Nice walk through a series of bite sized tutorials, by designer Kevin Hon Chi Hang. I still find myself mostly wedded to Photoshop comps for my development workflow, but I’d like to learn more about Sketch for side projects; this looks like a good place to start.
It’s a year old, but Jason Grigsby’s post on recommended guidelines still (remarkably) holds up very well with regard to best practices and responsive imagery. The most important takeaway:
The one thing we can be certain about is that we’re going to need to replace what we implement now when standards catch up with responsive images.
So whatever you build, make sure it is flexible and can be changed easily when the ultimate solution for responsive images becomes apparent.
When I’m working at my Mac it’s easy to reference my iCloud tabs from my iOS devices when I’m in Safari. But elsewhere it’s a no go. This little extension by Kevin Marchand for the Alfred keyboard launcher makes the tabs much more accessible: I type ‘tabs’ into Alfred and immediately can open a tab with an extra key press. Very useful.
Film awards season is well behind us, but this Vanity Fair convincingly argues why the Oscars, and to a lesser extent most acting awards, tend to favor the relatable over the cool and unreadable.
A lot of design and development insights in this Gigaom post by Janko Roettgers. Fascinating to see the Netflix team debate image weight so heavily:
However, the team ran into a significant issue when it began to build out the final UI for consumers in the third quarter of 2013, just months before it was scheduled to launch. It discovered that lower-end Blu-ray players and streaming boxes couldn’t handle WebP decoding on the fly, or at least not as smoothly as Netflix would like them to. That’s why the team decided to still serve JPEGs to cheap consumer electronics devices by default, but send WebP images to game consoles and other more powerful machines…
…The goal was to find that sweet spot where images look great but still load quickly, and transitions are smooth — something Netflix internally calls a “recipe” for image encoding. It was a time of constant fine-tuning, a time when even something as minuscule as a 150ms delay during an image transition warranted further tweaks. “You will feel that,” insisted McCarthy.
Chasing down page weight and experimenting with multiple platforms? There’s a lot in common here with web development workflows.
The Verge’s Nilay Patel writes a compelling editorial on why the internet needs stronger government oversight in the lack of virtually zero meaningful competition among internet providers. Essential tech reading.
The Last of Us was an amazing game that really pushed the adventure genre forward. So it bummed me out after finishing it that I didn’t buy the collector’s edition that contained this 85 minute making of documentary. Fortunately for all of us it’s available now for free streaming on Amazon.
There’s a few moments that feel a bit too effusive (it’s clearly an “authorized” doc) but largely it’s excellent, an excellent watch for almost anyone who likes narrative-driven gaming. There’s a lot of interviews with the cast, developers, sound engineers, raw footage from the mo-cap studio and much more.
This typographic blog post has already been passed around tech and design circles, but it’s absolutely worth a look if you haven’t seen it. The subject matter is 2009’s Moon and it’s cool to see a lot of futuristic fonts in discussion. You’ll probably learn something about Eurostyle; I had no idea there were variants (like Microstyle) that deviated slightly from the original typeface.
Six minutes of Criterion Collection staff making classic films gorgeous? Sold. Keep your eye on the whole Gizmodo video collection on Vimeo while you’re at it; it’s uniformly smart content.
Major props to Giant Bomb’s Jeff Gerstmann for keeping the hype meter in check and not giving a final review of an entirely online-only game yet. And if there’s any commentary that stands out about one of the most anticipated games of this year, it’s this:
Titanfall doesn’t have time for that nonsense; it’s way too focused on being a great multiplayer shooter for people who already enjoy them. That leads to an interesting conundrum and a package that manages to be laser-focused on a specific type of gameplay, which can make it also feel a little too small. It all comes down to how much you already enjoy these games and how badly you want something that updates the Call of Duty formula in some new, exciting ways.
That’s a great summary. A significant evolution of the traditional first person shooter genre but it’s not necessarily going to convert the unconverted.