From a certain point of view, to borrow a phrase from a different movie, Star Wars isn’t an attempt to escape from Vietnam, but an attempt to recontextualize it, with the United States slotted into the role of the Empire, and the Rebellion standing in for the NVA and the Viet Cong. By the time the film reached screens, this source of inspiration was so deep in the mix—buried beneath everything from Joseph Campbell to Bruno Bettelheim to The Wizard Of Oz—that it hardly counted as subtext anymore. But it’s still fundamentally a story about revolutionaries standing up for what’s right, and its Vietnam-inspired origins complicate the notion that Star Wars was ever purely an escapist enterprise. No matter how long ago and how far, far away you set a story, the real world has a way of creeping in.
Of all the many influences on George Lucas for Star Wars, Vietnam wasn’t one that came to mind before reading Keith’s piece. Yet he makes a fairly persuasive argument.
I’ve linked to many RWD articles here, but this recent piece by Eric Portis in A List Apart is much more than another well written introduction to the subject. His logic and discussion around the new sizes attribute, an otherwise often confusing topic, is masterful.
The next time you’re in a discussion about typography, for a design or other context, have this handy resource by FontShop handy. It’s a nice refresher on a lot of basic terminology, from ascenders to x-height.
Front end developer Mina Markham wrote a very nifty starter kit for new Sass projects. On some of my latest work I’ve been especially influenced by Mina’s use of a utilities folder – it’s an effective way to include self-generated functions, mixins, and other external sass libraries all in one shot.
It’s that time of year again; several critically acclaimed apps get a discount for the holidays. Many rarely get a discount, so it’s worth jumping on these sales before they end on December 26th.
It’s a extremely strong set of applications, but I’d personally recommend Tweetbot, Drafts 4, Scanner Pro, MindNode, Next, and Clear.
Another meticulously detailed Typeset In the Future post, this time about the use of Futura, Helvetica, and many other fonts in Ridley Scott’s Alien. The movie is a masterpiece of horror, sci-fi, and suspense, one of my favorite movies of all time. So it’s wonderful to see author Dave Addey geek out in such depth on small typographic cues contained all over the picture. It’s complemented with lots of freeze frames and behind the scenes knowledge.
Designer/developer/speaker Harry Roberts of CSS Wizardry isn’t generally a big extend fan:
Let me start by saying that I would generally advise never to use @extend at all. It is something of a Fool’s Gold: a feature with a lot of promise and twice as many caveats.
Compared to Harry I’m a Sass newbie, but I always found the extend call, much like nesting, mildly discomforting. This post helped me understand exactly.
From the moment I first saw the Destiny beta, from the UI to the art direction and even the main ‘feel’ of the game, I knew there was something distinctly different about its game design. So props to the design blog Betterment for laying out some of the biggest hooks Bungie’s epic first person shooter/MMO have to offer. As many reviewers have noted, even with a severe lack of content and repetitive mission nature, there’s something supremely addictive about its gameplay. To quote Betterment author Jason Amunwa:
Destiny uses multiple systems to tease our brain’s pleasure center with anticipation of a reward, combined with activating our nucleus accumbens by making the reward variable at every level. It’s essentially commandeering players’ anticipation – whether it’s getting loot, exchanging Engrams, or what-have-you – and using it as an itch to motivate just one more play.
Our feeble brains’ pleasure centers never stood a chance.
I’ve bounced between web design and development for years. As someone who has never had a formal instruction in visual design, Erik Kennedy’s primer on this Medium post isn’t a bad start for those new. I especially like his thought processes behind rule three: double your white space. Might be a bit overkill compared to what’s absolutely necessary, but it’s one of the first mistakes I see from design newbies, especially developers starting to dabble in design work.
Here is the gigantic, crucial difference between piracy and streaming. In piracy, we don’t have listening numbers: we don’t know if an album downloaded for free was listened to 100 times or 0. A download might represent a lost sale or it might represent a listener adding to an endless collection or sampling one album among dozens, as if hearing the song on the radio. We really have no idea. But with streaming, we absolutely know. The statistics are right there. And artists should be paid accordingly: maybe not $10 a fan, but definitely more than a few pennies.
There’s a cold ratio at play here: the less popular a band is, the more money they need to generate per fan to reach a break-even point. However, the more popular a band is, the more ways they have of generating money per fan — and often they can generate more money per fan anyway, with deluxe packages at shows and branding opportunities, especially if you consider corporations to be people, as the Supreme Court does. It is a fundamentally unfair marketplace that privileges the already successful, which is rarely the path to innovation — or interesting art.