Chase Sapphire Preferred and Discover It
When Microsoft announced the redesign and re-branding of Hotmail and Live.com to Outlook.com, I raced over to the virtual land grab to get the usernames I wanted for the new Outlook.com domain. If I’d understood the process better, I likely would have just converted my pre-existing Live.com email address to an Outlook.com email address — but that process was not clear on Day One, and so I gambled on being safer than sorrier and just started all-new accounts on Outlook.com.
What I didn’t expect in the transition from Live.com — and in comparison with my Google Apps life — is just how great Outlook.com would be in function and aesthetic! Wowser! I like the new icons and fast interface. The overall look and feel are refreshing and new — I can’t wait for the Calendar to be updated to the new design.
The biggest surprise was firing up Outlook.com on my iPhone and finding how fast and easy it was to use. Pages load really fast. Google could learn a few things about beautiful iOS design from Microsoft. You can almost read the mail screen with your eyes closed! The fonts are big and beautiful.
Facebook, bleeding money and prestige, are forging forward with plans to build a huge, sprawling, Metropolis Campus that looks like a giant warehouse that was built on a Tilt-a-Wheel and then bumped for good measure just to be jazzy. There’s no sense of privacy or sacred space. It’s all one big blob of a structural maze and a spinning internal eyesore.
Sometimes, there is no place lower to go than the depths of a tasteless, public, aesthetic parading itself on the paving stones of public discourse as an ingenious iteration of inspiration — when the idea is really nothing more than visual vomit. Today, I introduce you do the “Cloud Towers” — where Art-Meets-9/11-Terrorism-In-The-Sky in Seoul, South Korea:
If you do a lot of work on the web, having a large display can really help you get a lot of work done in a faster fashion. More screen space means more multi-tasking. More multi-tasking means you get more work done for the dollar hour than you can when restricted to a single workspace.
Even though my 24″ Apple Cinema Display died after two years — it has now been fixed by Apple under AppleCare warranty — I wasn’t completely shorn off the Apple tree. In fact, I rather loved the new “Thunderbolt” technology that was invented to give faster communication between computers and devices.
When I decided to get a new 11-inch MacBook Air with Thunderbolt technology, I knew I had to also go for the 27-inch Thunderbolt Display to round out the new experience.
Continue reading → The 27-Inch Apple Thunderbolt Display Review
Madonna — still aging and continuing to change her gender — now wants her 13-year-old daughter Lourdes — aka “Lola” — to dress us and give us fashion advice as we buy junque from their new “fashion line.”
Continue reading → Madonna Fails to Protect Her Daughter from Public Humiliation
UPDATED: December 9, 2010
After six months of usage, I cancelled our yearly paid TypeKit account this morning and removed all the fonts from all 13 blogs in the Boles Blogs Network. I did this for two reasons. The first is because there is a niggly font rendering problem for iOS 4.2 devices like iPhone and iPad with some fonts that requires you to change how you publish a headline or your name, and you need to add Custom CSS to try to make the workaround work. I have no interest in sleuthing font solutions across 13 blogs for a service we pay to use. TypeKit should not have offered inferior font sets to customers that causes this sort of hassle. The second reason for TypeKit removal is that some of the font sets we were using were adding 100kb to over 225kb to page load times. That’s just too much cruft to load for too little aesthetic gain, and adding that to the iOS font problems we’ve been haggling over the last couple of days placed the final straw on our back that irretrievably broke our interest in supporting TypeKit on our blogs network.
UPDATED: July 4, 2010
I spent the afternoon trying to figure out how to code Typekit Fonts into all 14 of my WordPress.com blogs to add some spectacle to the drama of this United Stage blog. The process isn’t simple or intuitive and since there really isn’t any step-by-step documentation that I could find to help me, I decided to help myself — and you — by constructing this Typekit walk through for the new default Twenty Ten theme. You start by going to Typekit.com and signing up for an account. This afternoon, I purchased the Portfolio option for $50.00USD a year because I have 14 blogs in need of fonting. If you have one blog, you should be able to get away using the free Trial plan — but you will have to wear a Typekit badge. You do not have to purchase the CSS upgrade on WordPress.com to get Typekit to work on your blog.
Continue reading → The Typekit Fonts Tutorial for WordPress.com
There is great power in the semiotic image. Sometimes it is simpler to grasp a complex idea with a simple vector graphic. Here’s the seminal work of the “World of 100” and as you can see in the image below, only one person in a village of 100 would have a college education.
You must be logged in to post a comment.