design

New Look!

This site has a new look! I had some rare free time last Sunday morning so I changed the colors and made up a new header image. I haven't been posting much here beyond my delicious bookmarks, but I'm hoping this new look will help motivate me to post more.

Here's roughly how it worked. I started with the Sea of Japan palette at Color Lovers:

Sea of Japan palette

Then I flipped through a couple design books and stock art for inspiration. Here are a few that were sources for the new look:

Ibys Logo
IBYS Logo, c. 1929, Euro Deco

Sociedad Anonima Mariano Vila Letterhead
Sociedad Anonima Mariano Vila letterhead, 1933, Euro Deco

Lighthouse Matchbox
Indian Matchbox, Matchbox Labels

I also stumbled on an antique compass image I liked in a Google Image search. Then I threw all of these into a blender, added Futura, and pow—new header. So thanks to those sites, books, and designers for inspiration. I'm not sure how this will get me blogging again but at least this is a non-automated post.
  • Anil collects more thoughts on the coming storm of apps vs. open web. "This, for me, is a social issue, a cultural issue, and a political issue, not just a technological issue. Perhaps we need to speak of it that way more often, to make the stakes clear."
  • "...it's time for developers to take a stand. If you don't want a repeat of the PC era, place your bets now on open systems. Don't wait till it's too late." Tim O'Reilly on the coming platform storm. [via anil]
  • "A Collection of iPhone Home Screens." I found this a while back but couldn't remember the name or how to get back to it because the keywords are saturated. My Google-fu was hot today, and I'm bookmarking for future reference.
  • This Java class is full of helpful functions for escaping and unescaping strings, and it can be used within ColdFusion (if you're into that).
  • "Cultivating a Late 19th-Century Style at Home." This seems to be an IRL manifestation of that thing.
  • Aha! This answers a question I didn't even know I had, but I've been unconsciously wondering. I thought this "look" came from the image-collecting Tumblr crowd. But apparently it's a thing IRL.
  • "The good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t work." Derek on SEO. In summary, hire a good designer not a self-proclaimed Search Engine Optimizer and design for humans not algorithms. Couldn't agree more.
  • "...the rev mechanism is very powerful and very tricky, because while it doesn’t change the semantics of a link relation, it does change the relationships between the parties, with many consequences that aren’t obvious." Good arguments against using rev-canonical for short URLs. (pssst, Flickr!) [via delfuego]
  • An XMPP Interface for Desktop Notifications. Like Growl for web apps using an open standard. (Does Growl do this?)

These are links I added recently to my shared items at Google Reader. Just catching up.
  • Nice little Mac menubar app that gives you more control over your computer fans.
  • "Nike has discovered that there's a magic number for a Nike+ user: five. If someone uploads only a couple of runs to the site, they might just be trying it out. But once they hit five runs, they're massively more likely to keep running and uploading data. At five runs, they've gotten hooked on what their data tells them about themselves." [via blackbeltjones]
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