Return of the son of Linkmania
- Uncle Milton (Glaser on Film)
- Milton Glaser is my neighbor. His studio is around the corner from mine. One of the world’s best known and most influential graphic designers, Glaser has been practicing for something like five decades, yet he still wakes up inspired — as this short film directed by Hillman Curtis shows. (Hat tip: JSM.) [Related]
- Davezilla on Sexy Chevrolet Redesign
- The Weekly Standards interviews Dave Linabury on the sexy, CSS-driven redesign by Campbell-Ewald of the official Chevrolet shopping site. (Note that the content of this article will disappear in the Safari browser due to its difficulty parsing The Weekly Standards’s layer-swapping trickery. This happens with all Weekly Standards content when viewed in Safari.)
- GooeySAX
- Web and software developer Todd Ditchendorf (hey, nice blog!) presents GooeySAX, a product whose name probably discomfits him when his mom asks what he’s been working on. The free product tests XML documents for well-formedness and can locally or remotely validate XHTML docs against a standard or custom DTD. Available for Mac OS X, Windows XP, and Linux.
- Looking for People Who Like to Draw
- American Illustration announces its 24th illustration competition. The deadline for submissions is 18 February 2005. The jurors:
- Christine Curry, The New Yorker, (Jury Chair)
- Joan Ferrell, The American Lawyer
- John C. Jay, Wieden + Kennedy
- Joe Kimberling, Los Angeles magazine
- Hannah McCaughey, Outside magazine
- Richard Winkler, Curious Pictures
- Old Browser Archive
- We posted this link back in the 1970s (or so it seems), but we are always getting new readers, and some new readers may be unaware of this magnificent resource made possible by Adrian Roselli, Algonquin Studios, and the hard-working volunteers of evolt.org. And so, once more with feeling:
- Need to find out what your site looks like in old browsers, dead browsers, outdated versions of still living browsers? Look no further than Evolt.org’s free Browser Archive.
Linkmania!
- Lightboxing
- Hot designer-on-designer action!
- AIGA design archives
- A browsable record of design work honored by AIGA.
- Weightshift
- Beautiful and unusual presentation by small design agency out of Chicago. CSS layout, valid XHTML structure.
- What if...
- A visual experiment in personal narrative by FlipFlopFlyin.
- Eric Meyer: Be a Parent
- Got kids? Run a blog? Then read this.
- Cloud King: Owen Mundy
- Fine art photographer, straight outta Lawrence County, Indiana.
- Seventies!
- A collection of 70s images.
- The dullest blog in the world
- I know, I know. I’ve linked to it before. How dull of me.
- Mezzoblue: Getting unstuck
- Fighting creative doldrums.
- Backyard
- Incredibly unusual site of what appears to be a film production company. I say appears because the site does not explain itself. And maybe that’s okay. Could be a marketing ploy. (If you have to ask who they are, this company is too hip for you.) Main thing is that the site, fashioned by ex-Designers Republican Matt Pyke, is unlike any other.
- Goldberger on Johnson’s passing
- In the 7 February New Yorker, architecture critic Paul Goldberger has penned an eloquent epitaph for Philip Johnson, American architecture’s enfant terrible, who died this week at age 98. Accompanying Goldberger’s perfectly pitched prose is an incredible Arnold Newman photograph of Johnson in Manhattan in June, 1959, with the Seagram Building looming behind him.
- Although The New Yorker posts much of its content online, and intended to post Goldberger’s epitaph, the magazine’s link to its own content is broken (or the content was never uploaded — or a data entry error scotched the database). Whatever the cause, the content cannot be retrieved from the web.
- So buy a print copy.
- Homeland Insecurity
- From the same New Yorker issue, William Finnegan on the U.S. government’s efforts to look like it is trying to protect citizens from terrorist attack.
- In today’s Report:
- ALA 194
- Special double issue on separating behavior from structure and presentation.
- Black History in Motion
- As Black History Month begins, The New York Public Library launches In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience.
In a special double issue of A List Apart, for people who make websites, Peter-Paul Koch shows how to separate behavior from structure and presentation via JavaScript “hooks,” and J. David Eisenberg explains how to make those hook-laden pages validate.
Now that you’ve separated your website’s (XHTML) structure from its (CSS) presentation, wouldn’t it be great to similarly abstract the behavioral (JavaScript) layer from the others? ALA prodigal Peter-Paul Koch shows how to use JavaScript Triggers to do just that.
In his article in this issue, Peter-Paul Koch proposes
adding custom attributes to form elements to allow triggers for specialized
behaviors. The W3C validator won’t validate a document with these
attributes, as they aren’t part of the XHTML specification.
Not to worry! This article will show you how to create a custom DTD that will add those custom attributes, and will also show you how to validate documents that use those new attributes.
In the U.S., 1 February is the first day of Black History Month. This year it also marks the launch, by The New York Public Library, of In Motion: the African-American Migration Experience:
A sweeping narrative from the transatlantic slave trade to the Western migration, the colonization movement, the Great Migration, and the contemporary immigration of Caribbeans, Haitians, and sub-Saharan Africans. Told in historical texts, rare visual materials, and contemporary photo-journalism.
Although it is not instantly apparent, the site provides immediate access to rare documents in The Library’s collection. It is a web interface to non-web documents. In Motion is a joint production of NYPL’s Digital Library Program and Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Hat tip: Carrie Bickner Zeldman, who helped birth the colossal site.
Gunner Palace double launch
We would link to the newly launched Gunner Palace website even if it were not crisply designed and compellingly written.
The indie documentary Gunner Palace (“Some war stories will never make the nightly news”) chronicles the daily experiences of 400 young American soldiers headquartered in a bombed-out pleasure palace once owned by Saddam Hussein.
Compiled by co-directors Mike Tucker and Petra Epperleinand, the Gunner Palace blog...
...consists of notes from the production of the film in 2003–2004 and emails sent from 2/3 FA soldiers during their 410-day deployment to Baghdad and Najaf.
The film (view trailer) has been picked up for nationwide U.S. theatrical release on 4 March 2005. Leading up to the wider release, director Tucker and soldiers from the film have begun a sneak preview tour of select U.S. cities.
God bless the brave.
ALA 193
Issue 193 of A List Apart, for people who make websites, features Norm Carr and Tim Meehan’s gentle introduction to use cases:
One of the biggest problems in creating and delivering a site is how to decide, specify, and communicate exactly what we’re building and why. Use cases can help answer these questions by providing a simple, fast means to decide and describe the purpose of your project.
Also in this issue, please note that ALA’s translation policy has changed.
Picture for a Friday afternoon
As the weekend approaches, I leave you with two good links and one interesting stinker:
- The Mindness of Strangers
- Over three months, Danish designer Simon Hoegsberg stopped 150 strangers on the streets of Copenhagen and New York City and asked them what they had been thinking about the second before he hailed them. Using a microphone and a dictaphone, he recorded their answers, then snapped their photos. The result, launched today, is The Thought Project.
- Dooces Loaded
- Dooce.com, the website of Heather B. Armstrong, continues to provide the pleasures of real human writing (see, for instance, “Why simply enjoy an organism when you can experience a sensational organism?”) in an enviably clean yet smartly branded blog layout. There are even nifty Categories for those who like to slice reality into comprehensible pieces. If you like your personal sites personal, this Dooce is for you.
- Not so bright
- Mensa International is a society of people who are much, much smarter than you or me. (You or I? See, that’s one reason I’m not a Mensa member. Them cats knows they grammar.) Anyway, the people of Mensa are bright, which makes deliciously ironic the fact that their website is kind of dim.
- For openers, when you go to mensa.org, you are redirected to mensa.org/home.php. No, I am not kidding.
- According to the home page, Mensa “‘provides a forum for intellectual exchange.’” (I use double quotations because Mensa wraps quotation marks around its own site copy.) Perhaps they should exchange intellectual ideas with someone who knows how to configure a web server. There’s tons more but I’ll leave it as an intellectual exercise for the reader with time on his or her hands to list all the bone-headed mistakes on the smart folks’ site.