Five great shots from Pulp Fiction in honor of its 20th anniversary →
We’re technically two months past the exact anniversary, but it’s worth a look back at a few images from what remains a groundbreaking, highly influential film.
We’re technically two months past the exact anniversary, but it’s worth a look back at a few images from what remains a groundbreaking, highly influential film.
Craig Mod:
When we explore new ground (or re-explore old ground, forgotten ground) in new mediums, we often find it necessary to swing the design and interaction pendulum to the baroque side of the scale. We do this to see what “too much” feels like in order to understand the edges of “enough.” We saw this happen with iPad “magazines.” We saw this happen with “Snow Fall.” “Snow Fall” was less about what felt natural in a web browser or what was best for the story, and more about what was maximally possible in a web browser. The experiment just happened to be attached to an article.
Great storytelling is not about maximizing technical possibility.
Spot on.
Kotaku’s Kirk Hamilton:
Six months in, the Xbox One still raises as many questions as it answers. What is Microsoft’s vision for this thing? Is it about the cloud, or online gaming, or is it about Kinect? Is it for watching TV, or as the company’s more recent messaging seems to suggest, is it now all about gamers and games?
It’s only natural that some unanswered questions remain, of course—no game console achieves its every goal in the first six months. All the same, Microsoft has yet to put forth a coherent vision for the Xbox One, nor have they clearly articulated why it’s worth spending hundreds of dollars to own one.
As I wrote about back in 2013 before the Xbox One and PS4 were released, vision was the biggest concern I had about Microsoft’s offering. This piece was written slightly before E3, where Microsoft standing by keeping its focus squarely on games. But many questions remain unanswered.
Designer Gregoriy Korgan:
The fate of many startups depends almost entirely on one conversion point: When a visitor becomes a user.
All too often, this pivotal role falls on the shoulders of a pitifully generic “sign up” button that’s lucky to get even a minute of consideration during development.
If you take a moment to consider the wording of your signup button, you can drastically increase how many of your visitors turn into users.
One of those “why didn’t of this months ago” moments reading Gregoriy’s post. It may be interesting to experiment more with in my day job.
Leave it to Chris Coyier from CSS Tricks to try and figure out, with code examples and video, some responsive imagery basics. Pay extra attention to the strong explanation of the sizes attribute, integral to srcset-based responsive images.
Designer Brent Jackson succinctly goes through the weaknesses of the hamburger menu; can’t say I completely agree with this more recent backlash against this now ubiquitous navigational choice, but Brent presents a strong argument.
Lucy O’ Brien for IGN:
Ultimately, it was Burton’s faithfulness to the spirit of the comic book material that proved to be ’89 Batman’s most endearing legacy. While it didn’t immediately lift comic book movies to the lofty position they enjoy today – there were a couple of devastating fumbles before Bryan Singer caught the ball with X-Men in 2000 and ran with it – Burton was the first to prove that digging into pre-existing comic book properties in earnest could prove incredibly fruitful.
It’s an influence that can be felt today more than ever.
One of these features that snuck out months ago that I had no idea that existed. As developer Jon Hollin explains, with a simple change in the viewport meta tag you’re able to auto hide the top and bottom nav bars as the page loads.
More on Michael Bay and Transformers 4, this time from the great Film Crit Hulk (and for those new to his writing, the all caps isn’t a mistake, it’s an editorial choice on Hulk’s part):
EVERY TIME HULK SEES A MICHAEL BAY MOVIE HULK IS REMINDED THAT HE DOES THESE KINDS OF THINGS. WHICH, PERHAPS IN A SAD WAY, CONSTANTLY REMINDS HULK THAT HE IS ONE OF THE MOST WEIRDLY FASCINATING FILMMAKERS ON THE PLANET. PLEASE DON’T MISTAKE THAT FOR A STATEMENT IMPLYING HIS FILMS ARE WORTH SEEING OR ARE ACTIVELY FASCINATING TO WATCH. NO, THEY ARE OVERLONG, BORING SLOGFESTS THAT SPEW SO MUCH HATEFUL, SEXIST, HOMOPHOBIC AND RACIST GARBAGE ALL UNDER THE PRETENSE OF THAT WINKING “THIS IS THE WAY IT SHOULD BE” BRAND OF HUMOR THAT MAKES YOU WANT TO GO OUT INTO THE LOBBY AND RECONCILE YOUR HUMANITY FOR A WHILE.
Slashfilm’s David Chen:
If there is such a thing as cinema as Soderbergh describes it, then Age of Extinction is a perfect distillation of anti-cinema. It posits that films no longer need a coherent plot, character development, or action scenes that have tension and stakes in order to be successful. That economic considerations no longer need to be hidden or subtle — they can be brazen and attention-grabbing. That excess in every respect (runtime, municipal destruction, manchild behavior) is not a vice, but a virtue.