Top film lists of a decade are nothing new, but the writing here by the A.V. Club staff on this compilation is great. Good choices too; there’s a lot of Coen Brothers and Tarantino near the top. (One quibble though: where’s Heat?)
A great video over at The Gameological Society that talks about the impact of the 1980s Nintendo sci-fi classic Metroid. I remember growing up with this game and feeling so bad ass after my friends and I defeated Mother Brain. Its influence on modern gaming is undeniable.
It’s The Evening Edition, just with technology instead of world news. Works for me.
We’re going to see a big change in a certain type of iOS app—the one designed for the device….In a sense, this could be a good thing—freeing up iOS from the constraints of specific screen shapes opens up developers to whatever Apple throws at them next and should also make apps simpler to port to competing platforms. But it also impacts heavily on those tightly crafted experiences that were designed just for your iPad or just for your iPhone.
With web having been down this road for a while, it will be interesting to see native apps designed in a more responsive direction.
Developer Thomas Reynolds:
If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, nobody would give a shit. They would move on, like they moved on from Myspace. They would find another instant messaging app. They would find a different calendar. They’d use email. And they’d do it overnight because they’re simply a pile of communication technologies for which we have plenty of replacements already. There’s nothing special about Facebook to miss and for a giant, wealthy company with a billion users… that’s pretty sad.
Hey Thomas, tell us how you really feel, ok?
A bit too heavy handed for my tastes, but his point about Facebook’s walled garden and its obsession for keeping you inside that garden has merit.
PJ Rey, The Society Pages:
Nostalgia for the low-tech/lo-fi/analog is really nostalgia for a time when technology could be mastered–a time when you could fix your own car or bike, a time when you pop open the back of a camera and intuitively understand how it works, a time when you knew where your food came from and how it was prepared, a time when the circuits in electronic were large enough to be visible and an average person could figure out how to repair, replace, hack, and even build them, a time when a device was yours to open and when warranties end-user agreement didn’t micro-manage how used your own property. In short, the appeal of low-tech is it affirms our sense of independence and individuality.
I opened this article expecting a superficial screed against Williamsburg, but this is far deeper territory.
Nathan Ryan, writing for The Industry:
If you’re working from the start date on an open-ended project, it’s much easier for the client to dictate terms which almost always means you end up doing more work than you signed up for when the project started.
Focusing you and your client on an agreed-upon ship date for their project means you can more clearly dictate what can and cannot happen in that timeframe because you’re working against the clock and you can only get so much quality work done in any given amount of time.
I can’t say I fully embrace Nathan’s stance; something about basing things off a hard deadline (which often changes) does feel very “waterfall methodology” to me. Yet he makes some reasonable points, especially the one quoted above.
I’ve had a soft spot for actor Kyle MacLachlan ever since watching him as Jeffrey Beaumont in Blue Velvet. The guy has had a pretty varied career as well: six years of Sex In the City and lots of smaller, quirkier roles spanning both TV and film. So naturally he’s a pretty stellar fit for The A.V. Club‘s regular Random Roles interview feature.
Love his commentary on watching Showgirls (Kyle had a starring role) for the first time:
It was about to première, I hadn’t seen it yet, and I wanted to. So I went to see it and… I was absolutely gobsmacked. I said, “This is horrible. Horrible!” And it’s a very slow, sinking feeling when you’re watching the movie, and the first scene comes out, and you’re like, “Oh, that’s a really bad scene.” But you say, “Well, that’s okay, the next one’ll be better.” And you somehow try to convince yourself that it’s going to get better… and it just gets worse. And I was like, “Wow. That was crazy.” I mean, I really didn’t see that coming.
Jason is one of the designers I respect most from both his writings and tweets, and this extended interview helps illustrate why. I especially liked his advice to designers starting out:
Creativity is like a muscle and you need to exercise it constantly. You need to draw; you need to sketch; you need to constantly be recording and taking in the world around you. A lot of writers say they need to write in order to understand how they think; I believe designers need to draw to understand how they think. Keeping a sketchbook is something that every designer I know takes for granted. Because it’s something they can do, it’s something they don’t do.
From Font Bureau:
The digital version of Helvetica that everyone knows and uses today is quite different from the typeface’s pre-digital design from 1957. Originally released as Neue Haas Grotesk, many of the features that made it a Modernist favorite have been lost in translation over the years from one typesetting technology to the next.
Type designer Christian Schwartz has newly restored the original Neue Haas Grotesk in digital form – bringing back features like optical size variations, properly corrected obliques, alternate glyphs, refined spacing, and more.
Really interesting work here. Be sure to check out the features page to see the subtle (yet significant) differences between Neue and the default Helvetica.