I’m currently a bit more developer than designer in my day job so the many virtues of Dribbble don’t apply to me as much. But the many free resources published there – especially for in house UI design, sketching, and brainstorming, really come in handy. That’s what makes PSDDD so useful. A bunch of free resources available for download, separated out by functionality.
Developer Tyson Matanich breaks down how the newly proposed picture element was integrated into Microsoft’s new redesign. Turns out they rolled with a forked version of Scott Jehl’s picturefill JavaScript plugin. Links to it and the original are available on the post.
Kill Screen Daily‘s Jamin Warren:
Long games have been presented as a moral imperative on the part of game makers. A game’s worth is determined by cost/hour calculations — a 60 hour game is a better “value” because it offers more enjoyment than a three-hour movie at a $15 movie ticket. This assessment not only reduces an art form to the cold metrics of cash (Is MoMA a better value than the New Museum because it has more paintings?) but it makes wicked use of what economists call “default bias.”
I see where Jamin’s coming from; as I’ve gotten older my tolerance for 30 plus hour games has gotten shorter. I just don’t have the time.
Brian Phillips writing for Grantland:
The real story of Star Wars is the redemption of Darth Vader, while Captain Renault’s redemption in Casablanca is just a by-the-way bonus. But the resemblances are intriguing. Why do they exist? I don’t think the answer is that George Lucas deliberately copied Casablanca; I think it’s that Star Wars and Casablanca are both made out of a million spare parts from other and older stories, and some of the action-romance archetypes that George Lucas drew upon in Star Wars had also been drawn upon 35 years earlier by the committee of accidental geniuses that made Casablanca.
I normally wouldn’t have seen a connection between these two films in a million years, but Brian’s piece makes a compelling, albeit indirect, arguement.
Ever have a conference call with a coworker living far away? Planning a trip to get a sense of jet lag? That requires time zone math. There’s a million native app solutions (e.g. Apple’s dashboard clocks) but I’ve disappointed with what’s offered on the web, until I stumbled on Every Time Zone. It’s a simple one page design with a slider to quickly calculate the time zone around the world.
Wired‘s Chris Kohler:
The dual message couldn’t more clear: Consoles are bigger than ever, and they need to change immediately, or die.
“Consoles, in terms of the way that they’ve been operating and failing to evolve, have to change,” says Mark Kern, head of the game developer Red 5 Studios. “The console model is hamstrung by the whole box-model mentality, the idea that you pay $60 for a game and you go play.”
Regardless of the outcome, holiday 2013 is going to be a fascinating time. With Microsoft and Sony very likely unveiling their next generation hardware, how will they sell in the face of heavy mobile competition? Will the distribution model be radically different?
Designer Chris Armstrong writing for A List Apart:
When we construct a grid, we’re creating layout boundaries: known relationships and constraints that define an environment wherein an appropriate solution can occur. But when we construct an infinite grid, we’re not just setting the boundaries for a layout, but a layout system, with too many variables for us to nail everything down. If we define the important relationships, the blanks will fill in themselves.
Really interesting read, and something that I heard several times in the UI17 conference I attended last week. In short, don’t design break points and your site’s responsiveness based on current mobile constraints, instead design based on site content.
There’s many Tumblr blogs out there devoted to film, but this one really stood out: Intertitles focuses on screen caps of movie titles. When you start staring through a bunch of posts in a row the importance of typography and negative space during a movie’s title sequence becomes very clear.
Jason gives a nice talk here regarding how and when to say ‘no’ to clients. The content is simplistic but given through the lens of the speaker’s diverse experiences it says a lot.
Famed game designer Peter Molyneux speaking at a worldwide game jam inspired by a Twitter lookalike:
“Personally, I’m just a bit bored,” he said. “Bored of all the same pap that’s been popped out year after year after year. What we need is innovation, and we need to come together and do crazy things, whether they be radioactive babies or blind men walking into lampposts—I don’t care what it is. That’s what the world wants from us.” It was a debatable assertion, but Molyneux powered through it. “Now let’s go and do it!” he concluded, and the room erupted in applause.
Molyneux is one of those idiosyncratic game geniuses that I don’t know if he’ll ever fully get his groove personally. Yet Wired paints a great picture here.