I'M JUSTIN DICKINSON

Wow. This is really powerful. Such a sad story that I’m sure is true all too often. Don’t let the Penelopes of the world get you down.

Imprint-The Online Community for Graphic Designers | Penelope

I’ve eaten at WD50 and it’s an experience like no other. I remember reading about Wylie in a Details article back in probably 2007 that questioned if someone who made foams and used chemicals could make it as a chef. Glad to see he’s become so respected and successful. Well done man!

A look at the Vimeo Roku channel on Beet.TV with Vimeo’s own Dae Mellencamp.

The Everyone Forever Now video series is absolutely fantastic. This one is my favorite so far. Highly recommend going over to the site and watching the rest (“How to Shoot a Gun” is another good one).

Everynone

Found these Transparent Screen images on Flickr by accident today. Fun idea.

Vimeo Festival Passes at Early Bird Prices on Vimeo Staff Blog

Festival passes are available starting today, and to reward you for your vigilance, we’re offering them at a special “early bird” price. We’re offering this price because the full schedule has not yet been released, so act now! Head over to the official site to pick yours up. No hidden service fees or seating charts; just pure, unadulterated ticket purchasin’ like they did in the old days.

I can say with certainty that the Festival schedule will not disappoint. If you’re even the least bit interested in film making, get your pass for the Vimeo Festival today. It’s going to be awesome.

I saw this on Chris Coyier’s blog and agree that it should become a meme. Mine will be food heavy since that’s what I spend most of my money on. I tried to make corollaries between the numbers on each list.

Things I Never Cheap Out On

1. Olive Oil
2. Meat and Fish
3. Fresh veggies
4. Bacon
5. Bread
6. Milk
7. Tea
8. Scotch, bourbon, gin
9. Shoes
10. Jackets
11. Notebooks
12. Computers and computer equipment
13. Knives
14. Pots and pans
15. Cocktail glasses
16. Shaving products
17. Haircuts
18. Towels and sheets
19. Christmas
20. Donating to podcasts

Things I Always Cheap Out On

1. Butter
2. Sausages
3. Fruit
4. Eggs
5. Pasta
6. Juice
7. Coffee
8. Vodka and wine
9. Clothes
10. Sunglasses and swimsuits
11. Pens and pencils
12. Home electronics
13. Plates, bowls, silverware
14. Furniture
15. Drinking glasses
16. Soap and shampoo
17. Laundry/dry cleaning
18. Toilet paper
19. Birthdays
20. Donating to charity

Frank Chimero

It was really hard to pick out just one quote from this to feature. The whole thing is so great. Read it, then read it again, then repeat once a year forever.

Editor Bear has great insight into the Ursine Creative process in today’s post. I wonder what other products could benefit from some bear-agency branding?

I just discovered the Nice Type channel on Vimeo (thanks to Sarah). There’s a lot of awesome here.

This is just fantastic. I love the aesthetic style, the typography, the dynamic info-graphic elements, it’s all good. Now I want to go watch Tremors.

I’m adding a lot of new music to my iTunes tonight. Most of it came from Spencer, tracks he played on the boat while we were out last weekend. I’m listening through Phrazes for the Young now. Casablanca’s voice is really compelling for me. I’ve always loved the Strokes and this album is great as well.

One of the albums I just added is Drake’s So Far Gone. I have literally no idea about Drake. I’ve heard his name and know people like him. I saw it and thought I’d give it a try. While I haven’t listened to it yet, the album cover is beautiful, isn’t it? Very nice use of type. It’s good to see a hip-hop/pop artist choosing to go graphic/typographical instead of using a photo. Classy, Drake, very classy. Let’s hope the album is as good.

iPhone 4 versus Canon 7D (by Take Zero Productions)

From the great new iPhone Cinema channel on Vimeo. The iPhone 4’s camera is pretty impressive, I’m excited to see what filmmakers manage to do with it.

Wu-Tang and Simon and Garfunkel? Now that’s a receipt. Currently en route to my home.

An Ideal Hand Position (by katinthecupboard)

This is beautiful (via Twigs & Buoys)

Vimeo seen through Sigur Ros-colored glasses.

vimeoawards:

Great new Festival and Awards promo by VsTheBrain. Do you want to make one? email us! awards@vimeo.com

- Joseph Schmitt // So Long, And Thanks for All The Fish

I’ve had a similar realization lately myself. Except mine came after I realized I’m fostering a growing envy for all the people I see achieving great things around me.

I absolutely believe in the idea that you should constantly surround yourself with people smarter than you, it’s one of the major reasons I decided to work at Vimeo. Observation without contribution turns awe into envy and inspiration into jealousy. It can be a dark road.

First, I want to stop being negative; fight that feeling of “why didn’t I think of that? It should’ve been me!” and instead congratulate my peers for their amazing achievements. Creativity and innovation are not a finite resource. It’s easy to think all the good ideas have already been had but in five years there’ll be a whole new group of people I’m envious of who, right now, are out there creating, not wishing they’d thought of someone else’s idea.

I feel like I too will back away a bit from Twitter, Facebook, etc. At least turn down the info spigot to a trickle. That’s the only way to free up my time enough to start working on the things I want to do. I have great ideas but they’re nothing but brain crack† without action.

So far, so good. Before writing this post—but after reading Joe’s—I took a favor asked of me by a friend and tried out some new CSS techniques with which I’ve been meaning to experiment. Michael wanted a map on his contact page with a pointer to where he lives. I rotated some elements, used some trickery to create the arrowhead, and added text-shadow to imply some depth. I’m quite pleased with the result.

My fingers are crossed and I hope I can go through with this personal renaissance. I hope Joe can too: he gave me a hint at the project he’s been working on and I am selfishly glad he’s finding more time for it because I want to use it. Now.

† This is one of my favorite things ever. I have watched this video countless times when I need to rekindle my creativity. If you only watch one video I share on this blog, make it this.

Seriously.

NY Nap App

File this under “ideas I wish I’d thought of first”.

soxiam:

took me a while but i can no longer say i don’t want an ipad.

Safari is a great browser. It’s incredible that the default browser that comes built-in to an Operating System is so high caliber. However, there are a few annoyances that have existed in Safari for several years now that keep me from using it as my daily, default browser. Safari 5, which was…

Great points Joe, same problem I have with Safari. Though, if you use Readability, the whole Apple+1 is useful for reading articles (transition to the readability view with just the keyboard).

A few Good Creative Men

There’s a bunch of these videos, this one is my favorite so far.

via Sarah

pile:

kateheffernan:

Spotted in chi city

Coast 2 coast people

Today we opened up submissions and launched the site for the Vimeo Festival + Awards. Kevin, Joe, Jake, and I have been working on this and I’m really pumped to see it go live and start getting attention.

The Festival and Awards will take place this October in NYC. We’ve got some really awesome stuff planned. The awards celebrate the best in online video and are judged by a really great panel of judges. These are people you’ve heard of like David Lynch and DJ Spooky.

Blake goes into some more detail.

pile:

Vimeo on the Apple store roof

All Vimeo users wear leggings.

Different view:

TinySong.com Redesign. I like the focus on sharing, it’s why everyone uses this great service. I also approve of the colloquial apostrophe use. Another great piece of design coming from Grooveshark.

Follow us “or else”? Way to be huge d-bags TweetBackup. Not cool at all. At least you haven’t updated Twitter since last November.

This is me writing about you, like you asked. Kthxbye.

This was shot on the Red One camera and the amount of vibrance achieved is incredible. The beautifully composed shots are helpful as well. Well done, a must-watch at full screen on Vimeo for the HD.

San Francisco in 4K (by Patrick Lawler)

The website Changing Habbits shows the environmental impact of a person by using humanoid forms with body parts distorted relative to the environmental impact of common activities.

Each part of the body is allocated to a different type of environmental burden: the feet correspond to the transport footprint, the hands to home energy, mouth to water, stomach to consumption, bottom to waste and the eyes and head to electrical consumer products. The overall CO2 footprint is conveyed to the human figure’s height. People can input their personal data to retrieve their personalized humanoid sustainability representative.

The test is far from flawless, has some built-in bias (it assumes I own a washing machine, for example) and is decidedly British but this is still a cool tool with an interesting result. Here was my form based on environmental impact. Their tips? Turn off my laptop, turn down the heat, and recycle more.

maniacalrage:

Ironing Techniques By Professional Craftsmen (via lonelysandwich)

Adam writes:

This short instructional film showcases unmatchably masterful ironing technique that we’d all do well to learn from, but it’s also one of the most absorbing, delicious demo videos I’ve ever seen.

And it’s absolutely true. This video scratches me somewhere I didn’t even realize itched.

I’ve never been good at ironing. In fact, I’m pretty terrible. It takes me a really long time and I always feel like I’m not doing it right. This video proves that I’m not.

I like the wide board the guy is using. I wonder if his technique can be duplicated on a regular size collapsable board.

It was for decades the most enduring piece of ephemera in New York City and is still among the most recognizable. Trim, blue and white, it fits neatly in the hand, sized so its contents can be downed in a New York minute. It is as vivid an emblem of the city as the Statue of Liberty, beloved of property masters who need to evoke Gotham at a glance in films and on television.

Adobe has repeatedly said that Apple mobile devices cannot access “the full web” because 75% of video on the web is in Flash. What they don’t say is that almost all this video is also available in a more modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads. YouTube, with an estimated 40% of the web’s video, shines in an app bundled on all Apple mobile devices, with the iPad offering perhaps the best YouTube discovery and viewing experience ever. Add to this video from Vimeo, Netflix, Facebook, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NPR, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, People, National Geographic, and many, many others. iPhone, iPod and iPad users aren’t missing much video.

Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers. For example, many Flash websites rely on “rollovers”, which pop up menus or other elements when the mouse arrow hovers over a specific spot. Apple’s revolutionary multi-touch interface doesn’t use a mouse, and there is no concept of a rollover. Most Flash websites will need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices. If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

According to the Vimeo blog and everyone else it’s official:

Yep, we’re doing it, and it’s going to be awesome. The Vimeo Festival and Awards will be a celebration of the best original and creative video that has premiered online. Our goal is to reward the individual creators behind online video and acknowledge the internet as a quality medium of expression and distribution. And of course, we’re going to do it in style.

This is going to be an amazing event. The teaser page is up now (first thing I designed at Vimeo, yay!) and you can watch the awesome videos community members have made. They’re all superb, but my favorite so far is:

Start getting excited people! More info to come in the following weeks.

So get this: I’m the new web designer at Vimeo.

In a strange bit of nostalgia-inducing luck I find my new desk not far from where I sat in the beginning of FiLife back in 2007. Thinking back to my first weeks at FiLife, in New York, in the start-up world, I’m amazed by how much I’ve learned since then. I’m proud of what we built and what we managed to achieve. I’m very sad to see it go but feel lucky to have worked with such amazing individuals.

I’ve always been a huge Vimeo fan and love their vibe and culture. I’m super-excited to be on such a great team and can’t wait to see what we manage to create and what else I will learn.

If you’re unfamiliar with Vimeo, you should go check it out. Watch some of the great videos (staff picks are a good place to start). You’ll soon see what sets the site apart:

Then read more about what Vimeo is and go add me as a contact.

Congratulations to Steve Alvarez for winning the iPad etching contest. I saw his design a few weeks ago since @supersgp sits next to Steve at Code & Theory. I couldn’t imagine a better submission so I’m not entirely surprised he won. Send him a tweet telling him he’s awesome.

It’s this kind of thing that makes me crazy jealous I can’t draw good.

hayekd:

josephschmitt:

Peter’s a really good listener.

P.S. Oh yea, new couches.

“So I guess I’ve never really been able to talk to my father, and that’s why I’ve always been a follower not a leader. You know what I mean, right Peter?”

Furniture is Vimeo-colored. If you squint you can see me in the BG with my headphones on.

Virginia Campbell, of Lake Oswego, Ore., suffers from glaucoma, making it extremely difficult to engage in her favorite pastimes: reading and writing. After hearing about the iPad, Campbell, an alumnus of Portland’s Reed College, decided that the tablet could be the tool she needed to get back to enjoying reading and writing. And she was right.

For all the months of bickering and complaining about the iPad it’s important to see that outside the tech industry all these things fall into the hands of real people who don’t care about front-facing cameras, USB inputs, or multi-tasking.

This is why I love technology and design. It brings people joy. It’s fantastic that this woman can just pick up an iPad and start using it to write limericks:

“To this technology-ninny it’s clear
In my compromised 100th year,
That to read and to write
Are again within sight
Of this Apple iPad pioneer.”

(via iPad has ‘changed’ 99-year-old woman’s life | The Digital Home - CNET News)

@Lufthansa_USA with accompanying letter.

Now that’s taking advantage of a moment for some great PR. Well done on the Social Media side for Lufthansa.

via @panelfly

This is a really eloquent and well-thought out post regarding the launch of Instapaper on the iPad by Marco Arment. In it he discusses design decisions, challenges he faced, and business reasons surrounding app development.

Overall, a very nice piece about an app I love. It’s nice to know things I use a lot are in the hands of thoughtful, intelligent people. Also glad to hear my pro version purchase covers the iPhone and iPad.

I had to uninstall and reinstall FourSquare today so I could use it with OS 4.0. Doing so I found the app has changed a lot since I first installed it before SXSW 2008. Besides being prettier (well done, Mr. Rainert) there are prompts to scrape your Twitter, Facebook, and Contacts lists for friends using the service and a nice flow for new users to join.

As an early adopter of many iPhone apps this makes me wonder what other innovation I’m missing. The initial load and experience for new app users is very important, it’s the first interaction your app has with your customers, but it’s often overlooked—especially in alpha app releases—since you do it once and that’s it.

The next time I find myself creating a flow for an app, maybe I should uninstall a few of my favorites, reinstall them and sign-up as if I was a new user.

I used the HTML5 Test today to check out the three major browsers I use: Chrome (day to day browsing), Firefox (development), and Safari (occasional browsing, testing). To my surprise Chrome came out the winner. It didn’t have a perfect score but it was pretty close.

Posted by twitter.com/jmdickinson

If you haven’t already been following Josh Brewer and Josh Porter at 52weeksofux.com, you need to start now. It’s a great read on some of the realities, questions, and problems of User Experience design, both on the web and in the natural.

The topic of a recent post at 52 Weeks of Ux had…

Merlin makes a great and entertaining point as always and you should absolutely go read the entire post.

I hate talking on the phone as much as the next guy and this seems like a good idea at first glance but I wonder if all of that is a little much to go through for a food delivery guy who can’t find my apartment. I’m pretty sure asking for a list of the cell numbers for all delivery people would seem suspect at my local Mexican/Chinese/Thai restaurants.

Looks like Google Voice recently introduced the second-best thing ever: ability to block a given “UNKNOWN” caller, even though, by definition, you don’t know their identity or number. Marry me.

Frankly, I don’t care whether this works by wires, slave labor, or fucking elfin magic, it’s…

nickdouglas:

Get ready to never ever ever leave your phone on the bar, ever.

According to this chart, is it more expensive to live in Shanghai or New York?

It took me a second to figure it out and these folks even wrote an article with the wrong answer (which was picked up by Racked NY and now poor little fashion-lovers everywhere will be confused).

The answer…

Have you seen these HSBC ads?

As I ride the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan everyday I get a chance to look at a lot of ads. Having worked in advertising I tend to pay a little more attention and be more critical, as is anyone who’s once created what they’re viewing.

I’ve seen these HSBC ads around the city and thought they were clever. I’m a pretty sappy guy but I’m not likely to be emotionally moved by a bank poster. More so I wondered about the process of selecting the images and labels. Did they create a concept and then work toward it? Were there some that didn’t work or were deemed too risque? (I’m wondering why “pew” wasn’t used in the rug ad below, seems like a better option that would be shorter and create a deeper response.)

Then I started seeing these ads mentioned online in a lot of places. As I looked at them all together I started to realize they really did have some influential power behind them. I might not go so far as to say they stopped and made me think but they were more thoughtful and tasteful than yet another claim about how many ATM locations I can be enjoying.

I like the ones with one picture and different words better. It’s amazing how easy it is to associate each of these statements with the image. One after the other, despite contradiction, illicit empathy. I guess Jeff Winger was right.

These ads are primarily placed in airports so they’re meant to be viewed by people who have some time to read them, walk away, think, return and contemplate their meaning. This kind of placement helps in eliciting emotion—it’s easy to find meaning when you’re stuck for an hour layover than when you’re watching a 30 second TV ad or driving by a billboard.

I did some half-hearted Googling and couldn’t find what agency did these for HSBC. If you know, hit me up on Twitter as I’d like to check out their work and say congrats to them for creating a tasteful and thought provoking campaign.

Ask H&FJ: Four Ways to Mix Fonts

In a world where the list post implies mediocrity and digg-bait it’s nice to know not all is lost.

H&FJ show tips and techniques regarding the use of complimentary typefaces in design. I’ll be referencing this a lot.