phonezilla

Hillman Curtis

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 09:21:26 -0500

Hillman passed away at home on April 18th at 6:03 pm in the presence of his loving wife, two children, his sister, sister in law and brother in law. He was 51 years old and died after a long and fiercely fought battle with colon cancer.

Like many other people whose sites I read and admire, Hillman Curtis played a key role in my early design career. At a time when I wanted to push interaction well beyond what HTML could do at the time - before CSS, before jQuery - Hillman’s seminal Flash Web Design not only taught me how to do the work but also educated me on why - the emotional reasons, the technological reasons, the human reasons. The book stayed with me for years, dog-eared pages and all.

Curtis’s influence manifested itself in my then-annual redesigns of phonezilla.net and my web exhibits: micro sites whose only purpose was to serve as a personal expression.

Curtis helped shape the early web when we were transitioning from CD-ROMs to this new, undefined frontier.

He is no longer here. But his influence and spirit continues to be a part of the consciousness of many designers.

This Is Not My Beautiful House

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 14:52:20 -0500

The most recent episode of Back to Work, “Bold with the Scissors”, talks about agency. While it was discussed before I didn’t quite get a handle on it until this episode. Merlin Mann spells it out well, and you should definitely listen to it. The talk of the different types of agency got me thinking and helped me realize why I’m squeamish about Facebook.

But that’s another post. In this one, I want to talk about another incident I had a few months ago.

I was contacted out of the blue by a content producer from a very large corporate weather site. They saw one of my photos from my defunct flickr stream and said, hey, we love your photo. We’re putting together a slideshow. Can we use it?

All of my photos on flickr are copyrighted. That’s just how I roll and that’s what I’m comfortable with for now. So I was glad they asked. I thought about it for a few moments and replied.

I said yes - but attached a price to it.

My rationale, which I didn’t share with them, was this: you’re not getting my creative work for free. This photo is going on a page loaded with ads. You’re making lots of money on this page. Lots. And the fact that you’re doing a slideshow suggests it’s going to be broken up into individual pages - more page views and more money. So sure, I’m OK with that for a price. (I’m selling out!)

Their reply came quickly: we have no budget for this, so, sorry.

I was fine with it. I wasn’t mad. I’m not. What it boiled down to was this: if this large weather site, owned by a very very large corporate conglomerate, wanted to be an agency for my work, then they needed to share in their nearly-guaranteed profits with me. That’s all. I think it’s fair.

Using a similar context, this is what makes me feel weird about Facebook. I’m creating a lot of writing, photos, videos, and rants. I’d create them anyway. But if I put them on Facebook, they’re making money off of it and I get… likes from friends and family. Not without value, to be sure, but a very different currency.

Agency matters.

No More Twitters Jumping on the Blog

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 09:36:58 -0500

For now, I’m suspending the torrent of tweets on phonezilla. You want to read ‘em, you know where to find ‘em.

Unless she's already used Paper, that is. But it's not visually obvious what one should do.

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 16:01:36 -0500

Unless she's already used Paper, that is. But it's not visually obvious what one should do.

If I hand someone an iPad with Paper running - and a blank page - how could she possibly know what to do?

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 16:01:36 -0500

If I hand someone an iPad with Paper running - and a blank page - how could she possibly know what to do?

On the one hand, a chrome-free UI like Paper is refreshing. On the other hand, I miss affordances.

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 16:01:35 -0500

On the one hand, a chrome-free UI like Paper is refreshing. On the other hand, I miss affordances.

This is pretty badass: a "Help" bandage that comes with a bone marrow registry kit. Amazing idea. http://t.co/VLMSf0PV

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 10:02:15 -0500

This is pretty badass: a "Help" bandage that comes with a bone marrow registry kit. Amazing idea. http://t.co/VLMSf0PV

Anu Ramaswamy's nice take on designers who code. http://t.co/4CjNXRMJ

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 15:31:26 -0500

Anu Ramaswamy's nice take on designers who code. http://t.co/4CjNXRMJ

Practice through doing, and be humble about it.

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 16:01:45 -0500

Practice through doing, and be humble about it.

This afternoon. http://instagr.am/p/IU220-QdeK/

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 14:50:22 -0500

This afternoon. http://instagr.am/p/IU220-QdeK/

http://instagr.am/p/ISVWHFQdZ-/

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 15:19:37 -0500

http://instagr.am/p/ISVWHFQdZ-/

http://instagr.am/p/ISVOjYwdZ6/

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 15:19:34 -0500

http://instagr.am/p/ISVOjYwdZ6/

It's 2012 and Chase still doesn't understand not having leading zeroes on month and day fields. Come on.

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 17:01:00 -0500

It's 2012 and Chase still doesn't understand not having leading zeroes on month and day fields. Come on.

http://instagr.am/p/IKtGBbwdZn/

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 16:05:02 -0500

http://instagr.am/p/IKtGBbwdZn/

Carpet Patterns of the Damned (plus, my feet.)...

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 12:19:39 -0500

Carpet Patterns of the Damned (plus, my feet.) http://instagr.am/p/IKR7AxwdU7/

Central Market’s chocolate section....

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 10:34:47 -0500

Central Market’s chocolate section. http://instagr.am/p/IKFtadQdTA/

Good Design: TripIt

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 09:32:32 -0500

The sign up form on the home page also acts as a sign in form. If you’ve got an account, it takes you right to your itineraries. Nice.

A few notes on the new rdio interface

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 21:19:38 -0500

I had the good fortune of attending the rdio relaunch event at SXSW this morning. I’ve had some time to play with the new interface now, and the general sentiment is positive.

I first saw the new UI by accident: one of the Macs at the venue had it wide open well before anyone took the stage, but as soon as someone pointed it out, it was disappeared. Super, super quickly. I mistakenly thought it was iTunes.

rdio looks a hell of a lot like iTunes now, or at least, iTunes under the previous OS X. It feels very quiet and, as rdio’s Wilson Miner said, the focus is on the content. This is a key differentiator for rdio now, as during the presentation they equated the traditional line-by-line view of an album (i.e., iTunes’s default view) with a spreadsheet. It’s pretty darn similar to the iTunes grid view.

I’ve always had an issue with Spotify’s dark interface. It turns me off and feels like it’s trying too damn hard. rdio has taken some of the key attributes from Spotify (mostly the contact list at right and source list at left) and brightened them up considerably. The album art is the star of the show here, as it should be. The color palette throughout the entire app is remarkably subdued. Other than the rarely-used rdio blue and social networks’ logos (Facebook, et al), the interface is solely shades of grey.

There are nice little touches too. The interaction when viewing who’s listening to an album is great and grid-happy:

6 icons is the width of the album art. Someone paid attention to that.

Miner also made it a point to show, essentially, that the back button works now and the app’s responsiveness is super fast. Both true. I enjoy the social panel thingie more than I thought I would. It updates in real time, so I can instantly see what anyone on my list is listening to. And being able to drag-and-drop albums or stuff to people is a killer feature in Spotify that I’m pleased to see here.

In the end, this feels like iTunes on the web in many ways. If Apple’s strategy centered around the web, they’d likely create a fully web-based iTunes. It’d be integrated with Ping, if people cared about it. And ultimately you’d end up with something like rdio. That’s not a bad place to be, but I worry if it’s enough.

Great copy. http://instagr.am/p/IH-QICQdfI/

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 14:50:13 -0500

Great copy. http://instagr.am/p/IH-QICQdfI/

rdio announcement. Love this design....

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 11:35:26 -0500

rdio announcement. Love this design. http://instagr.am/p/IHpCLuwdcF/