Designer and Paravel founder Trent Walton on the strength of small teams with a skill set balanced among planning, design and development:
When various skill sets are combined in this way, people learn from each other. Rather than creating to-do lists filled with nudges and site tweaks for developers, designers could learn CSS and edit designs in the browser alongside more intensive development. Developers could hone their design sensibilities and contribute by making enhancements such as gestures, geolocation, and performance a part of the design process.
Trent’s right. The faster we mix and integrate our teams, the less “siloed” work and more “T shaped” contributors, the stronger our web work becomes.
It’s a new season of Mad Men which means a new set of Tom and Lorenzo posts on the series’ costume design and fashion choices. If you don’t believe costume design is a critical cinematic influence, read these posts, you’ll be a believer. I especially liked a reference to Sally’s first appearance on season six:
It’s notable how much Sally stands apart. Betty and Mama Francis are tied together; Betty and Sandy are tied together; but Sally, in her brilliant blue dress and simple hair (the simplest female hair in the scene, if not the entire show, signaling the adoption of more relaxed hairstyles for young girls in the post-hippy period), she’s a bolt of sarcasm cutting the room in half.
A lot of tech companies, especially smaller ones, can struggle with an effective and organized deploy plan. Beanstalk helps solve that gap, adding some slick version control and collaboration tools in the mix. Admittedly, until I heard a shout out from Chris Coyier of CSS Tricks, I hadn’t heard of the resource, but browsing over their site I was impressed by the feature set (the side by side HTML/image preview is brilliant) and reasonable pricing.
He [Carruth] is obsessive, won’t deny that. For Primer he taught himself everything, from editing to operating a camera to acting to writing music. It took a while. The movie almost never got made because of it, because of his tendency to go down wormholes for weeks and months and years at a time. “I don’t typically have a social life, I don’t have a family, and I will stay up all night, every night, for days on end, to solve something that I think is solvable,” he says. “And it’s very frustrating sometimes, because I know that I’m like that, and it’s not always a positive result.”
‘Visionary’ and ‘auteur’ are words overused when it comes to describing filmmakers. But Carruth is unquestionably both. I revisited Primer last weekend for a second time, and it’s just as cerebral and deep as I remembered from my first viewing years ago.
There’s been a trend in recent years where luxury fashion companies hire big name film directors and stars for a TV spot or short video. I’ve found most to be pretty lack luster for the exception of David Lynch’s work with Calvin Klein and Gucci; even on blatantly commercial endeavors Lynch’s vision shines through. But I had fun with this series of spots for Prada by famed indie director Wes Anderson and his frequent collaborator Roman Coppola. It’s no Rushmore, but it was cool seeing Anderson’s usual tropes of centered framing and whip pans in this context.
Developer Jonathan Christopher on the big announcement that Chrome is splitting away from Webkit into its own engine, Blink:
I can’t help but be super psyched about this announcement. While a big, short-sighted part of me finds the whole Google aspect unsettling, I think I stand behind what positive byproducts of these changes. We can’t deny Apple’s direct influence on the WebKit project, and we can’t look past the changes that will happen with that project once the Google contributions cease. We need to keep in mind though that it might be inspirational for both projects which in turn benefits the world at large.
I generally share Christopher’s enthusiasm. My first reaction was largely negative: will we to have to run different testing and development patterns for Safari and Chrome? But of the “big four” tech companies (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google), Google is pushing our perception of the web forward the most. I’m excited to see what they’ll do with Blink and Chrome moving forward.
Classic film buff Jordan Krug collects and scans contact sheets from a bunch of legendary films, posting the results on his blog. The majority are rare and unpublished. Just scanning the past few week, there’s work here from Chinatown, Rocky and Dirty Harry. Really cool stuff.
I’ve got a lot of respect for web designer Chris Coyier. His Css Tricks is pretty much the definitive resource I head to when looking up CSS techniques. That’s when, via a pretty random Google search, I came upon this talk he gave late last year. Really great advice here, from development setup to deployment strategy. Chris is a entertaining speaker as well; you won’t get bored.
Nice photo work profiling the many coders, testers, artists and more that worked behind the scenes at the just closed LucasArts. Admittedly the gaming studio had little output in the last six years or so. Yet during the mid 90s, it was a unstoppable force for adventure gaming: the Monkey Island series, Grim Fandango, Sam & Max and much more. LucasArts and Sierra were the gaming giants that powered the majority of my gaming in the late 80s and early 90s; a bit sad to see them shutter like this.
A common problem we have as web developers is sharing a web site or app we’re running off localhost to others. Yes, you can always have a quick deployment strategy, but Localtunnel provides something a bit slicker and easier. Just install the Ruby gem, run a command and you’ve got a subdomain on localtunnel.com to share to your coworkers and clients. Granted, it’s no substitute for a full deployment environment, especially in the context of formalized QA testing, but especially for quick shares and checkins with coworkers, it’s a nice idea.