Archive: Miscellany

What the Apple Watch means for the age of notifications

Steven Levy on how technology will eventually save us from notification overkill:

So what’s the solution? We need a great artificial intelligence effort to comb through our information, assess the urgency and relevance, and use a deep knowledge of who we are and what we think is important to deliver the right notifications at the right time. As time goes on, we will trust such a system to effectively filter all our information and dole it out just as needed.

Flexbox adventures

Excellent explanation of how the Flexbox CSS operator determines layout. I especially enjoy how the author breaks down the math calculations and proportion.

Typography cheatsheet

Excellent single source from Typewolf on how and where to add various special typographic characters. There’s grammar tips, examples to copy and paste, keyboard shortcuts, and HTML entities for the web.

How Wes Anderson’s cinematographer shot 9 scenes

Doesn’t get much better than Nico + slow motion as Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) gets off the bus in The Royal Tenenbaums.

We are not colonists

Gita Jackson, writing for Boing Boing:

Where would avant-garde cinema be without Maya Deren, whose authorship of her own work was challenged—as women’s authorship is almost always challenged? If the current Fine Arts climate can support both Kara Walker and Ryder Ripps, I am sure gaming can handle both Merrit Kopas’s Hugpunx and EA’s Battlefield: Hardline. The same corporations that sell us the idea of gamers as an imagined nation are experiencing a wave of diminishing returns on their franchises. What we see in gaming right now is not colonialism, but evolution: the changes that need to take place for the art form to survive and thrive.

Sass guidelines

I’m not 100% onboard with everything developer Hugo Giraudel recommends in this long set of recommendations for writing Sass. Yet there’s an incredible amount of solid advice here, especially the bits on numbers, measurement calculations, and selector nesting.

Our favorite typefaces of 2014

For the record, I’ve dabbled with Skolar Sans on a side project and use Nitti Grotesk all the time within Writer Pro. Both are outstanding choices.

Designing the hiring process

Michael Owens writes over at Medium about common patterns shared around hiring solid designers. The post gives a lot of feedback (from several different perspectives, many that are contradictory) on some of the most common evaluation methods, including design exercises, interview panels, and portfolio reviews.

Action figure

Wonderful Grantland piece profiling Rueben Langdon, one of the film and gaming industry’s premier motion-capture stuntmen:

For the next 12 hours or so, Langdon, Toney, and Austin leap, tumble, and fall. Between takes, they discuss their beats: Who should punch where, how they should punch, how long a combo is too long a combo, and other sundries of performed battle. Occasionally, they shuffle to the sideline and pull out some action figures, modeling their moves the way 10-year-old boys might when daydreaming in their parents’ basement, before cartwheeling back into the volume like the real thing.

What emerges is the grace of chamber music, of movements that, when they fall, seem to fall exactly as they should, telegraphed by some higher balance and sense of symmetry.

Codes, chaos, and the world of Heat

The Dissolve’s Scott Tobias writes on key themes in Michael Mann’s crime epic:

And that’s the other side of Heat’s symmetrical relationships: There’s Cop and Crook, Pacino and De Niro, Order and Chaos. We can admire Neil’s skill, as Mann does, while understanding that the criminal life he’s trying to lead—disciplined, elegant, orchestrated with multiple exits and down-to-the-second timing—is a folly from the start. It’s folly to bring an untested, unstable con on the armed-truck job. It’s a folly to steal bonds from a sleazy hedge-fund manager (William Fichtner) and expect him to buy them back without consequence. It’s folly to open up his home and heart to a woman he’ll have to leave in 30 seconds if he feels the heat around the corner. And it’s folly to seek revenge when self-preservation is the most rational option. “A man got to have a code,” Omar says in The Wire, but having a code, as Neil does, and actually abiding by it are two different things. Sometimes, the plan goes out the window.