Showcase

Code: Lightning Notes [A Simple Blogging System]

2012-02-03T16:55:00.001+01:00

A simple web-logging system, created as a proof-of-concept in 2004. Fully standards compliant and accessible, it is designed to quickly set up a functional and structured site to conveniently track related and unrelated items.

Written in PHP, using a flat-file, XML database, outputting an XHTML page with CSS skins.

A sample installation lives at alexanderbecker.net/lightningnotes/.
The code is available on Sourceforge.

Screenshots

A post in Lightning Notes with highlighted search term.

Lightning Notes dressed in red.

Lightning Notes style-switched to gray.

The Lightning Notes entry form.

Previewing a post in the Lightning Notes entry form.

Features

Text-input with Textile
XHTML-output with CSS skins
RDF-output for feed readers
Search and highlight search terms across entries
Search bookmarklet
Parsing OPML-feeds
Customizations through a config-file
Data stored in one XML-file

Lightning Notes doesn't let you edit an entry after it's published. This is a feature -- you get a preview, which is editable and when the post is published, it's published. The end user can't change it anymore. Uses: Accountability, lab journals, etc...

Ambigram: Dynasty

2012-01-09T09:09:00.005+01:00

I made the ambigram for the word Dynasty as a reply to a somewhat strange request, and I'll leave this space open until the story evolves -- if it ever does.

Double-mirror swoosh. Below is the original sketch --

The brief called for as legible as possible, (the continuous ambigram running joke...) so no floral style or other decorative elements.

This is a quick pixellated version, pushing towards some more minimalism. At a resolution of 56 × 11 pixels, this might even be the smallest ambigram ever, at least for the letter combination provided. As an exercise, you could even cut down a few pixels in either direction, but the result would probably get even more ugly...

Book Design: James Altucher's "I Was Blind But Now I See"

2011-10-04T17:05:00.003+02:00

Please note: If you're interested in having your own book laid out, edited, and/or designed, please review the info under Book Publication & Production Services.

I recently had the pleasure of working with James Altucher on his latest book "I Was Blind But Now I See" -- paying homage to Charles Bukowski with a cover reminiscence.

Layout and typesetting, as well as some behind-the-scenes work from yours truly should result in a double recommendation to buy this book.

Excerpt

Acknowledge that every day of your life the Zombie Recruitment Machine is trying to brainwash you. Just like when we were kids we believed in Santa Claus and how George Washington chopped down the cherry tree, now as adults we've been trained to believe in much more dangerous and insidious ideas. Being aware that you need to question everything is commandment number one, including, by the way, questioning what I'm saying to you right now.

And then on top of the brainwashing we suffered in schools, from our parents, from our friends, from society, there’s the 10,000 ad impressions each day that hit the periphery of our eyes and further tries to tell us what little intricacies of life will deliver goodness and happiness to us. We can't even begin to be happy until we at least acknowledge that SOME brainwashing has occurred.

[The Ten Commandments of [Insert your name here]-ISM]

From James Altucher

The 8 Reasons You Might Want to Look At "I Was Blind But Now I See"

#1: It's Easier on the Eye. For this book, as opposed to my first self-published book, I used a professional book designer, Alexander Becker. You can find his website here. He didn't just design the cover, he was very proactive on every decision ranging from fonts, to how to emphasize topics without using bold type, to changing title names to be less blog-like, to re-formatting the way I was doing lists. In other words, he made it a book, something I neglected to do with my first self-published book.

[Why "I Was Blind But Now I See" is My Best Book Ever]

HTML5 and the Surprising Return of the Monocolumn

2011-08-23T16:44:00.002+02:00

I finally rewrote alexanderbecker.net in HTML5. Here is why and how I made the transition --

While the pages on the site look all new -- I wanted whitespace, and lots of it -- the magic lies under the hood.

HTML5 makes it easy to structure the code with even more semantic meaning than the previously used (and beloved) XHTML, also, the site is optimized for mobile devices using CSS, there is Microdata added with authorship-enhancing features, it's bilingual, simple, it is all coded in reusable functions in PHP, and the Showcase is written in Blogger's own template style.

The Making-Of

Why HTML5?

XHTML provides strict, and requires well-formed markup, yet, HTML5 is a more complex animal, consisting of many different aspects, among them the canvas, simple video embedding, geo-location, local data-storage, and forms on a whole new level.

If you plan to do anything sexy with a site, allowing truly interactive user-manipulated interfaces, or multimedia-rich applications, or full-fledged web-apps, HTML5 is the way to go.

Semantics

Since the beginning of using markup, for me, in the mid-nineties with HTML 3.2, I was fascinated with adding meaning on a semantic level. Naturally, I discovered XML and built my first CMS using the power of custom DTDs and reusable, tagged, and attributed data to create archives for the future. Then came XHTML, and all of a sudden, we were able to share our semantically enriched content. One thing always bothered me, though: Why don't we have a standard tag for the date of an article or blogpost? Enter HTML5: <time datetime="2011-08-22T13:37Z">Monday, August 22, 2011</time> -- isn't that beautiful?

There are some more new tags: <header>, <nav>, <aside>, and <footer> for the general areas of a webpage and <article>, <section>, and <hgroup> to structure a typical post. View the source of this site, it's quite elegant.

Microdata and Authorship

Another promising technique was -- and still is -- RDF, making statements about resources, very abstract and apparently too scary-looking for the majority of web-developers.

Now, with Microdata, HTML5 lets you nest semantics within existing content on web pages, the keyword being "Extensibility." Microdata adds custom attributes and allows you to markup, for example, names and addresses and other personal or corporate data to be extracted by appropriately configured user-agents. An example -- which works today, not in the future and which is not too abstract -- are the small meta-info excerpts, shown below many Google results, where they are called rich snippets. The "authorship markup" belongs here also -- hard to resist it, as a semantics freak.

Templates

Adapting previously built PHP-templates is pretty straightforward, as in updating code and integrating the newly available tags. Blogger is a little trickier; the newer Blogger templates use HTML5 themselves to interactively customize -- once you paste the perfectly valid HTML5 source into the template editor, the content-type is automatically changed to XHTML. It still works, though.

CSS & Webfonts

CSS3 support is getting quite good across browsers. While researching the current differences in displaying styles, I came across normalize.css, which doesn't simply reset styles but does something more intelligent: it preserves some defaults and enforces them for consistency.

Not too long ago, fonts were very much restricted and had literally gotten old. I never really used the various genius techniques to replace text with custom fonts -- but this is 2011 -- all modern browsers support Webfonts. And if it's only to see some new faces.

Mobile: The Return of the Monocolumn

Last but not least, everything and everybody is mobile today. It's easy with the use of some clever CSS, but instead of merely adjusting the site's layout to the mobile world, I wanted to take something from mobile. This being the day of the battle of the interfaces, the smartphone monocolumn brings back an elegance that was almost lost over 3-5 column megapages. Part of the plan was whitespace and the monocolumn, even on a 22" screen, works surprisingly well.

The bastardized 4-column giga-footer is a built in design-irony, I know. It stacks up on too-narrow mobile devices and on a broad screen, it adds a foundation of four pillars, artefactual, if you want to...

Resources

The Book: None of This is Real

2011-08-11T09:09:00.004+02:00

(Cross-posted from Lyrois)

Just out: The coffee table book "None Of This Is Real" and the text-only companion "None Of This Is Real #READONLY", covering LYROIS works from the time between 2002 and 2011 --

Description & Details for "None Of This Is Real"

None of This is Real
Works & Words 2002 - 2011
Authored by Lyrois
From an idea by Alexander Becker

None of This is Real collects and curates the output from the LYROIS lab between the years of 2002 and 2011, covering Street Art, interior & showroom design, as well as action sports. The works and the words reflect the tension between conciliatory imagery and antagonizing commentary, yet, one doesn't exist without the other.

In 1997, Alexander Becker drew a bunch of shapes, 17 figures gathered around the silhouette of a dancer. The shapes are sampled, over and over, with the techniques du jour, and the materials we contemporarily love; bright, opaque, or translucent vinyl, bullet-resistant acrylic glass, hi-tech paper, and industrial adhesive foil.

Inspired by theatrical Gobos, Lyrois plays with light and shadows and their projections.

ISBN/EAN13: 1463662017 / 9781463662011
Page Count: 178
Binding Type: US Trade Paper
Trim Size: 7" × 10"
List Price: $39.95
Language: English
Color: Full Color with Bleed
Related Categories: Art / Popular Culture

None of This is Real is available via Amazon, B&N, and various other places off- and online.

Some Page Spreads

Description & Details for "None Of This Is Real #READONLY"

None of This is Real: #READONLY
The #READONLY Companion to the Coffee Table Edition
Authored by Lyrois
From an idea by Alexander Becker

The #READONLY edition of None of This is Real collects and curates the text output from the LYROIS lab between the years of 2002 and 2011, reflecting the tension between conciliatory imagery and antagonizing commentary.

ISBN/EAN13: 1463792190 / 9781463792190
Page Count: 62
Binding Type: US Trade Paper
Trim Size: 5.25" × 8"
List Price: $6.50
Language: English
Color: Black and White
Related Categories: Art / Criticism

None of This is Real #READONLY is available via Amazon and Createspace for now.

Join the Lyrois circle on Google+ and get the free, digital #readonly edition of None of This is Real.

Interface Design: Slide is the New Hover

2010-06-24T23:48:00.069+02:00

While creating the interface prototype for a portfolio page, I came across some interesting feedback and observed, through informal user testing, a couple of usability assumptions that seem to be common today.

The details are not the details. They make the design. --Charles Eames

The Return of the Gradient

With everybody being spoiled by slick User Interfaces (UI) and the return of gradients and finally working transparencies (through CSS3) most sites are due for the bling.

In the ever expanding universe of touchscreen devices, slide is the new hover.

Of course, a hover effect doesn't make sense on touchscreens, it just doesn't work. What we can do, however, is create hover effects for mouse and trackpad and ignore it on touchscreens. Therefore, no functions beside visual effects can be implemented, e.g. showing information via elaborate tooltips is out of question.

Eye-candy or not, a UI works with and caters to expectations, instilled & refined by the likes of Apple, etc.

Informal research indicates a demand for slick...

A better looking UI is a deeper experienced UI which is a more efficient UI -- which leads to an astonishing and almost counter-intuitive conclusion: Function is derived, in part, from form.

The cleaner the interface, the more code you have in the source.

In interface design, a passion for every pixel is crucial.

The best usability testers are our extremely web-savvy children & our not-so savvy parent's generation. Not to generalize, I know there are exceptions in both camps.

Example 1: A quick redesign

I started and beautified the LYROIS entry page with some CSS3 & a gallery.

This is how you arrive --

A huge mouseover animates the logo and prepares the way for the game with the shapes. The gallery is recognizable as a scrollable through the use of the navigational arrows. Text shadows are delicately used to enhance legibility and contrast and a white-to-transparent gradient creates a visual foundation for the gallery. This is an example of an "adapted" look, not intended to be "trendy", but used to meet visual expectations.

The overlay creates focus and removes distractions --

By clicking on a gallery item, an overlay is made visible, containing not just a bigger image but moreso, a short project description and a link to the project page. I want the overlay to add value & information, mere zooming might be disappointing. The use of a white shadow surrounding the overlay is intended to further push the underlying elements in the background thus visually masking distracting elements. (Note: This is concept work and I am aware of the right arrow and the generic close button.)

The goal is to build an integrated UI though, not just parts. On the other hand, developing in public is always fun & I can roll out what I got, with ongoing feedback. Without thousands of visitors per day, I can afford to.

Example 2: Cleaning up

Starting the page --

The intention is to remove multiple blocks of text, an attempt in visual minimalism, rectangular fields for three functional areas; the navigation × sidebar, the gallery, and the content of the page. The main target of the minimalism is the sidebar, with lots of text and distractions -- we're here for the imagery, right? The 5-item navigation contains the whole traditional sidebar with clear titles. You get to see what you click on, as opposed to sorting out the skimmed fragments. The gallery section is subdued and kind of veiled behind a semi-transparency, again, a feature to remove distractions and visual competition. The background gradient, while picking up the contemporary style, acts as a subtle visual indicator of page-length: The brighter the background, the closer you are to rock-bottom.

The top right mini-gallery is built with all CSS3, no JavaScript, and no image-swapping. The JQTools catch the click and enable the overlay. This gallery is not scrollable, it is made up of 12 items which are simply clipped to the width of the browser window. The reason for this decision: Incorporating the arrows or some navigational element would lead to clutter, also, explaining a non-obvious action -- like using keyboard-arrows -- is the opposite of what we're after here.

A closeup of the accordion tabs --

The tabs are enhanced with CSS3-gradients to create the old button-effect. There are no images here, and I wouldn't have used an image-based gradient -- but doing it this way is fast and flexible and the iPad and other slick touchscreens practically demand gray gradients (What sounds like a rant is none. The gradients are simply beautiful.). The hover state on mouseover flips the gradient. Please note the text-shadow and the way it is flipped as well when hovered.

The opened accordion and a hover state --

Here we got the accordion slid open, showing its contents, under theis pane, by the way, a customized stack of BixBe sales widgets. The content of the page is visible with the tabs open, it wouldn't make for a simpler site with the content hidden by the tabs, this is an example of two levels of content living peacefully side-by-side. No competition here. Note the state of the opened, active tab, which stays in the mouseover state while the pointer is already away and hovering above the gallery, revealing the now fully opaque picture of the second item.

The whole page with overlay active --

As shown in Example 1, the overlay contains a short project description and a link to the project page. Again, the use of the white shadow surrounding the overlay is intended to hide distracting elements. One last word regarding the gray-scale gradients: A gradient is elaborate by itself, the use of color, especially near full-color pictures is most often too much. Eye-candy, taken literally, is a distraction by itself.

See it live at Lyrois.

Tools & Techniques

Used items from the very reliable JQuery Tools --

The skin is made with a bunch of very heavy and somewhat advanced CSS3.

Please note that CSS3 gradients & shadows don't show in Firefox (FF) prior to 3.6 -- at a visitor share of less than 10% I don't hack for Internet Explorer (IE) anymore.

Depending on the browser it either looks beautiful or it degrades gracefully. This means that FF prior to 3.6 and IE get no gradients but solid colors and mostly no shadows. You don't even need pixel-based gradient backgrounds when CSS3 does even that.

Resources

CSS3 tutorials and showcases

Optimization

Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site

User Interface Design

UXMyths: Debunking user experience misconceptions
Top 10 UX Myths: Myth #3: People Know What They Like
"Menu Mind Games": William Poundstone Dissects the Marketing Tricks Built Into Balthazar's Menu
Hick's law states that the time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices. And as the decision time increases, the user experience suffers.

Glorious Logo Commissions

2009-11-26T17:46:00.010+01:00

Finding a visualization for a name, an idea, or a concept, creating logotypes, signets, or whatever you like to call them, always opens the opportunity to explore new paths because, you know, the Lyrois vectors are frozen.

This is where and why I am formally offering to accept commissions for logos created in my now-signature styles.

Old-school logo geometries and clear, strong shapes, papercutting, exploring whitespace and silhouettes... everything in highly accurately drawn vectors -- if this sounds appealing to you, we'll have great times and glorious shapes to create.

The trick is to determine the symbols, find an appropriate representation for each one, hide them within a powerful shape, and forget about them for the legend to be forged.

Commissions start at € 1,000 and end with your and my satisfaction and vectors delivered.

Many versions are created, documented, and preserved; this is where passion, blood, sweat, and tears come into play --

Below is a selection of recent projects with links to backstories and making-ofs --

Logo: Windson

Imagine a Norseman; son of strong winds, also, a son of the sea. Badass with style and an edge, literally or not. Powerful, mean & nice, steely, but not too polished.

The Windson legend is elaborately packaged, visually legible if you want to, with every detail meaningful, yet powerful on its own, as an impressive shape. The result is essentially a combination of the symbols for Wind and Son. The metal effect is part of the deal, but there is nothing more pure than the papercutting style. I make every detail count, or eliminate it altogether. Talk about hyperinfusion of meaning -- in other words, you cannot over-interpret this logo.

Logo: Lightning and Meteors

The Lightning and Meteors sign for Alexander Becker Consulting is a non-typographical symbol, capturing and expressing vision and impact in an abstract business realm. The symbols were preselected: lightning and shooting stars, these are the tools and the means, while earth and space are the targets, so to speak.

Ambigram: The Dynasty

A rotational ambigram, we want the graphic to look and read identical when turned upside down. This means, each letter has to contain the rotated version of its counterpart -- and vice versa.

Logo: 30pro

From top-left with the ingredients highlighted clockwise. 3-0-p-r-o ... this is what we got and what we wanted to make into the final shape. While you don't need to see all the letters, they do define the whole thing in true form-follows-meaning style.

Logo: Stars'Spring 2007

The Stars'Spring sky disk. A seal with an aggressive outer ring, an onion theory, some mythology, and lots of force-de-frappe.

Still interested? Contact me and we'll make it happen.

Maybe you're looking for free logotype and design work? Read this, please.

Logo: Windson

2009-11-17T17:55:00.004+01:00

The backstory of the latest logo commission. Start with the briefing --

Windson. Imagine a Norseman; son of strong winds, also, a son of the sea. Badass with style and an edge, literally or not. Powerful, mean & nice, steely, but not too polished.

Full Dress: The Money Shot

Making Of

Elements -- The Windson legend is elaborately packaged, visually legible if you want to, with every detail meaningful, yet powerful on its own, as an impressive shape. The shape is essentially a combination of the symbols for Wind and Son. The metal effect is part of the deal, but there is nothing more pure than the papercutting style. I make every detail count, or eliminate it altogether. Talk about hyperinfusion of meaning -- in other words, you cannot over-interpret this logo.

Wind -- Taken from meteorology, the symbol consists of the circle; indicating the sky, the shaft for the wind direction, and the barbs and pennants for the wind speed.

See the station model for interesting use of meaningful symbols.

Treatment -- The brief states "coming from the north," which determines the direction of the shaft. We want a powerful wind, a storm that is -- hence two pennants. Windson blows through clear skies, calling for a hollow circle -- as opposed to the Lightning and Meteors logo, which comes with thunderstorms.

Son -- We turn to heraldry, where the marks of cadency lend themselves to represent what we want. Being a first son, Windson carries a label of three points, a horizontal strip with three tags hanging down (Executed as an inverse shape).

Another symbol for son is the greek letter Upsilon, which shows in some intermediate versions of the logo.

The overall shape is that of a ship coming towards the viewer -- how else does a Norseman move? It adds stability and a sense of direction to the whole image. The zero-ground edges make the logo resembling a jewelized weapon, carrying the mean & nice theme.

Sketches

First draft --

Different blades and pennants, note the scimitar blade in the lower right, which is out of style here --

Globus cruciger flavors --

Even more sketches, see an oil rig and the Upsilon, also, note the sand drawings in the upper left --

Morphology

Three weeks, 50+ versions, lots of explorations.

More pictures

Logo: Lightning and Meteors

2009-06-09T16:10:00.005+02:00

The Lightning and Meteors sign for Alexander Becker Consulting is a non-typographical symbol, capturing and expressing vision and impact in an abstract business realm.

The symbols were preselected: lightning and shooting stars, these are the tools and the means, while earth and space are the targets, so to speak.

The Money Shot

The glorious definition of Kitsch --

The Legend

The ingredients clockwise, from top, right, bottom, to left; abstract and camera-ready.

Earth -- divisions of the circle, superimposed stars, the weather factor, astronomical symbols, and the introduction of the signature papercutting style.

Lightning and meteors -- getting the lightning down and the stars up, because how to impact is as important as where.

Patterns -- altered angles and directions represent different meanings, active, passive, forward, backward, grounded, or airborne, as well as modulated levels of intensity.

Research & Resources

Lightning

Weather Symbols

Meteors

Meteors are streaks of light formed when chunks of metallic or stony matter known as meteoroids enter the Earth's atmosphere at high speeds from space. Most meteoroids disintegrate before reaching Earth. Those that do strike our planet are called meteorites.

Coins

Astronomical Symbols on Ancient Coins

Genealogy

You may also want to take a look at the Stars'Spring sky disk, the direct ancestor of Lightning & Meteors.

Motivational Poster: The Rules of the Game

2009-06-02T05:21:00.002+02:00

A collateral from a recent, undisclosed consulting project, the rules of the game are a simple no-list, designed to illustrate the requirements of maximizing accountability and eliminating distractions to ensure the highest grade of professionalism in a tightly-knit team.

No Excuses, No Rationalizations
No Bragging, No Ego
No Talismans, No Coin Flipping, No Gambling
No Whining, No Slack, No Hesitation

Please note that the rules above are a means to improve accountability and professionalism within a team. It's a list of work ethics, not a prescription for private life.

On the other hand...

A PDF-file is available upon request.

Ambigram: The Dynasty

2008-11-11T11:11:00.006+01:00

The Dynasty; ambigram, created in 2008 for thedynasty.org.

An ambigram, also sometimes known as an inversion or flipscript, is a graphical figure that spells out a word not only in its form as presented, but also in another direction or orientation. The text can also consist of a few words, and the text spelled out in the other direction or orientation is often the same, but can also be a different text. Douglas R. Hofstadter describes an ambigram as a calligraphic design that manages to squeeze two different readings into the selfsame set of curves.

What?

The goal is a rotational ambigram, we want the graphic to look and read identical when turned upside down. This means, each letter has to contain the rotated version of its counterpart -- and vice versa. The pairs are t and y; h and t; e and s; d and a; and the middle-letter twin y and n. We can chose from upper- as well as lowercase letters.

Playing around

The sketches identify potential ligatures and strategies to combine each letter-pair. After drawing the first half of the graphic, we copy and rotate it to see if it works upside down and thus completes the second half.

Putting it all together

The shapes are drawn geometrically, and the final ambigram emerges from the ligatures. The floral elements are added to reflect the tribal nature of The Dynasty, the skewing adds to the character of the drawing.

Rotating

The bottom half is a rotated copy of the top half...

Readability

An ambigram may or may not be legible as a word, it is, in either case, a unique shape directly evolved from its components. In fact, it acts as a new letter, reflecting the sum of its parts and adding just a little bit more.

The Dynasty

The Dynasty represents an old tribe with mythical, even mythological foundations, itself a twisted symbol for an ancient legend.

Logo: 30pro

2008-05-11T12:25:00.007+02:00

30pro. Constructed in 2008. From top-left with the ingredients highlighted clockwise --

Making-of

3-0-p-r-o ... this is what we got and what we wanted to make into the final shape. While you don't need to see all the letters, they do define the whole thing in true form-follows-meaning style.

A perfect application for old-school logo geometrics and blocky, strong shapes.

More than 160 different versions were created over the course of nine months.

The last 43 versions are explorations of different paths (literally, check the picture) and various ideas and symbols with the remaining seven (printed in red) being considered back and forth. The cards are now bound in a flipbook producing amazing effects and providing inspiration over and over.

Patterns

Final Edit

The final logotype incorporates iconic scissors symbolizing the business' roots in cutting plastic. A couple of symmetries expose themselves depending on how you turn it. Try 45 degrees clockwise, for example. Furthermore, the geometric nature enables the creation of diverse patterns which emerge via duplication and cloning.

The trick is to determine the symbols, hide them within the shape and forget about them for the legend to be forged.

What scissors?

Logo: Stars'Spring 2007

2008-04-21T10:47:00.011+02:00

The Stars'Spring sky disk. Created in 2007, with the objective being the visualization of "Stars'Spring", highly accurately drawn in Freehand.

Pics from the Shop

Encirclement changes the visual dynamic and tempers the intensity of the aggressive outer wheel.

Shaping the wheel of fire --

Peeling back the layers of the onion --

Tumbling through space --

Relatives

Any resemblance with the Nebra sky disk is accidental and wasn't discovered until after the design of the Stars'Spring sky disk was finished. It doesn't hurt though.

Descendants

Take a look at the promising descendant of Stars'Spring, it is called Lightning and Meteors and it is where we're going from here.

Logo: The Dynasty 2001

2008-04-04T21:30:00.060+02:00

The Dynasty; script, created in 2001 for the short film The Dynasty.

Design Brief

imagine to be... always. one second ahead

The Dynasty rose in the desert
around the heart of the world
where the stars are born.

It is an old tribe,
diversified all over the world.

Its trees are lost in the global present.

The Dynasty exists
from the beginning of time
'til the end.

The Dynasty is about repetition
cycles, changes
time spots, abstraction
competition.

It is in fact; always,
eternally. continuously, one second ahead.

What?

After an eternity of research and exploration, it was to be a script logotype, of some sort --

The letters were drawn on the computer, with a mouse. As it is usual, some ligatures emerged. Eventually, a rough looking graffiti-style script made it through.

Finally

This is what it looked like in the end --

Presentation: The Rules of Con in Guy Ritchie's Revolver

2007-05-28T01:46:00.001+02:00

You can only get smarter by playing a smarter opponent.

In 2005, Guy Ritchie made an extraordinary movie that's apparently not recognized for what it is.

The plot summary from IMDb --

Jake Green is a hotshot gambler, long on audacity and short on common sense. He's rarely allowed to play in any casino because he is a winner. Jake has taken in so much money over the years, he is the only client of his accountant and older brother Billy. One night, Jake, Billy and their other brother Joe are invited to sit in on a private game, where Jake is expected to lose to Dorothy Macha, a crime boss and local casino owner who can't play for squat, but always wins because people are too scared to beat him. Jake isn't afraid of Macha, and not only beats Dorothy in a quick game of chance, but takes every possible opportunity to insult the man. Jake and his brothers leave the game, and Macha puts out the order for a hit on Jake, who ends up working for and being protected by a pair of brothers, Avi and Zach, who are out to take Macha down.

Let's take a look beyond the plot and see what the characters say, who is who, and what is what. You obviously need to see the movie before reading the comments, in fact, they may appear to make even less sense than the film itself but once you've seen the film, everything will be fine.

Here is the whole presentation, from 2007. Fully interactive and done with Latex.

Showcase

Code: Lightning Notes [A Simple Blogging System]

Screenshots

Features

Ambigram: Dynasty

Book Design: James Altucher's "I Was Blind But Now I See"

Excerpt

From James Altucher

The 8 Reasons You Might Want to Look At "I Was Blind But Now I See"

HTML5 and the Surprising Return of the Monocolumn

The Making-Of

Why HTML5?

Semantics

Microdata and Authorship

Templates

CSS & Webfonts

Mobile: The Return of the Monocolumn

Resources

The Book: None of This is Real

Description & Details for "None Of This Is Real"

Some Page Spreads

Description & Details for "None Of This Is Real #READONLY"

Interface Design: Slide is the New Hover

The Return of the Gradient

Example 1: A quick redesign

Example 2: Cleaning up

Tools & Techniques

Resources

Glorious Logo Commissions

Logo: Windson

Logo: Lightning and Meteors

Ambigram: The Dynasty

Logo: 30pro

Logo: Stars'Spring 2007

Logo: Windson

Full Dress: The Money Shot

Making Of

Sketches

Morphology

More pictures

See also

Logo: Lightning and Meteors

The Money Shot

The Legend

Research & Resources

Lightning

Weather Symbols

Meteors

Coins

Genealogy

Motivational Poster: The Rules of the Game

Ambigram: The Dynasty

What?

Playing around

Putting it all together

Rotating

Readability

The Dynasty

Logo: 30pro

Making-of

Patterns

Final Edit

Logo: Stars'Spring 2007

Pics from the Shop

Relatives

Descendants

Logo: The Dynasty 2001

Design Brief

What?

Finally

Presentation: The Rules of Con in Guy Ritchie's Revolver

The plot summary from IMDb --