About This Site

Mike Industries is the personal site of me, Mike Davidson. It is littered with original articles, shared items (mainly found video and links, via Tumblr and Delicious), and overshared items (mainly thought vomit, via Twitter). If you’re here because you found something interesting on the site, I humbly invite you to subscribe to the Mike Industries RSS feed so you never miss a new item.

As for me, I live in Seattle and am known for several things, none of which will be remembered in 1,000 years:

I am founder and CEO of Newsvine, which was recently acquired by msnbc.com.
I invented sIFR, a technology which has enabled tens of thousands of designers to beautify the web with tens of thousands of typefaces.
I led the redesign of the first major media site to support web standards, ESPN.com in 2003.
I have no tolerance for the intolerance of imperfection on the web.
I went to school with Leonardo DiCaprio and appear adjacent to him in our 3rd grade yearbook.

So now it’s time to decide what you want to do here:

If you want to check my availability for a speaking engagement or press interview… please shoot me the details and I’ll try and respond as soon as possible.
If you are just getting into the design industry and would like specific advice… please check out “How to Make Friends and Influence Art Directors”.
If you just want to drop me a line… please use this form. Sometimes I return mail in hours… other times, weeks.

Shared

How 3D works, and why it's back:

Great article on the ins and outs of three dimensional imagery. Still doesn’t change my opinion that well-shot conventional cinematography is more impressive than the novelty that is Avatar.

The Importance of Removing Features:

This is one of the most useful articles I’ve read in a long time. As we work on focusing, strengthening, and simplifying Newsvine, the concepts discussed by Lukas ring true. “Saying no” has never been a strong suit of mine. It’s very helpful to remember how important of a quality it is. (via fullstopinteractive)

Newly released video of the space shuttle Challenger disaster: It was 24 years ago, I was in 5th grade, but I remember it like it was yesterday. School was stopped immediately and they wheeled out televisions in every classroom for us to watch the news footage. It’s great that this video has been released, but holy crap, how do you tuck something that away for two decades???

A nicely done british parody of 60 Minutes style video journalism. It’s easy to miss how formulaic our news is sometimes. (via B-Tizzle, originally via E-Chizzle)

Colosseo: This is why Cameron is a king and we are all just pawns in his world. I can’t wait to get my hands on this poster. I will point out, however, that the outro credits on the video need some kerning. Someone is going to lose their right hand for that.

Spezify:

New ways of searching are almost never as useful as old ways of searching. Spezify is pretty awesome though. It’s a visually interesting, never-ending, horizontally and vertically scrollable, topic explorer. I don’t think I’d use it for digging deep on anything, but to get a quick visually rich sampling of a topic, it’s quite fun (via tiff, a long time ago actually, over email).

Realism in UI Design:

Reminds me of my favorite logo design advice: “Never waste a stroke”. (via gruber)

The best hockey team intro ever: Or as Tyler says “The Alaska Nanooks are my new favorite hockey team”.

jimray:

Rachel’s right, this is the best thing ever. At least, once you get the joke. Being the old fart that I am, I had no idea why this was funny until I spent about 30 seconds figuring out what a Team Jacob was and and then it was only a matter of time before, well… it would seem this poor girl confused Pat Robertson, douchebag supreme, with teen heartthrob and Twilight “star” Robert Pattinson.

Interesting. I just assumed “switching to Team Jacob” meant converting to judaism.

AWP Express:

I have no idea if these guys are any good or not, but this is the best example of a design agency site I’ve seen in a long time. It’s clean, extremely readable, very well-written, friendly, free of fluff and hyperbole, and contains clear calls to action. If you own your own agency and are trying to drum up work, you could learn a lot from how these guys present themselves. (via CSS Beauty)

Avatar: The Making of the Bootleg Makes me want to skip the whole 3D thing and support the Canal Street cinematographer’s guild.

Why Are Europeans White?:

According to Frank W. Sweet, it all goes back to cereal.

How to use CSS @font-face:

Very thorough writeup. It’s almost time to walk sIFR peacefully into the sunset. (via oxygensatchel)

A great HDR Tutorial from Wolfgang Bartleme (aka “The Austrian Wolf”). One of these days, I’m going to start shooting this way… probably after it’s an automatic function of the camera though.