Danny DeBelius

chartsnthings: Shan Carter (and an army of others) share some sketches from the NYT electoral map

Tue, 15 May 2012 05:35:46 -0700

chartsnthings: Shan Carter (and an army of others) share some sketches from the NYT electoral map:

…no one was really super thrilled with maps as the main conduit for the analysis. Instead, they decided on minimizing the geography and using “bins” for states. (Shan has sort of been obsessed with “bins” since 2008, when his dream of having states magically fall into buckets on election night ultimately didn’t pan out. I personally had to cheer him up after that and it was not pretty.)

Here is another great reminder for map-happy news nerds that sometimes the important patterns of a story are not really geographic in a way that is best conveyed through a choropleth or proportional symbol map. This graphic is brilliant and the process behind it is well worth your time.

Visited the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library today and the Air...

Mon, 07 May 2012 16:51:20 -0700

Visited the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library today and the Air Force One Pavilion was worth the price of admission.

City of Angels (Taken with Instagram at Griffith Observatory)

Sun, 06 May 2012 20:50:20 -0700

City of Angels (Taken with Instagram at Griffith Observatory)

Paper has been hyped to me by multiple extremely smart,...

Tue, 01 May 2012 15:48:00 -0700

Paper has been hyped to me by multiple extremely smart, extremely talented folks at NPR, but I remained skeptical given my utter uselessness with at least three other drawing apps I’ve tried on iPad so far.

I’ve come around after spending some time with it this afternoon. Paper removes the paralysis of choice Adobe Ideas gave me with infinite brush size and color combinations while retaining just enough stroke variations to effectively translate the travel of a Wacom Bamboo stylus into UI sketches that don’t make me feel like I am a total fraud.

If you’ve been frustrated by the results other iPad drawing apps have yielded, I highly recommend you give tablet sketching another try with Paper.

"We are tempted to think that our little “sips” of online connection add up to a big gulp of real..."

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 08:06:38 -0700

“We are tempted to think that our little “sips” of online connection add up to a big gulp of real conversation. But they don’t.”

- Sherry Turkle, The New York Times

Stunning work and a fascinating look inside war...

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 05:41:57 -0700

Stunning work and a fascinating look inside war photography.

timelightbox:

Photographer Ben Lowy discussed his work, which documents places including Haiti, Darfur, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya during times of conflict.

Serendipitous. (Taken with Instagram at NPR Headquarters)

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 08:55:54 -0700

Serendipitous. (Taken with Instagram at NPR Headquarters)

"If the definition of “open” is “that which can be indexed and monetized by Google,” maybe we need a..."

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 08:33:46 -0700

“If the definition of “open” is “that which can be indexed and monetized by Google,” maybe we need a new word.”

- Liz Gannes, AllThingsD

Was in the neighborhood. #obligatory (Taken with Instagram at...

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 08:51:00 -0700

Was in the neighborhood. #obligatory (Taken with Instagram at The White House)

Nielsen is wrong on mobile

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 09:48:00 -0700

Nielsen is wrong on mobile:

Josh Clark (emphasis mine):

Mobile isn’t just ‘mobile’. It’s also the couch, the kitchen, the three-hour layover, all places where we have time and attention to spare. 42 per cent of mobile users say they use it for entertainment when they’re bored. Those aren’t 10-second sessions. That means we shouldn’t design only for stunted sessions or limited use cases.

Say it over and over until you’ve exorcised the mental image of your user typing furiously on her iPhone as she frantically runs down a crowded sidewalk, looking for her next 10-second morsel of information. That user undoubtedly exists, but we have to stop assuming this is the only mobile use case.

Skeuomorphs? We don’t need no stinking...

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 07:26:00 -0700

Skeuomorphs? We don’t need no stinking skeuomorphs…

Propellerhead’s deceptively simple new music creation app Figure takes a very different tack than Apple’s GarageBand in its approach to synth UI. While there is much to appreciate in GarageBand’s expansive capabilities, I have often felt that the team erred on the side of aesthetics at the expense of usability. The primary offender in this category is their implementation of physical knob skeuomorphs, which are a constant source of frustration for me.

Figure, on the other hand, gives us subtle visual cues to the “knobs” controlling the rhythm of each piece of the drum machine without a dogmatic adherence to the physical behavior of a knob. The Figure knobs are delightfully simple to manipulate by dragging up and down, and the knob expands to make the rhythmic value visible while manipulating the control.

This is beautiful work that I hope Apple’s designers will take note of.

NYC

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 15:37:00 -0700

Manhattan from the Brooklyn Bridge

Brooklyn Bridge

New York by Gehry

Tower reflection

Memorial

1 World Trade Center

Tower reflection II

30 Rock

30 Rock

Midtown mist

NYC

Great, Another Bootstrap Site

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 09:36:00 -0800

Great, Another Bootstrap Site:

Paul Scrivens:

If you have done your time and learned design or coding, then frameworks offer you a great way to take some shortcuts, but only because you know how to tweak your way through them when things get rough. If you are using Bootstrap to quickly get a site out the door, I understand the importance of launching fast and early, but spend a couple of hours making sure your site doesn’t look like the thousand other Bootstrap sites out there.

Nailed it. Bootstrap is an incredible tool that is easily abused by those who see it as a theme. Don’t look at Bootstrap as a coat of paint to slap haphazardly onto your site. See it as a power sprayer that will let you blast through some of the solved problems of front-end code organization so you can focus on the details of the interface.

"These are “thought-leader gatherings” where “rock stars” emerge from their “silos” to learn about..."

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 06:56:00 -0800

“These are “thought-leader gatherings” where “rock stars” emerge from their “silos” to learn about “disruptive” ideas that have been carefully “curated.” ”

- Benjamin Wallace, New York Magazine, on the proliferation of TED and similar conferences.

Cowboy Junkies Tiny Desk Concert (Taken with Instagram at NPR...

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 10:53:49 -0800

Cowboy Junkies Tiny Desk Concert (Taken with Instagram at NPR Headquarters)

Tiny Desk Concerts with the Cranberries are very well attended,...

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 10:48:00 -0800

Tiny Desk Concerts with the Cranberries are very well attended, it turns out.

The packaging for Tycho’s “Dive” album is...

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 11:57:00 -0800

The packaging for Tycho’s “Dive” album is gorgeous, which I was completely unaware of having been introduced to the record through Rdio. Currently mourning the slow-moving death of album art at the hands of digital delivery. (Taken with instagram)

"At the very least, Hitchens’s antireligious writings carried a whiff of something absent in many of..."

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 06:22:35 -0800

“At the very least, Hitchens’s antireligious writings carried a whiff of something absent in many of atheism’s less talented apostles — a hint that he was not so much a disbeliever as a rebel, and that his atheism was mostly a political romantic’s attempt to pick a fight with the biggest Tyrant he could find.”

- Ross Douthat

Really enjoyed Bill Frisell’s take on “Strawberry...

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 11:33:00 -0800

Really enjoyed Bill Frisell’s take on “Strawberry Fields” at today’s Tiny Desk Concert.

Fonts In Use: BostonGlobe.com

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 11:22:10 -0800

Fonts In Use: BostonGlobe.com:

Stephen Coles:

Despite the emphasis on maintaining the newspaper’s identity, BostonGlobe.com is not merely a skeuomorphic replication of the printed paper. Font sizes, column widths, and navigation are informed by best practices in digital media, and specifically “responsive” design, resizing and repositioning text and images for optimal viewing at any window size. Not every window width results in a beautiful page, but overall it’s a much better and more consistent experience from the big screen to the iPhone than most digital newspapers today.

The calculus of brand consistency vs. page weight is critical in making decisions about typography on the web, particularly for a responsive site that will see significant mobile browser use.

This is as complex a case study as you’ll find on the subject, and the insight from Miranda Mulligan, Upstatement and Filament Group is invaluable.