How do you stay focused?

I’m not sure that I do. I’m kind of all over the place, with my attention split between web apps, iOS games and apps, and Safari extensions…. If I feel my focus waning, I let it wane. Curiosity or that unpleasant feeling of leaving something unfinished usually draws me back to a problem or task before too long.

“5 Minutes on The Verge: Shaun Inman”

This. Oh, so very this.

We can now design effective adaptive layouts that respond to their environment. If these layouts are based on a system that defines its ratios from the content, then there is connectedness on two levels: connectedness to the device, and connectedness to the content.

Mark’s thinking about flexible, content-driven grids has me damned excited about his upcoming talk at AEA Boston, and you know I’ll be flinging fistfuls of lucre at my laptop screen whenever his new book’s available to preorder.

The web really feels fun again.

Needless to say, I am having the time of my life.

We’re also learning a lot, too. A lot of discussions about approach and execution have come up, largely because processes for a lot of this stuff don’t exist yet. That will, with a bit of hard work and community discussion, change over time. Still, there has been a lot of brilliant stuff created so far.

Here’s just one example:

The goal of this technique is to deliver optimized, contextual image sizes for responsive layouts that utilize dramatically different image sizes at different resolutions. Ideally, this approach will allow developers to start with mobile-optimized images in their HTML and specify a larger size to be used for users with larger screen resolutions — without requesting both image sizes, and without UA sniffing.

Check out the script, download it, and kick the tires a bit—feedback and tweaks are most welcome.

I realize that there are always going to be philosophical differences around responsive web design. But for me, the solutions-driven discussions are always going to be infinitely more interesting to me than the alternative.

I was, however, emphatically raising my fist in the air when I read this:

While I’m well aware that things don’t have to look the same in every browser, it just seems to strike me as odd that CSS3 features keep getting touted on the front of browser homepages, and yet something as fundamental as a percentage would be rendered incorrectly (or, rather, not as well as would be expected).

Emphasis mine. Much of the behavior Steffan notes was outlined by John Resig in 2008, nearly three years ago. There are some incredible inconsistencies at play here, and designers really shouldn’t have to shoulder the burden of working around them.

In short, some broad consensus between the different rendering engines needs to be reached—and if it comes at the expense of pushing the Next Hot Bleeding-Edge Experimental Sexy CSS3 Feature™ to market, I’m all for it.

Over the past couple of years, my blog hasn’t felt my own, to a degree. It’s felt like I’ve been writ­ing for an audi­ence, post­ing stuff for oth­ers rather than myself. That’s arse-backwards. A blog should be about per­sonal expres­sion. The moment you start think­ing, and writ­ing, to please oth­ers then it’s a bind; it feels less like a per­sonal exer­cise and more of a job.

A beautiful, thoughtful redesign from Mark Boulton (and a responsive one at that). Go go, read read.

That’s the thing about responsive web design: you can’t just think of it as a sprinkle of pixie dust that can be applied to any site. It requires the right mindset. It requires that sites be built on solid foundations of best practice. If those foundations are in place—a flexible layout, flexible images, optimised performance—then responsive web design can work its magic.

There are so many wonderful, quotable points that I’m doing Jeremy a disservice by even excerpting that one. If you’d like to understand why a responsive approach would be right for your project (or, perhaps as importantly, why it might not), I urge you to read the whole thing.

Do right by yourselves, people. If you need an insightful creative director, an insanely talented designer, and/or a talented, thoughtful developer, hire the hell out of him.

On a related note, I’ll be over here sobbing into my stylesheets if anyone needs me.

Dan Cederholm moves over to Wordpress, tweaking his site’s design as he does so. Which is lovely, of course, but not as lovely as this:

If anything, [the new design is] a slight step backward, to the layouts of SimpleBits’ past. Like anyone who used to blog with frequency pre-2005, I’d like to post here more often — not just to fill up bits and bytes, but to write again. Remember when blogs were more casual and conversational? Before a post’s purpose was to grab search engine clicks or to promise “99 Answers to Your Problem That We’re Telling You You’re Having”. Yeah. I’d like to get back to that here.

I’ve been thinking the same thing lately: that this whole quasi-tumblelog thing I’ve been playing around with isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. As Merlin Mann said: Jesus, I miss paragraphs.

In other words: OMG.

Read Jason’s launch announcement when you have a moment, and check out Dan Mall’s write-up as well. Congratulations, all!

Making something “free” is obviously an allocation strategy. “Free” attracts attention. Making things brief is an allocation strategy as well. The problem is that free isn’t sustainable, and that brief is underpriced.

We need a Ronald Reagan of attention, someone to inspire us away from the fight over smaller and smaller pieces of the attention pie. Someone who will inspire us to make the attention pie bigger.

I imagine attention festivals: week-long multimedia, cross-industry carnivals of readings, installations, and performances, where you go from a tent with 30-second films, guitar solos, 10-minute video games, and haiku to the tent with only Andy Warhol movies, to a myriad of venues with other media forms and activities requiring other attention lengths. In the Nano Tent, you can hear ringtones and read tweets. A festival organized not by the forms of the commodities themselves but of the experience of interacting with them. Not organized by time elapsed, but by cognitive investment: a pop song, which goes by quickly, can resonate for days; a poem, which can go by more quickly, sticks through a season. A festival in which you can see images of your brain on knitting and on Twitter.

(IOW, TLDR.)

Beautiful collection of stills taken from movie titles, categorized by decade. (Via Rumsey Taylor on Twitter.)