Athletics Weblog

DustUp Strikes Again

James Ellis — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 21:22:52 GMT

Matt’s DustUp typeface strikes again:

(on Pete, not LL)

Link: A Brief Career In Printing

James Ellis — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 18:43:04 GMT

Just FYI, before all this, I was running a printing press:
A Brief Career In Printing.

Thanks to Duane King for scouring his graphical deep freeze for the overprinted Italian postcards he picked up in the 80s. Perfect. Reminds of the trash stock we used to prep press runs with.

News of the day

James Ellis — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 21:19:28 GMT

Our pals at Oak were on the front page of today’s NYTimes Fashion & Style section. Article here. Critical shopper indeed.

—

And, it’s that time again:

Calling all designers, developers, information architects, project managers, writers, editors, marketers, and everyone else who makes websites. It is time once again to pool our information so as to begin sketching a true picture of the way our profession is practiced worldwide.

If you’re in the business, I recommend you carve out 5 minutes and take The Survey For People Who Make Websites, 2008. I thoroughly enjoyed it last year.

Link: Stephen Fritz

James Ellis — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 22:36:16 GMT

Our buddy Stephen Fritz just updated his portfolio. Fritz is an old-school type of guy, a bona-fide design vet, and serious Bowie-phile.

When I first moved to New York, my first job was with Olive, a small interactive agency that Steve co-founded in 97. The true story is that I only got the job after physically sneaking into the building and knocking on the door. Fast friends ever since.

During my time at Olive, I worked with Steve on a variety of projects, and generally learned a lot.

Later Steve sold his share of Olive (they’re still around, btw) and these days he’s a CD over at IconNicholson doing real power-broker type stuff.

I’m glad Fritz decided to get comprehensive with his portfolio — I enjoyed the memory lane.

NY77 Nominated for an Emmy

James Ellis — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:25:28 GMT

We are all excited to learn that NY77: The Coolest Year In Hell has been nominated in the 29th Annual News and Documentary Emmy Awards for the Outstanding Arts & Culture Programming and Outstanding Individual Achievement in a Craft: Graphic Design and Art Direction categories.

In the summer of 2007 Athletics’ David Ahuja worked with Wyeth Hansen and Todd Neale to design and animate this two-part, two-hour documentary for VH1’s Rock Docs series.

You can read the news on AWN here:
http://news.awn.com/index.php?ltype=top&newsitem_no=23969

You can check out a montage on David’s site:
http://www.amoebalabs.com/work_NY77.php

As well as a clip here from the show about the July 1977 Blackout:
http://www.spike.com/video/2881108

Link: VLU interviews Pinball Publishing

James Ellis — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:22:22 GMT

Yesterday Viewers Like You published an interview with the folks from Pinball Publishing, a small, sustainable/eco-friendly printing operation in Portland, Oregon. The interview takes a look at Pinball’s work and process, and comments on the benefits of having a good relationship with a printer.

Made me miss running a printing press.

Delicious API Integration

James Ellis — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 04:17:33 GMT

Last week we announced the relaunch of the Thinking for a Living website. Today a bit about how it works.

Earlier this year Duane King (of BBDK) and I started discussing possibilities for a new TFAL website. What had started out as a brief booklet was evolving into a larger concept: an open-source design education resource. Duane wanted to grow a database of print and online resources, and find a way to publish this information effectively online. I recommended using Delicious, the Yahoo-owned online bookmarking service, as a back-end.

Delicious allows you to maintain a single repository of bookmarks, with all data hosted on Delicious servers instead of your local machine. The obvious benefit to this system is that your bookmarks are accessible from any computer on the web.

It’s easy to push new bookmarks to the system: You can use the Delicious Firefox extension or browser bookmarklets to quickly bookmark items as you browse. Each bookmark may include information such as title and description. And rather than organize bookmarks by placing them in specific folders, each Delicious bookmark can be associated with any number of tags.

Most important for our purposes, and where things get interesting: Delicious offers an API that allows external applications to communicate with the service. By tapping into the API, we can access the TFAL Delicious account bookmarks, and (re)publish this data/content on the TFAL website in whatever fashion we like.

This is interesting as most people view Delicious as a personal internet utility, not a content management system. It’s also interesting that we can take our bookmark data/content out of the highly normalized Delicious environment and integrate it within something of our own design.

It could be said that we’re simply reformatting information, however, I think there is more to do it than that. The important point is that we’re able to involve our content in a larger context and give it greater meaning. And by presenting it in a format of our own design, we can make the content that much more uniquely ours. Given the standardization of the modern web, we think a little specialness goes a long way.

Working with the API

Athletics has been working with the Zend Framework for some time now. Given the investment we’ve made in our existing systems/infrastructure, ZF’s plug-n-play approach to framework integration suits us well. ZF should be accessible to anyone with a decent grasp of PHP.

ZF provides dozens of modules designed to address a variety of different tasks. For this project we made use of Zend_Service_Delicious, a module designed specifically for interfacing with the Delicious API.

An example of the code required to connect to the Delicious API and query for all posts:

<?php
// Connect to the Delicious service
$delicious = new Zend_Service_Delicious('username', 'password');
 
// Query for all posts
$all_posts = $delicious->getAllPosts();
 
// Loop through all posts
foreach ($all_posts as $post) {
    echo "Title: $post->getTitle()";
    echo "Url: $post->getUrl()";
}
?>

It doesn’t get much easier than that. ZF abstracts all the complicated stuff; you never have to bother about XML/JSON/etc.

Caching

Delicious is strict about how often you hit the API, as they can’t have external apps slamming the service and draining bandwidth. From their API help page:

Please wait AT LEAST ONE SECOND between queries, or you are likely to get automatically throttled.
Please watch for 503 errors and back-off appropriately.

This means you must implement some sort server-side caching to prevent your site from making too many calls to the Delicious API. With TFAL, we store the result of $delicious->getAllPosts() for about two hours. We do this using another handy ZF module: Zend_Cache.

In the following example we combine Zend_Service_Delicious with Zend_Cache to store the Delicious data for two hours:

<?php
$frontendOptions = array(
  'lifetime' => 7200, // cache lifetime (60 * 60 * 2 = 2 hrs)
  'automatic_serialization' => true
);
 
$backendOptions = array(
   'cache_dir' => 'path_to_cache_dir' // Directory where we put the cache files
);
 
// Instantiate a Zend_Cache_Core object
$cache = Zend_Cache::factory('Core', 'File', $frontendOptions, $backendOptions);
 
// Can we load the cache?
if( !$delicious_data = $cache->load('AllPosts' ) ) {
 
  try {
    // Connect to the Delicious service 
    $delicious = new Zend_Service_Delicious( 'username', 'password' );
 
    $delicious_data = $delicious->getAllPosts($tag=null);
 
    // Save the results to the Cache
    $cache->save( $delicious_data, 'AllPosts');
 
  } catch ( Zend_Service_Delicious_Exception $e ) {
    // If connection to Delicious failed, load old cache regardless of expiration
    $delicious_data = $cache->load('AllPosts', $doNotTestCacheValidity=true );
  }
}
?>

In the code above we initialize a Zend_Cache object on lines 1-12. On line 15 we attempt to load the cached version of the Delicious data. If the cache has expired we continue to lines 17-29 where we first try to connect to the Delicious API and request all posts (lines 19-24). If this fails (the server couldn’t connect to the Delicious service for any reason), we catch the exception (line 26) and force load the last cached version of the Delicious data, regardless of whether it has passed its 2-hour expiration date.

We found this sort of caching essential as Delicious doesn’t hesitate to block your requests if you get too greedy. (We were blocked a couple times during development.)

Additional caching

Storing $delicious->getAllPosts() is great and will definitely keep you from being booted off the Delicious API, but once you start dealing with large data sets (with over 1200+ items, TFAL certainly qualifies) additional page-level caching can speed things up significantly. For a high-traffic page like the Home page, we store the system-rendered HTML page output for 10 minutes instead of repeatedly asking the system to spider all 1200+ items just to determine what constitutes the latest 3 resources. This makes a lot of sense given that the $delicious->getAllPosts() data-set only updates every 2 hours.

We have page-level caching functionality built into our general purpose web framework. The implementation is very similar to that of WP-Cache. However, I should mention that Zend_Cache can also be used for page-level output caching.

The numbers:

Rendering the Home without page caching requires 0.2 seconds and 6.24MB of memory. (This is, of course, using the cached result of $delicious->getAllPosts(). Making the full trip to the Delicious API takes much longer — usually a second or two.)

0.2 seconds might seem fast, but it’s actually a bit excessive. By using a full page-cache we can get this down to .01 seconds and 1.83MB of memory. Big improvement. This additional caching is particularly important the day your site gets linked up on a heavily trafficked website and an avalanche of traffic rolls in.

Additional notes:

The odd del.icio.us name/web address has always bothered me a bit. I’m all for waving the nerd flag, but I’ve never found domain hacks to be all that clever. Inevitably in conversation someone ends up saying “dell dot ick-eo dot you-ess”, which is ridiculous. After being acquired by Yahoo they picked up delicious.com, which bounces you to del.icio.us. I understand Yahoo intends to rebrand the service simply “Delicious” at some point. I’m looking forward to that.

Also, this post was an excuse to play with GeSHi, the PHP-based generic syntax highlighter class. It’s really quite handy and supports fifty-eleven languages. We’ll be using this for code highlighting from now on.

Questions/Comments: Contact James via email - .

Thinking for a Living

James Ellis — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 11:27:31 GMT

As designers we celebrate meaningful libraries of information. We love the information, but it’s not our only concern. We also take the design of the library itself – the system that organizes the information – very seriously.

Designers have a long history of library-making. Pre-internet, we compiled books (reference books, monographs, retrospectives, magazines, etc.) Now we find ourselves reinventing our libraries for an online world. We develop new systems to better manage and deliver our information, and to accommodate the scale and scope of the internet.

Unlike the finality of books, online libraries constantly change, and this dynamic nature makes modern library-making a unique challenge. To do it right, you need more than the designer and archivist; you need the information architect – the online system builder – as well.

Today we’re happy to announce the significant relaunch of a modern online resource. We partnered with our friend and colleague Duane King (the DK of BBDK) to develop a system that extends his immense library of online resources to the web. Please enjoy Thinking for a Living™:

http://thinkingforaliving.org/

Two introductions. One new desk.

James Ellis — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 21:21:11 GMT

This summer we have two new faces in the studio.

Jason Bishop – fellow Brooklynite and one of our long-time buddies via Richmond, VA punk rock (think Avail, Action Patrol era) – will be spending the summer with us. Jason is currently an MFA Designer as Author candidate at the School of Visual Arts. Prior to going back to school, Jason was working in NYC doing primarily web design/development for clients such as nytimes.com and Cornell University. Now he’s expanding his skill sets to include to motion and traditional print design.

Jason’s work:
http://jasonbishop.net

Dylan Mulvaney is entering his fourth and final year of study earning a BFA in graphic design in Iowa State University’s College of Design. Dylan is interested in the intersection of digital and traditional tools of production within graphic design; meaning, he likes to get his hands dirty. This summer he’ll be bouncing back and forth between here and our friends at Rad Mountain. In the fall he will be studying in Rome’s Piazza delle Cinque Scole, getting knee deep in contemporary European design culture. After graduating in May 2009, Dylan plans to locate to NYC proper.

Dylan’s work:
http://dmulvaney.com

The addition of Jason and Dylan required an Athletics expansion: birch-top desk #10.

We like building our own desks. And it’s always nice to visit “the nicest guys in the world” at Meserole Lumber.

Wood cut to size, Jason sanding:

Built, ready to poly:

Poly’d, drying:

The Wiggle Puppy, observing:

Final product in context. 3-desk superstation:

Creativity and the Collective

James Ellis — Tue, 20 May 2008 04:52:10 GMT

This past Saturday Jason, Matt and I had the pleasure of speaking at AIGA/NY’s Smart/Models one-day business conference here in New York. Our presentation, “Creativity and the Collective”, focused on our studio-as-collective business model.

The bulk of our presentation examined the differences between a traditional business structure and our collective model. As we’re so often questioned about the nature of our organization, we wanted to provide examples of how members of the collective form teams on a per-project basis to tackle work involving a variety of a creative disciplines — from graphic design, illustration, print and motion/broadcast/directorial, to web design and development.

To illustrate various points, we prepared a series of infographics designed to be part informative, part humorous, and part inside jokes for both designers and fellow aging hardcore kids/former edgers.

For the design nerds, we reinterpreted the classic 1969 Eames diagram.

(Click to enlarge)

And we were so pleased with the following graphics that we opted to include them in our presentation, despite the risk of having our cleverness lost on portions of the audience.

(Click to enlarge)

(Didn’t catch these? See here and here.)

Some thoughts

45 minutes goes fast; we had to blaze through the last five minutes.

Speaking early in the day is the way to go. With our talk out of the way we were able to relax and enjoy the other speakers.

Apple’s Keynote is a breeze. Give it a look if you’re putting a presentation together. Copy/paste vectors no problem, drag-n-drop Quicktimes, export to PDF, whatever you want. Near-zero learning curve.

TheTimesCenter is an amazing event space. Totally pro-form. The building’s interior nature/garden zone: blockbuster.

Michael Surtees of DesignNotes posted a review of the event, including some photos:

Update: Armin from Under Consideration published a very nice review as well.

Unanswered questions

We did a 45-minute presentation with no Q&A, as the organizers asked that we save questions for the end of day panel discussion. We were able to address some audience questions during the panel, and it was certainly interesting, but given the number of questions we received during the reception, and later via email, it appears that a few attendees left with questions unanswered.

The most common point of confusion regarded distribution of revenue. It seems some misinterpret the term “collective” to indicate a form of communism. Others simply wanted to know how we structured proposals, paid taxes, or formed LLCs.

We're happy to pull back the curtain for those with questions. Just get in touch:

Thanks

We’d like to extend a big thank you to the Smart/Models event committee – Tina Chang, Liz Danzico, Kent Hunter, Bobby C. Martin Jr., and Sam Potts – for the hard work of organizing the event, and for making us a part of it. And, of course, thanks to everyone for coming out on a Saturday.

The Body is the Subject

James Ellis — Fri, 09 May 2008 22:24:26 GMT

Last week we launched a new project. We’ll get around to writing more about it, but for now, the teen-machine that is the Nylon Summer Music Tour is still getting going. Designers should find the zine-maker entertaining, particularly the ExtraJamz ZIP.

• • •

Stopped by last night’s Riviera opening, Fellow Traveler. I particularly enjoyed Funderburgh’s work. Show will be running through May 31st.

• • •

Cut/Copy In Ghost Colours is the new summer record. Theirspace.

• • •

After consistently releasing records for years and years, career musicians sometimes go for legendary status. Tom Petty appears to have made the jump. You could certainly argue that he had already achieved this status; the Wilburys were, after all, a super-group. But with the recent release of Highway Companion, the Runnin’ Down a Dream documentary, the Heartbreakers’ Superbowl halftime show, and now the surprising resurrection of the Mudcrutch band and brand, it seems pretty well wrapped up. In case you missed that last one, check out the heartwarming NYTimes scoop. The record is good.

• • •

Speaking of NYT, be sure to catch this week’s piece on the McKibbin lofts. This photo in particular made me laugh. Takes me back to when I first arrived in Williamsburg at 19, and living just down the street from the McKibbin lofts. I don’t miss being mugged at 8pm.

• • •

Our pals at Empowering Media launched a new blog. Make no mistake, this is nerd biz. If you’re building websites, you need friends like Larry Ludwig.

• • •

Lately we’ve been working on an internal re-brand exercise dubbed “Adobe CS4: Spirit-Breaker”. Still working out the details, might work better as a Flash-specific campaign.

• • •

Not sure if this is real, but it doesn’t matter. Jealous of my famousness. Update: Defs not real, but again, doesn’t matter.

Athletics looking for talented illustrator

James Ellis — Wed, 07 May 2008 17:27:23 GMT

We are looking to fill a very specific position. We are in the process of generating a significant number of graphic assets, primarily vector. And we need some help. We’re looking for someone with serious illustration and Adobe Illustrator skills.

We may, for example, call on this person to render a crackpot JFK genie head. We would expect a detailed vector rendering on the level of:

Or, if we asked for a heavy line-art style rendering of a rockabilly hotrod, we would expect:

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. We’ve got a long list of needs: a juicy cheeseburger, scary wolf-man, 80’s keytar, gun-toting toddler, laser-tag-inspired weaponry (reference), etc.

We’re looking for someone comfortable moving between styles. Also, given the volume of assets we need generated, we’re looking for an illustrator capable of moving quickly. Each of the above graphics should require no more than a day or so to complete.

We’re flexible on location. This isn’t the type of work where we necessarily need someone here in Brooklyn, but it wouldn’t hurt.

If this is you or someone you know, please get in touch. We’ll give you the full scoop, talk turkey, etc.

Email us here:
illustrationwork@athleticsnyc.com

Tell us about yourself and include links to examples of work. No attachments please. And to weed out those unable to pay attention, please provide mention of David Bowie’s 1976 release, Station to Station.

Athletics at AIGA/NY's Smart/Models

James Ellis — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 14:07:33 GMT

Matt, Jason and I will be speaking at Smart/Models, a one-day AIGA/NY conference, on Saturday May 17th. In our presentation, Creativity and the Collective, we will be discussing the Athletics business model.

We will be joined by principals from four other unconventional organizations: Jason Fried from 37signals, Joe Duffy and Eric Block from Duffy & Partners, Sylvia Harris from Sylvia Harris, LLC, and Douglas Riccardi from Memo Productions.

For more details:
http://smartmodels.aigany.org

Stats tracking using Mint and Google Analytics

James Ellis — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 01:29:55 GMT

Most every web project we push out the door uses both Mint and Google Analytics (GA) for site stats/tracking/analytics.

Analytics software has come a long way since the days of server log file analysis programs such as Webalizer. Modern jobs like Mint and GA take a different approach, using client-side Javascript to grab more in-depth user data. The client-side approach better differentiates between humans and robots, and captures the return visits of users browsing pages from their browser’s cache. And though it was once a concern, nowadays only weirdos are browsing without Javascript support. They don’t count.

Mint
http://www.haveamint.com

Unless you’re juggling metrics at an ad agency, Mint will generally get the job done, delivering a well organized and easy to digest overview of site activity. A single page/interface reveals your latest visits, referrers, pages, searches and more.

The user experience is very different from GA. Mint doesn’t dig particularly deep, but it’s fast and fun. The interface is chock full of Javascript/AJAX flippity-do’s.

Mint is a self-hosted app and requires a server running both PHP and MySQL — basic gear. Mint collects data via Javascript, then drops it into a MySQL database using a bit of PHP. Mint runs quick, provides real-time stats, and is easy to install.

Cost: $30 per site license (per domain). Cheap.

The Visits module:

The User Agents module displaying Screen Resolutions. Notice how many users are still at 1024×768, even on a site generally trafficked by design/tech folks.

The User Agents module displaying Browsers. Sadly, 10% are still using IE6.

The User Agents module displaying Flash Player installs. 94% on 9, amazing. Thanks Youtube…

Favorite feature: Mint provides an RSS feed of your site’s newest unique referrers. Plug this into Google Reader (or whatever you like) and you can keep up every new website, blog, link-list, etc. that directs traffic to your site. Beyond the obvious utility, this tool can also reveal web theft in progress.

Mint Demo:
http://www.haveamint.com/about/demo

Mint Feature Highlights:
http://www.haveamint.com/about/feature_highlights

Google Analytics
http://www.google.com/analytics

Upon acquiring Urchin’s tracking software in 2005, Google re-released the software as Google Analytics, free of charge. Given Urchin’s popularity and the new non-price, GA was everywhere seemingly overnight.

GA does fifty-eleven things; it certainly out-features Mint. You’ll find charts, graphs, tables and maps everywhere, for every possible metric. It’s great for analyzing very specific trends. You could spend hours digging through it all.

You can manage any number (or at least a whole bunch) of domains within a single GA/Google account. Not everyone manages a pile of domains, but for those that do, this is a big deal.

If you’re prepping a stats report for a client, check out the export-to-PDF or XML feature. GA produces very attractive PDFs which you can then take into Illustrator and chop up as needed. This includes charts, and it’s all vector.

Unlike Mint, GA allows for the tracking of Flash events, and of file downloads (PDFs, mp3s, etc.) See here and here.

GA even offers a Content Overlay view, allowing you to browse your site with GA sprinkling stats all over the page. You can see which links are getting the most clicks. Check it:

(If you’re into this sort of data visualization, check out Crazy Egg. That’s their whole deal.)

Another interesting feature is the Map Overlay. By analyzing user IP addresses, GA is able to map which countries visitors are coming from.

Why run both?

The biggest difference between Mint and GA is that GA is always a day behind. GA only updates account data once every 24 hours. (Real-time analytics would introduce massive data-processing overhead for Google.) Mint, however, always displays up to the minute data.

Analyzing trends is great, but there are many instances where you want real-time stats. If you can’t ride the refresh button the day you get linked up on Digg, NYTimes, etc., you’ll have missed the fun.

Questions? Comments? Contact James via email - .

Web Theft

James Ellis — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 16:06:33 GMT

The web is pretty well open. You can view-source your way through most HTML, CSS and Javascript. That’s how most web workers learned their way around — by studying other websites. It’s one of the things we like about the web.

We certainly have no issue with anyone viewing our HTML, CSS, etc. But please don’t steal our design. And certainly don’t copy/paste our entire site HTML+CSS, change out the logo, post it behind your own domain and call it your own. Unfortunately, this happens on a somewhat regular basis.

Thanks to Mint’s newest unique referrers RSS feed, we can keep up with the latest URLs linking to the Athletics site. This feed lists the latest sites, blogs, link-lists, etc. directing traffic to our site.

And yesterday, upon clicking through to some of the latest referrers, we found this:

(Click for enlarged)

Web theft, in progress. Here we have someone in the process of customizing our site to make it their own. They have changed out the logo, changed some copy, but otherwise you can see they are still using our graphics and copy.

We couldn’t find an email address on the site, but after doing a whois on the domain we found that it’s registered to someone in Ankara, Turkey. We did find an email address registered with the domain, but it bounced back our kindly worded please-remove-our-property-from-your-site email.

Then, after taking a closer look, we noticed that they were still linking directly to our images. We realized we had the ability to send the folks at Yenioyun (and other web-offenders that we may not be aware of) a message.

Using a bit of mod_rewrite code, we were able to reroute all external requests for images on our server to an altogether different image.

Click through to http://yenioyun.org/ to see the result. And as I’m sure they will be changing their site shortly, here’s a screenshot for posterity. For the full effect, see the ani-gif we are using.

Of course this is nothing new. Web admins have long employed this sort of tactic for dealing with users leeching bandwidth (hotlinking images within their MySpace pages, message boards, porn sites, etc.) Most recently, I particularly enjoyed the John McCain MySpace incident.

Please, have the code:

With the help of this article and the mod_rewrite manual, we put the following mod_rewrite rule into an .htaccess file and placed it in our images directory.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteCond  %{REQUEST_FILENAME}  .(gif|jpe?g|png)$  [NC]
  RewriteCond  %{HTTP_REFERER}  !^$
  RewriteCond  %{HTTP_REFERER}  !athleticsnyc.com   [NC]
  RewriteCond  %{HTTP_REFERER}  !bloglines.com   [NC]
  RewriteCond  %{HTTP_REFERER}  !google.   [NC]
  RewriteCond  %{HTTP_REFERER}  !search?q=cache   [NC]
  RewriteCond  %{REQUEST_URI} !^/images/stop_stealing.gif
  RewriteRule  (.*)   http://athleticsnyc.com/images/stop_stealing.gif?id=$1   [R,NC,L]
</IfModule>

The first line looks looks for all gif, jpeg and png files. The next few lines define the domains allowed to serve up our images (we want Google Reader and Bloglines users to be able to view our images). The next to last line disregards the rules if you’re requesting the replacement image (to keep from causing an infinite loop of redirects).

Questions? Comments? Contact James via email - .

SxSW, Marked Men

James Ellis — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 23:15:54 GMT

Brief commentary on the music portion of this year’s SxSW, my first contact.

SxSW is a bit like visiting Six Flags for five days straight, but instead of waiting in line for rollercoasters, rock bands. Fifty-eleven bands are playing at any given moment. At all times everyone is consumed by a sense of anxiety about which bands they want to catch, if they can get into the shows, and where the after-hours hipster pool party is. We played a few shows as well.

Perhaps I would better enjoy the event if I had a personal concierge to make all decisions for me, secure my place on various guest lists and physically escort me from location to location. Without such services I found the experience a bit exhausting.

I did enjoy catching one of The Marked Men sets: four guys from Denton, TX blazing through power-pop tunes.

I’m a bit late to the punch on this one, but I’ve been repeat-listening their latest full-length, Fix My Brain, released on Swami. If you have the exact same musical taste as me, you’ll enjoy it.

Top track: Sully My Name (2MB, mp3). I’m a sucker for anything with double-tracked drums.

Comments? Use email: .

Future-stuff: Ubiquitous Internet

James Ellis — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 04:46:28 GMT

I’m sure road-warrior PC folks are quite familiar with the latest mobile internet gadgets, but until recently, I was not.

I had the opportunity to spend a chunk of March on the road, eventually making my way down to Austin, TX for SxSW. Being a busy guy, it was necessary that I get work done while bumbling around.

I had heard tale of the little data cards that provide internet access over 3G cell networks, but I’d never seen one in action. After a bit of research I discovered that they now offer little PC/Mac-compatible USB sticks that get the job done, no card required. All of the big providers – AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, etc. – offer these things. I had read a nice thing or two about Sprint so I gave them a shot.

Here’s what the gadget looks like:
(I found some better photos here)

Setup was easy. The gadget actually comes with the OS X drivers built in (it has an internal flash drive), so the initial install went quickly. Once set up, getting online is easy: you plug in the stick, wait for it to power up, then click Connect using the standard OS X Internet Connect app.

They market these things as running at broadband speeds, but I figured this was likely a generous description. Thus, I was surprised to find that this thing was fast, especially in metropolitan areas. I was uploading/downloading big files, watching YouTube videos, downloading iTunes episodes of Lost, etc. It wasn’t cable/fiber fast, but fast nonetheless.

One thing I noticed: each time you made a web request after a period of inactivity, there would be a 1-2 second lag before data started moving. But once it got going, it was fast again.

Reception was great. Speed was good even in many remote areas. The only black-out spot that I experienced was in a remote stretch between Little Rock and Baton Rouge.

My only complaint: I didn’t like having a little USB stick dangling off the side of my computer. I was always worried about accidentally putting pressure on it and having it break. Sprint did a great job jamming a 3G cell phone into a little USB stick, but I couldn’t help but wish that it was already built into the machine, as WiFi is.

The Sprint deal

You pay $200 for the gadget and $60/month for unlimited access. Not a bad deal, but then they ruin it by requiring a 2-year contract, just as they do with cell phones. It’s not just Sprint – all of the major providers do this.

Fortunately, Sprint offers a 30-day trial period: sign up for the 2-year contract, use the service all you want for up to 30 days, and if for any reason you wish to discontinue the service, you can return the gadget for a full refund and cancel your contract, no questions asked, no penalty fee. You are only charged a prorated portion of the $60/month service fee.

Thus, I had Sprint mobile internet for the duration of my trip, and upon return, promptly cancelled the service. Total cost: $55.

Thoughts (or, what the MacBook Air is missing)

Having ubiquitous, wireless, broadband internet feels like the future. It just works. It makes bothering with (and often paying for) WiFi hotspots seem very lame.

Now that I know ubiquitous internet is possible, it’s turning into an expectation. John Gruber’s comment comes to mind:

After using my iPhone for a few months, it started feeling weird that my PowerBook doesn’t have ubiquitous wireless networking: Wi-Fi when available, and seamless, instant switchover to something else when it isn’t.

I’ve seen the MacBook Air up close. It’s rad. But not quite to-the-max, I’m afraid. I’m just not sweating it. My MacBook Pro gets the job done. I can deal with the two extra pounds.

I think a lot of the tech world feels the same way: the Air’s form is very impressive, but that’s where the innovation sorta putters out.

My feeling is that if you’re going to introduce a breakthrough ultra-portable, and call it Air, it should deliver on the wireless promise.

I would have liked to have seen Apple extend their partnership with AT&T to include built-in support for AT&T’s 3G data service. (Sony does this with their VAIO laptops. Most of them come with built-in support for Sprint’s high-speed service.) Given the Apple/AT&T iPhone relationship, Apple likely could have persuaded AT&T to offer an Air data plan without requiring a 2-year contract — perhaps a pay-as-you-go plan, or an optional add-on to your iPhone bill. Whatever. Just give me a fair plan. I’d pay for it.

Until Air incorporates some sort of mobile broadband, I’m not seduced. If I’m a mobile computer person, and I need an ultra-portable device, I want wireless. I don’t care about DVD/CD drives, a bunch of ports, or face-melting performance. I just want to be on the internet everywhere. And I definitely don’t want some USB modem-stick dangling off the side of my otherwise flawless machine.

Free Code: Simple-Auth by Athletics

James Ellis — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 02:57:55 GMT

Today, a free snippet of PHP code. Simple-Auth by Athletics makes password-protecting web documents easy, and looks pro at the same time. After being asked about it a few times, we figured we’d share.

We regularly use this code to password-protect client work — design comps, wireframes, prototypes, dev sites, etc. Clients love password-protecting things, and for good reason: you never know what’s going to end up on some blog, message board, Digg, whatever. This is certainly a concern with some high profile clients, but even if no one in the world (other than you and your client) cares about what you’re up to, everyone enjoys a little professionalism and peace of mind.

For most, password-protecting a document or directory involves entering your web host’s control panel, clicking into the password-protect tool, navigating to the directory in question, and creating a new username:password combo. The control panel software will then generate an invisible .htaccess file and drop it into the directory. This whole process is somewhat cumbersome, isn’t very portable, and most people have no idea how .htaccess files work.

Simple-Auth makes it relatively easy to password protect any PHP file. It’s a snap to drop in once you get a sense of how it works. It’s easily configured and modified. You don’t need to mess with a hosting control panel. No hidden .htaccess files. And it’s more attractive than the standard http authentication dialogue box.

Demo

In the demo below we password-protected a very simple HTML document. Instead of using the .html file extension, we use .php. We do this because we need to add one line of PHP code at the start of the file in order to activate the Simple-Auth PHP brain. Now when visitors attempt to access this document, they will be required to provide an authenticating passcode before viewing.

View the demo here. The passcode is “passcode”.

Simple, right?

Download

Download the code along with a sample document. (ZIP, 5k)

Customizing

The simple-auth-by-athletics.php file is organized relatively well. Take a look around and you’ll see where you can set the passcode, modify commonly used bits of HTML, and dig into the HTML/CSS. A basic familiarity with code-noodlery required.

Enjoy.

Comments? Contact James via email - .

Testing & debugging Flash apps in the browser

James Ellis — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 18:01:35 GMT

I’ve always found debugging Flash applications to be somewhat challenging. The Flash IDE offers a decent debugger complete with download simulation, bandwidth profiling, etc., but this is only available when you build and preview a SWF directly in the Flash IDE. If you want to do any debugging outside this environment, you’re going to need to look beyond the tools Adobe provides.

Given that web users generally consume Flash apps within the browser via the Flash Player plugin, it only makes sense to test in this environment.

Many Flash apps are totally dependent on dynamically generated XML (i.e. Flash apps tied to content management systems). In such scenarios – which the majority of our Flash projects fall into – you really need the ability test & debug in the browser. By running Flash in the browser, we get to test on top of our full local development stack (Apache, MySQL and PHP on OS X).

Also, many Flash apps require some sort of javascript integration. This might just be having Flash content rendered using swfobject, or using SWF Address for deep-linking, or doing some more complicated communication between Flash and HTML page elements. Obviously, you’ll need a browser around to test this sort of gear.

There are a couple of tools we use to get under the hood while running Flash in a browser.

FlashTracer

This free Firefox extension created by Alessandro Crugnola allows you to view all output generated by Flash’s trace() function in a sidebar window.

An example screenshot:

(Click for enlargement)

FlashTracer does require the use of the Flash Debug Player, which you can download here:
http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html

FlashTracer works by displaying the Debug Player’s log. This log consists of trace() command output from any running Flash app. This means that FlashTracer will display output from Flash running in any browser, not just Firefox.

Strangely, on OS X the Debug Player seems to be overwritten by other applications from time to time. Perhaps application installers overwrite the Debug Player with the regular player — I’m not sure. For this reason, it’s a good idea to keep the Debug Player installer handy.

Also, keep in mind that the Debug Player does introduce some performance issues, especially when you’re tracing off fifty-eleven things per frame.

Charles Web Debugging Proxy

Charles does all sorts of things, but for me, it’s most useful as a bandwidth throttling tool. Charles acts as a man-in-the-middle and simulates various bandwidth situations by introducing network latency even when accessing content on local machines.

If you’ve ever developed a Flash application, you know that Flash behaves differently when (pre)loading content from a local machine vs. a real internet connection. It’s important to test how Flash behaves in real-world scenarios, including slower connections. Charles makes it easy to do so.

Of course, Charles does fifty-eleven other things as well. A more complete (and complicated-sounding) description from the Charles website:

Charles is an HTTP proxy / HTTP monitor / Reverse Proxy that enables a developer to view all of the HTTP traffic between their machine and the Internet. This includes requests, responses and the HTTP headers (which contain the cookies and caching information).

Charles simulates modem speeds by effectively throttling your bandwidth and introducing latency, so that you can experience an entire website as a modem user might (bandwidth simulator).

Charles is especially useful for Adobe Flash developers as you can view the contents of LoadVariables, LoadMovie and XML loads.

Charles is shareware. You can test it out for free. $50 for a single user license.

Other options

There are alternative approaches. Most hardcore AS folks will tell you to stay away from trace() altogether and use something like the LuminicBox.Log API (english translation). However, for quite a few developers, trace() gets the job done, especially since it’s possible to view its output within the browser.

Comments? Contact James via email - .

New Work

James Ellis — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 16:58:33 GMT

We posted some new work today.

Cover photo illustration for this week’s NY Mag:

House & Parish One, One-Thousand CD package:

Shout It Out Loud Music CD Sampler:

Thoughts on Kindle

James Ellis — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 07:05:39 GMT

Back in November of 2007, Amazon released Kindle, a new portable reading gadget. It’s about the size of a book, with a high-res black & white “e-ink” display.

We used to call these things e-books, but Amazon is trying to get away from that term, and for good reason. First, “e-book” sounds sorta boring – like it’s just a book on a screen. Rather, Kindle is a new sort of information consumption device.

Unlike the iPod approach where the device needs to be synced to a computer, the Kindle doesn’t need a computer at all. Instead, it wirelessly communicates with Amazon via the same 3G cell networks used by modern cell phones. This connectivity allows users to instantly purchase and read books, newspapers, magazines and many blog feeds. There are no service plans or monthly fees. Amazon delivers this connectivity free of charge.

Unlike the first e-book devices, Kindle makes it easy to both acquire and consume information. Kindle combines basic e-book functionality with dead-simple wireless access to the Amazon library of content.

I have been following Kindle since its release in November. It has been interesting to observe the reaction. Some are excited by the new gadget and the way it works. Others are openly hostile toward a technology designed to replace the production and consumption of dead-tree-books.

Chip Kidd on the Kindle:

What no one seems to get through their thick skulls, even after untold millions of dollars have been wasted on the concept: PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO READ BOOKS ON A SCREEN.

and:

The reason the iPod took off is that music was never meant to be a “thing” in the first place. It was born as pure sound, and pure sound is what it has returned to.

Jon Stokes for Ars Technica:

In short, electronic “books” are nothing of the sort, and if Kindle aims to be an electronic substitute (replacement?) for the “book,” then it has missed the mark by a mile. The basic problem with the current e-book + reader combination is twofold: the single-page format, and the lack of ready markup and annotation features.

Both make good points about Kindle being unable to replicate or replace the book experience, but I don’t think that’s the point. Rather, I think the Kindle is significant in that it offers a new way of acquiring and delivering information. In the same way that the iPod squeezes an entire record collection into your pocket, the Kindle turns a single book-sized object into potentially all books by wirelessly tapping into Amazon’s staggering library of content.

Sure, the initial Kindle is sorta gross looking. It has only one typeface. It’s black & white. The interface is clunky. It’s relatively expensive ($399). But the thing is beaming libraries of content through the air into your hands. To me, that is what seems the point, and something I find interesting.

Jon Gruber on Kindle:

After chewing it over all day, I’ve concluded that Amazon’s Kindle is going to flop.

Gruber makes great points about Kindle. It has a lot of things working against it: content DRM, device lock-in, etc.

I’m not sure if Kindle will be a success or not, but I don’t think it matters much. Eventually a device + service will come along that gets people psyched. It will be high-res, full-color, look rad, sport some hot-doggin multi-touch interface, and it will all be coupled with a content delivery service that makes it so easy to acquire content that visiting a physical bookstore will seem cumbersome.

This doesn’t seem so far off to me. Consider how quickly the iTunes store made traditional brick & mortar record stores obsolete, or how an individual’s iTunes library has replaced the physical CD collection.

Steve Jobs’ comments on Kindle from this NYTimes article:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Perhaps it’s not the sort of business Apple wants to get knee deep in, but people still read. While we’re reading less traditional books, we are reading more and more websites, blogs, etc. Again, the Kindle isn’t simply an e-book — it can push the NYTimes and blogs just as easily as Harry Potter. By offering the various types of content that people are interested in reading in a single device, Kindle can appeal to a significant audience.

It seems many people are interested in the new reading device — just take a look at the demand for the product. Since its release, Amazon has struggled to manufacture Kindles fast enough. They are currently sold out.

Books won’t be replaced anytime soon

Unlike relatively short-lived audio technologies like vinyl, cassette tapes and CDs, books have been around a while — we’re talking about a few hundred years of established specialness to destroy. It will be a very long time before any technology replaces books. Though, with that said, I think it’s only a matter of time before devices+services like Kindle+Amazon begin capturing the attention of readers and reducing the consumption of dead-tree-books.

Thoughts on bandwidth and Amazon S3

James Ellis — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 06:58:52 GMT

This past September we relaunched the Dangerbird Records website. Since then the site has experienced a massive increase in traffic, with the new videos section being particularly popular. In addition to regular web traffic, we’re noticing a significant number of users embedding Dangerbird videos on MySpace/blogs/etc. As a result, site bandwidth has been growing exponentially — a good problem, but a problem nonetheless.

Here’s an example video:

That’s a 27MB video file. If ten thousand people check it out, that’s roughly 270GB of bandwidth.

Here’s another example:

At 17 minutes in length, this video is a whopping 124MB. If 10k visitors consume it, we’re way up to 1.2TB of bandwidth. With high-performance bandwidth costing about $1/GB, you can see how costs can quickly get out of control for a popular website.

Fortunately, we can move this high-demand content elsewhere. The services meeting this type of demand are generally referred to as content delivery networks.

Traditionally, CDN’s were designed for performance and marketed to the enterprise crowd. For example, Apple uses Akamai to serve up images and videos for apple.com. Akamai hosts copies of Apple’s assets on high-performance servers all around the globe. When a user requests a file, they receive the file from whatever server is closest to their geographic location. Akamai helps Apple maintain global performance at web-scale demand, but it’s not exactly cheap.

There haven’t always been a lot of options in economy content delivery. (You might try to exploit Dreamhost’s ridiculous 5TB/month @ $6/month plan, but Dreamhost isn’t exactly performance hosting.) However, in the last few years we’ve seen a lot of activity in the economy content delivery space as web sites/hosts have struggled to keep pace with increasing demand for content such as videos/images. Surprisingly, what appears to be the best offering in this market comes from Amazon — best known as the world’s largest online retailer, not web infrastructure provider.

In March 2006, Amazon launched S3, or Simple Storage Service. S3 is a web service providing websites with unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth. You simply pay for you what you use and at minimal cost (Storage: $0.15/GB/month, Bandwidth/transfer: $0.10/GB).

S3 is both an online storage service and ~~content delivery network~~ economy hosting/bandwidth provider. You could use S3 to backup your entire computer, or you could use S3 to deliver fifty-eleven-gazillion copies of a single animated GIF. Both tasks fall outside the scope of capability of a normal web host. Meaning, you can generally only host so much data, and any single server will eventually choke upon receiving too many concurrent requests.

Update: Our colleague Larry Ludwig of Empowering Media & HostCube – our primary hosting/IT provider – emailed to comment that Amazon isn’t currently set up as a proper content delivery network (See Wikipedia’s definition here), as S3 content is delivered from one of two locations – either out of Amazon’s D.C. data center, or from Europe – rather than being replicated across various nodes and serving users by geographic location. It’s important to make this distinction between CDN’s and S3’s economy storage/bandwidth/hosting.

A few example use-cases for you:

An individual might use S3 to maintain a private, off-site backup of important documents, using minimal storage, and near-zero bandwidth, costing pennies per month.
Dangerbird Records can use S3 to deliver an infinite amount of video content at minimal cost.

A gigantic site like SmugMug (a photo site similar to Flickr) could use S3 to store a staggering amount user image data (in fact, SmugMug does use S3, saving them roughly $1M/year, crazy!)

It’s all a very interesting application of the distributed, on-demand, grid/cloud-computing, redundant, failure-tolerant, scalable (and many other words) systems architecture that we’ve arrived at in the post-Google world. Amazon sorted out the fundamentals of S3 in developing their own infrastructure for amazon.com. Now in true software-culture form, they have opened up their otherwise proprietary infrastructure to the world at minimal cost.

Since moving all video content to S3, we’ve seen Dangerbird’s normal bandwidth stabilize. Also, requests and transfer of video content will no longer being tying up server resources; now the server can focus on rendering page requests. And Dangerbird will save money.

Getting started with S3

If you can use FTP software, you can handle S3. It’s quite simple. First, set up an account. Then connect to S3 using some sort of client. The latest version of Transmit now provides support for S3, and there’s even a Firefox plug-in interface. Also, you might want to look into JungleDisk if you’re interested in off-site backup.

A visit to Cranbrook Academy of Art design department

Matt Owens — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 20:09:37 GMT

I was fortunate enough to speak at the Cranbrook Academy of Art design department at the end of January. Having graduated from Cranbrook in 1995, I was really excited to see what students were up to, and to catch up with Elliott Earls, the head of the department. Back in ’93, Elliott interviewed me as a perspective student and was instrumental in getting me into the program.

Elliott has been carrying on the Cranbrook tradition of an open studio environment that centers around self-initiated projects and weekly group critiques. I gave an hour long lecture to the students touching on my personal and professional work as well as talking about the collective nature of the Athletics studio. One of the main themes of my lecture was the notion that, as a designer, it’s not only the actual work you create, but also your own unique perspective on the design discipline that informs the creative process.

Cranbrook, like other design programs at Cal Arts, RISD and Yale, has amazing design resources: large-format digital output, laser cutters, wood shop, audio/video facilities and an impressive library. All of the available tools and raw materials offer Cranbrook students the opportunity to pursue and produce nearly any design idea. I think the big challenge, and the same challenge presented to me 13 years ago, is how to focus your own ideas and efforts to further one’s development as a designer.

During my visit, I spent about 30-45 minutes with each student learning their background and speaking with them about their work. The range of skill, ideas, energy and focus were pretty vast. I also found that students had decided to enter the Cranbrook graduate program for a variety of reasons. Some students had already worked in the professional sphere and were looking to either teach or shift their ability. Some students had very little design training but were selected for their creative ability in another discipline such as painting. Overall I felt the students had a firm grasp of what they wanted to do and were actively working together to move forward as designers.

I also found the group critiques to very informative. Group critiques begin with 2-3 students that hang their work in the crit room the day before critique. Another student is then selected to review the work and write up a 1-2 page evaluation. Reviews consist of an interpretation of the project as well as an assessment of the work of other artist or designers (contemporary and historical) that may help frame the project. The day of critique, the review is read aloud and all of the students have an opportunity to give their assessment. Comments range from issues regarding clarity of purpose, craft, meaning, technology, context, concept and aesthetics. After everyone comments, the person that created the work then reads a statement of purpose that articulates their ideas and goals for the project.

All of the students then have a chance to realign their comments to inform the statement of purpose and provide comments on how to move the project forward. It was my feeling that if every student were to take the critique format seriously and truly digest, evaluate and then act on the comments, the resulting work would be extremely strong. But as we all know, this is easier said than done. Just because the group provides the designer with the ammunition to push the work forward, it does not mean that a clear path emerges. The real opportunity for students is in learning to absorb feedback, and then work from it.

The Cranbrook experience is part academic, part self-help, part teamwork and part personal soul searching, and in the end provides a creative/critical format that is unique within the design discipline. It’s sort of the design equivalent to tv shows like Survivor or Project Runway, but it takes two years, there is no prize money and you have to read a lot more. Like any academic setting, I think Cranbrook provides the basic framework and facilities to push an individual designer to another level, but it is up to the individual to take advantage of the people, resources and environment.

Talking with students I stressed a need for a high level of sophistication in projects. Just because you have great resources does not mean that a big digital print of a Photoshop file represents “finished work.” Notions of craft, materiality and format help distinguish between a design “sketch” and a fully realized idea. For example, I would rather see tight story boards that clearly articulate a motion project than a 5-minute video “sketch” of an undercooked idea. It was the conceptual artist Sol Lewitt that said, “The idea behind the work supersedes the work itself” and that, “The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.” I truly believe that if a designer has an idea they believe in then articulating that idea can become an amazing journey where the sky is the limit.

As a designer, I think it is important to live in the “now.” I feel more urgency and enthusiasm for the design discipline than I ever have. I also feel that Elliott, as the head of the program, continually expresses a level of energy and commitment to design discourse that is genuinely inspiring. For students, I feel it is their personal responsibility to realize that their time at Cranbrook is very special, and as a creative person, you must push yourself and your fellow students. If you have the opportunity to do whatever you want, why half-step it?

On the last day of our visit we had a chance to see the Eero Saarinen exhibition at the Cranbrook museum. The exhibition was incredibly inspiring. From his 1948 womb chair design for Knoll, to the 1962 TWA Terminal 5 at JFK, Eero’s creative output was staggering. I felt the exhibition was a great reflection of the true potential of the design discipline, and part of what makes the Cranbrook legacy so special. From Eero and Eliel Saarinen, Charles and Ray Eames, Michael and Kathy McCoy, P. Scott Makela, Andrew Blauvelt, Elliott Earls, Martin Venezky and more recently the likes of Jason Jones, Camm Rowland, Chris Williams and many many more, I think there is something very unique about the Cranbrook experience that brings really talented people together and provides them with the right creative and critical tools to bring out their best. Ultimately Cranbrook grads have an oppurtunity to impact the larger world of graphic design in amazing ways.

View pics of my visit on Flickr

On the value of secret-keeping

James Ellis — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 04:56:32 GMT

Many small, idiosyncratic organizations make an effort to remain shrouded in mystery in some myth-building effort. Large, publicly-held companies rarely do. But there is one major exception: Apple.

At Apple, nothing is revealed until the last moment possible. Then, once every six months, Steve Jobs strolls out on stage in front of a packed house and delivers a keynote speech revealing various new gadgets. Every time around the tech world is obsessed with what might happen, and then post-event, obsessed with discussions regarding whatever was actually revealed. It makes for fantastic punditry. (I do love that John Gruber.) All consumer electronics companies release new products, but Apple is the only one turning product launches into media events by refusing to discuss, or even hint at what lies ahead.

What I find staggering is how much effort Apple puts into secret-keeping. Apple products require massive numbers of humans — designers, software and hardware engineers, advertising partners, overseas manufacturing partners, documentation-writers, web designers, etc. So many humans and no one is leaking. iPhone, the most highly anticipated product of recent memory, didn’t leak. Clearly the entire company has been organized around this secret-keeping principle, and it’s an integral part of the Apple brand strategy.

I mention Apple because we are fascinated by specialness in brands, particularly the myth-building qualities. Apple’s secret-keeping is a perfect example.

Months ago we considered penning an article for the blog detailing the inner-workings of a functioning design collective, specifically the business model. After all, we are operating outside the bounds of a traditional corporate entity; it might be an interesting read. Ultimately, we decided, No, we don’t need to share such information, at least not on the blog. Once distilled down to words on a screen, it didn’t seem so interesting. If anyone really wanted to know, we figured they could get in touch and we could have a conversation.

Turns out this is exactly what happened. This past Thursday we were treated to lunch by our new friends Renda Morton, Andy Pressman and Holly Gressley. All three are talented designers and currently sharing studio space in Dumbo. They wanted to chat with us as they are considering forming a collective. They stopped by and we shared our thoughts on the subject.

The take-away here is less is more, and sometimes lunch.

Volumeone refresh.

James Ellis — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 20:19:16 GMT

Matt Owens launches redesigned volumeone.com.

AisleOne interview with Duane King

James Ellis — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 22:23:33 GMT

AisleOne has a great interview with designer Duane King.

Duane is one of our good buddies and creative director of BBDK, our partners out in Sante Fe.

Athletics Weblog

DustUp Strikes Again

Link: A Brief Career In Printing

News of the day

Link: Stephen Fritz

NY77 Nominated for an Emmy

Link: VLU interviews Pinball Publishing

Delicious API Integration

Working with the API

Caching

Additional caching

Additional notes:

Thinking for a Living

Two introductions. One new desk.

Creativity and the Collective

Some thoughts

Unanswered questions

Thanks

The Body is the Subject

Athletics looking for talented illustrator

Athletics at AIGA/NY's Smart/Models

Stats tracking using Mint and Google Analytics

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Why run both?

Web Theft

Please, have the code:

SxSW, Marked Men

Future-stuff: Ubiquitous Internet

The Sprint deal

Thoughts (or, what the MacBook Air is missing)

Free Code: Simple-Auth by Athletics

Demo

Download

Customizing

Testing & debugging Flash apps in the browser

FlashTracer

Charles Web Debugging Proxy

Other options

New Work

Thoughts on Kindle

Books won’t be replaced anytime soon

Thoughts on bandwidth and Amazon S3

Getting started with S3

A visit to Cranbrook Academy of Art design department

On the value of secret-keeping

Volumeone refresh.

AisleOne interview with Duane King

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