• Temporize
• Web log
  2008
• 21/11/08

Following on from the last post, I’ve just finished reading and interesting piece by Brad Neuberg about how flash can integrate with the open web. One of the comments of the comments I found interesting was:

“Over time Adobe has been become more and more open source friendly, contributing to open source projects and opening up their own products. However, these decisions have always been good business decisions and open sourcing Flash right now is a really bad business decision.”

A good point, though I really think open source is going to be one of, if not The, major business models of the future, and I believe most companies are going to have to go this way at some stage in order to compete in the market place. Microsoft will at some point (if they haven’t already) start eating into Adobes market and user base with their Silverlight product, so opening up Flash to the open web and significantly increasing the developers and the community involved in the product would, in my option, be a very good business decision.

Although flash is slowly making its way onto some mobile devices, Flash on the iPhone is still looking as far off as a manned mission to Mars. But with HTML 5 starting to be implemented in webkit and most other browsers, and the advancements in SVGs of late, I’ve been thinking about what roll flash will play on the iPhone, and if it is really needed at all …

At the moment, I find the fact that I can’t jump on youtube and watch my friends latest video a little annoying, but with the <video> and <audio> tag already working in safari 3, how long will it be before these are carried through to the iPhone? And with the wider adoption of such tags, will sites such as youtube continue to use flash as their default media player?

I’m a big fan of Flash, and seeing what Joshua David and Hi-Res were doing with the platform back in the late 90’s is what really go me into web design and playing with code in the first place, but now that I’ve had to live without flash on the iPhone for the last few month and counted the amount of times I’ve actually missed it, I’m not so sure it’s the iPhone enhancer I’ve been hoping it would be.

This morning my first issue of Voiceworks magazine went to print. Due to not managing my time well enough, and learning the ropes of a new publication, I was up until 4am getting it ready for collection this morning and came across a hurdle I had not anticipated. Poetry.

Laying out pages containing poetry proved to be a lot trickier than I had expected. I had designed a system and styles which I thought would work across all content of the magazine, whether it be a fictional pieces or part of the columns, and could work without the heavy use of graphics or supporting images.

Unfortunately poems did not fit into this system as well as I had hoped. Instead of being a piece of copy to be moulded and crafted to fit on a page, a poem already has its form and needs to be placed ‘as is’ onto the page. As I found out, this tends to cause a problem with space and the relationship with other elements. I still managed the get everything done, but I think this will need revision before I start on the next issue, and I’ll need to do a bit or research on laying out poetry.

I’d be interested to hear if anyone else has come across a similar situation.

Over the weekend I was lucky enough to take part in a fantastic letterpress workshop held by Carolyn Fraser of Idlewild Press. It was a great experience learning the ins and outs of setting type, inking and preparing the presses and how to produce our own prints.  Here are a few images from the workshop, and I have just uploaded a few more to flickr.

Following on in the ever exiting (and disappointing) ePaper advancements,  Plastic Logic have just announced the next step in electronic readers. Their as yet unnamed decive uses the same technology as Amazon’s Kiddle, but thankfully comes looking a little more like a newspaper and less like a brick. With a screen that is twice the size the Kiddle’s, Logic’s device claims to be able to provide a newspaper like layout which can be continually updated via a wireless link, storing and display hundreds of pages of newspapers, books and documents.

TG Daily has some good pics.

Here’s a little peak at the typeface I’m currently working on. There are still a few characters to go, and will need some tweaking after they are finished, so might be a little while until its all done.

Just came across this on Ffffound. Genius.

Waaaaaaay back in the early 21st century, when I had just finished studying and had landed myself a job with London based Hoop Associates, surfstation.lu was THE design portal. Sure DiK was pretty cool, and INfront was my home grown portal, but with its ‘Pick One’ user submitied photo gallery, free grunge fonts and ever updating design news, to me surfstation was the bee’s knees.

Unfortunately, as the web progressed and sites became more advanced, surfstation stayed as it was. The news became less frequent, the fonts out of date and then flickr came along … and I did what any other designer hungry for news would do. I moved on.

But – as they say – better late than never. After 6 years I’m happy to see that rather than being pulled down, Surfstation is back with a clean new look. And while there aren’t as many sections as there used to be, the guys are looking to expand the site ‘as time goes by’.

Just don’t make it aother 6 years …

Today, just as any other weekday, I stopped off on my way to the studio to pick up my morning coffee. But for the first time ever, I actually looked around at everyone else with their little plastic lidded paper cups, and thought about what a fantastic piece of design this little container really was.

I’ve been a fan of this little item for quite some time, often giving them their own little personalities and leaving them to watch on from the window ledge at my desk, but had never thought about who was actually responsible for their initial concept.

Needless to say, Wikipedia  has a good little write up on the origin of the paper cup, but nothing about who actually designed it, which is a shame. Interestingly, Dixie Cups were the first to brand the paper cup, and the logo for their cup was created by Saul Bass in 1969.

Coincidently (or not), I received an email this morning about Objetified,  Gary Hurswits (Helvetica) forthcoming documentary feature about industrial design and the objects we surround ourselves with, and with the people who make them.

The film sounds great, and I’m definitely looking forward to seeing if Gary is able to top Helvetica, though somehow, I don’t think the paper cup is going to get a mention.

I was just reading through a article over at Web Monkey about what they consider does and doesn’t work on the mobile web, which has listed magazines and newspapers in the ‘doesn’t’ category due to screen restrictions and battery limitation.

The interesting thing I find here is that the services that are listed in the ‘doesn’t’ category as see as things “the mobile web isn’t, and perhaps never will be, very good at”, which I find  unimaginative and  short sited. While the battery limitations is one that faces any mobile device, what about the screen size? Yes, I know its no DPS, and I’m sure reading the small text on the go may give you a headache, but no more than reading a novel on the tram might. And while magazines as we know them might not suit current portable devices, as we have seen in recent years, magazines have a knack for re-inventing themselves in order to take advantage of whatever distribution methods are currently available. ( this is a magazine, PDF-mags )