May 2012
1 post
2 tags
Scylla Absinthe
This was a project for my packaging design class, this past semester. Starting from scratch, I designed the entire story and identity. Illustration was done by the incredibly talented Brian Mutschler.
Scylla is said to once have been a nymph so beautiful that Poseidon, the great god of the seas, fell madly in love with her. Scylla, not reciprocating the feeling, fled to the dry land, where...
April 2012
7 posts
2 tags
WWDC
This story will sound familiar to a lot of people this morning, I fear: I woke up to a handful of text messages, emails and IM messages saying Apple had opened sales for WWDC tickets at 5:30 am. I frantically jumped out of bed and to my computer, to try and buy one immediately. Of course, as it were, all tickets were sold out.
The rules this year around state that a personal Apple developer...
2 tags
Sexism
It’s often claimed that we are creating a negative environment for women in tech, through the way we like to have fun and blow off steam. A startup is an intensely stressful environment, and staying sane is crucial. In-jokes, brogramming, and good-natured debauchery is a way to do that. If somebody cannot handle some crudeness, I’d postulate that he or she does not belong at a startup,...
2 tags
A fractal of bad design →
Alex Munroe:
I can’t even say what’s wrong with PHP, because— okay. Imagine you have uh, a toolbox. A set of tools. Looks okay, standard stuff in there.
You pull out a screwdriver, and you see it’s one of those weird tri-headed things. Okay, well, that’s not very useful to you, but you guess it comes in handy sometimes.
You pull out the hammer, but to your dismay, it has the claw...
2 tags
2 tags
App Store Retrospective
Three years ago, I wrote a summary of the major problems with Apple’s App Store as an email on the iphonesb mailing list. Three years later, I think it’s a good time to look back and see how Apple has handled the situation, and assess whether we’re better off.
App Store:
Junk Apps: The App Store is filled with junk apps made in, at most, ten minutes. The proliferation of...
Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi:
At least Bank of America got its name right. The ultimate Too Big to Fail bank really is America, a hypergluttonous ward of the state whose limitless fraud and criminal conspiracies we’ll all be paying for until the end of time. Did you hear about the plot to rig global interest rates? The $137 million fine for bilking needy schools and cities? The...
March 2012
3 posts
3 tags
America is one of the most hospitable countries. The American people are genuinely nice: they give a lot to charity, they like to have fun, they smile. It’s hard to realize how much of a difference this makes until you spend some time living somewhere else. In Russia, for example, people seem sad and distant, while in South Africa the pleasantries feel much forced and status-driven, as if...
1 tag
1 tag
February 2012
4 posts
1 tag
1 tag
Lament of the Delicious Librarian →
Jessie Char:
I did some thinking and came up with a concept to pitch: a booth modeled like a cozy library with bookshelves that look just like the ones in Delicious Library. We could dress as “Delicious Librarians” (don’t tell me that wasn’t clever!) complete with nerd glasses and name tags. My coworkers and I stayed up late one night planning everything out so we could present the idea to...
January 2012
1 post
“There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be...”
– Steve Jobs
December 2011
5 posts
2 tags
Enter the Dragon →
Mike Lee:
With what we now know about extremophiles, meteors, and the tenacity of life in general, it seems clear that life or its precursors are scattered around the galaxy like the seeds of a great tree. Every time the seed of life lands in a habitable zone, it sets off a timer as evolution races to reach a stable state before exhausting the available resources. Those that do get to move to...
Path's "+" Button →
Rick Fillion:
Details take time. Details are exhausting, and require a ton of trial and error. I spent at least 5 minutes last night just tapping Path’s button again and again looking at the animation to try to figure it out exactly, to figure out why it felt so right. Recreating it would take me much longer than those 5 minutes. This exhausting trial and error is how you can manage to create...
1 tag
November 2011
2 posts
A Conspiracy of Hogs →
Willy Staley on how McDonald’s essentially transformed being in the restaurant market into being in the commodities’ futures trading market:
At this volume, and with the impermanence of the sandwich, it only makes sense for McDonald’s to treat the sandwich as a sort of arbitrage strategy: at both ends of the product pipeline, you have a good being traded at such large volume that...
1 tag
October 2011
4 posts
1 tag
WatchFor a short 1-week diagram exploration project, I made an iPad app. The app is essentially a cocktail recipe book, and this is a quick screen capture showing its interface.
1 tag
A minimix I made yesterday, in an attempt to renew...
“The world has lost a visionary. And there may be no greater tribute to Steve’s...”
– Barack Obama
“If you knew that your computer performed two or three hundred empty cycles...”
– Zack Morris
September 2011
6 posts
“What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the...”
– Andy Warhol
3 tags
How to fix the US economy in a week*
* if the president had dictator-like powers and could bypass congress.
Monday: Morning coffee. Get ready for a crazy week. Declare economic state of emergency, or whatever other excuse will let a president do whatever he deems necessary for a week.
Start with taxes. Abolish progressive taxes. Set fixed-rate income tax at 35% on any income above $30,000. (10% goes to states.)
Tuesday: Declare...
“There are two ways to strike out: looking and swinging. Striking out looking is...”
– Chad Etzel
Jobs are obsolete
Douglas Rushkoff:
We’re living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. That’s because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working.
[…]
What we...
August 2011
8 posts
“One of the really amazing things about New York City is the extent to which the...”
– Dave Winer
“And so, as someone who does a lot of writing throughout my day, having a text...”
– Shawn Blanc reviewing Macchiato
1 tag
What Happened to Obama?
Drew Westen for the New York Times:
Those were the shoes — that was the historic role — that Americans elected Barack Obama to fill. The president is fond of referring to “the arc of history,” paraphrasing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous statement that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But with his deep-seated aversion to conflict and his...
Patrick Rhone reviews Macchiato:
Recently, Ive been taking a tour of various text editors and writing environments in an effort to, well, give them all a fair chance. I’m ashamed to admit that I’m so tied to TextEdit that I far too often give most everything else only a drive-by chance before running back to the comfort and security of what I already know. That said, while I love TextEdit, it...
3 tags
Macchiato
This past June, I attended my very first WWDC. The conference, the people and the parties were all amazing, and it was definitely a highlight. Inspired by the spirit of the conference, and all the new technologies presented, I set out to conquer my laziness and build and ship a new app.
I’m a huge fan of Markdown. So much so that I write nearly everything in it. From emails and notes, to...
1 tag
Marco Arment:
I don’t think the results of the 2012 election will significantly affect the next term: the modern Republican party controls the country’s policy and all mainstream political discourse extremely effectively, even when they don’t hold the presidency or a congressional majority.
I have no idea what the Democrats are trying to do, generally. The only coherent message they’ve...
2 tags
Paul Carr:
To make money — real money — at this game you have to attract millions, or tens of millions, of users. And when you’re dealing with those kinds of numbers, it’s literally impossible not to treat your users as pieces of data. It’s ironic, but depressingly unsurprising, that web 2.0 is using faux socialization and democratization to create a world where everyone is reduced to a number...
July 2011
2 posts
4 tags
The Incredible Hypocrisy of Modern Citizens
One thing I’ve noticed about American culture from living in the USA for over two years now is that there’s a deep kind of hypocrisy running through our morals. We condemn many things for being indecent, while we allow much worse things to go under the guise of free speech. Meanwhile, individuals feel an incredible sense of entitlement when it comes to their perceived rights.
One...
Santiago Lema on the business of selling iPhone apps:
The average iOS user has a very short attention span and there are 200 apps that do exactly the same stuff yours does. You have to win at each step, and the decision will be made in less than 60 seconds. Whether you manage to get your app in the Top 50 rankings or your app shows up through search, the same steps apply. Bringing the user to...
June 2011
2 posts
“It’s a lot easier to convince one person you’re worth a million...”
– Yours truly
On Battleships →
Scott Locklin:
Guns that squirted out bullets as heavy as a Volkswagon; 14″, 16″, 18.1″ in diameter! Armor a foot and a half thick! Giant coal and oil burning steam engines creating 150,000 horsepower and belching out enormous clouds of smoke! 60,000 ton craft at 30 knot speeds! Sweet baby Jesus, that’s damn cool. However, it was never real practical, except for the occasional shore...
May 2011
8 posts
Unknown Author on what you choose to drink:
I like to order Martinis. Sometimes I stick with whiskey on ice. My friend likes white wine.
Apparently these drinks say things about us. They say more than “he likes gin.” They’re easy targets. “That’s an alcoholic’s drink,” I’ve heard. “That’s a girl drink.”
I reject that.
[…]
A drink isn’t a girl drink or a tough guy drink....
1 tag
So I got a lava lamp. Using the following image as a wallpaper right now:
1 tag
Level 2 Finals
I just finished my second year of Graphic Design at the California College of the Arts. What a relief it is to be done with finals… I really enjoyed this semester—and created some work I’m very proud of—but after 8 months of intensive design school, I’m ready for a summer where I can focus on personal projects and the cool stuff we’re building at Chartboost.
A small selection...
“Maybe we should always show pictures. Bin Laden, pictures of our wounded service...”
– Jon Stewart