I actually don’t give a shit about their advertising. I just don’t like their tees to begin with. Give me thick old-school Beefy-Ts any day.
Hundreds of headlines wash over us every day. And part of why many of us engage in this flow is because we have faith that over time, this torrent of episodic knowledge is going to cohere into something more significant: a framework for genuinely understanding an issue. And we live with it ’cause it sort of works. Eventually you hear enough buzzwords like “single-payer” and “public option” and you start to feel like you can play along.
But mounting evidence indicates that this approach to information is actually totally debilitating. Faced with a flood of headlines on an ever-increasing variety of topics, we shut off. We turn to news that doesn’t require much understanding – crime, traffic, weather – or we turn off the news altogether.
Cameron’s Colosseo letterpress poster is now available: The only question is, black or white? The black is oh so tempting!
Jon Stewart Skewers Media’s Obsession with Chat Roulette: Funniest Wii Craps reference ever, as well. It’s really interesting to me that Chat Roulette is getting this much “attention” when TinyChat has been around so much longer, essentially does the same thing and more, and is much more useful to the average person. Just goes to show how viral public sex acts can be.
The 2005 email that spawned Picnik, Google’s latest buy. If you’re thinking about launching a startup, you should study this e-mail carefully. It’s a perfect example of exactly how a crazy little thought becomes a big idea, and even on its own, it’s better than most “official company business plans” people present to VCs. I gave a talk at Webstock in New Zealand a couple of weeks ago about creating a startup and I wish I had this to dissect at the time. Really good stuff.
I actually really like how clubby it is. Unfortunately it means I won’t be commenting on any Tumblrs since I don’t officially “follow” anyone besides via RSS, but that’s probably ok. Maybe the answer to the world’s wide-open commenting problem is something like this.
I was a guest on Dan Benjamin’s new weekly radio show last week, along with Merlin Mann, Christina Warren, Adam Keys, and Dave Nanian. Subjects discussed include Newsvine, keeping your own identity after becoming part of a big company, and the RADICAL concept of only publishing stuff to your readers and followers that is actually true.
Given that pre-compiling CSS is an official “best practice” these days, why not use that compile step to extend CSS in powerful ways? LESS lets you use variables, nested rules, and other niceties at author-time to clean up your rules and keep everything tidy. I believe The Wolf made something like this a few years ago, but I haven’t heard about it since.
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.
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???
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).
Reminds me of my favorite logo design advice: “Never waste a stroke”. (via gruber)
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I am not a fan of Beefy-Ts to be honest. Everytime I have done a t-shirt design for an event, I have always asked the printer if they have anything lighter weight than the “Beefy-T” standard. So for that I am thankful for American Apparel.
Their advertising doesn’t bother me either.
However, I do hold them officially responsible for mainstreaming the hipster movement (which is not fair I know) – which includes three of my past roommates feeling justified to a.) wear v-neck t-shirts, and b.) not showering for a week. So…that’s my beef with American Apparel. Let’s keep the V-Necks on those with boobies and the non-showering to the French :)
“… and the non-showering to the French”
Was that necessary? :(
It was a joke. Lighten up. I love the French. Out of 21 countries I have visited in my life, France and Australia are the only ones I loved so much to warrant a return trip.
I don’t like using the phrase “lighten up” when trying to diffuse a situation like this. You didn’t mean any harm so something like “I was totally kidding” would have been better. “Lighten up” pretty much proclaims that the other person is in the wrong.
On that subject though, I do wonder a bit about how the whole not taking showers thing got started. Until recently, many Europeans took baths instead of showers (which is fine, really), and didn’t necessarily believe in deodorant (not fine, in my opinion). I believe this has mostly changed by now though. The stereotypes may remain, but I don’t think the facts support them anymore.