Yazid Azahari

alanvanroemburg: Apple iCloud icon golden ratio Alan van...

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 19:34:43 +0800

alanvanroemburg:

Apple iCloud icon golden ratio

Alan van Roemburg thanks to Takamasa!

"Less is more."

Tue, 10 May 2011 05:50:48 +0800

“Less is more.”

- Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Tracklist:1. ‘You Know What I Mean’ by Cults2....

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 07:49:27 +0800

Tracklist:

1. ‘You Know What I Mean’ by Cults
2. ‘6AM’ by The Holidays
3. ‘Tokyo’ by California Wives
4. ‘Big Jet Plane’ by Angus & Julia Stone
5. ‘Everybody Knows’ by Kids of 88
6. ‘Sloppy Little Kisses’ by More Amor
7. ‘Pumped Up Kicks’ by Foster The People
8. ‘When I’m Small’ by Phantogram
9. ‘Fall Hard’ (Passion Pit Summertime Radio Remix) by Shout Out Louds
10. ‘I Go Away’ (The Oos & Aahs Dubstep Remix) by MNDR
11. ‘Animale’ (feat. Dragonette) (VIP Mix) by Don Diablo
12. ‘Sabali’ (Miike Snow Remix) by Amadou & Mariam
13. ‘Easy To Love’ by Ivan & Alyosha
14. ‘Runaway’ (Kanye West Cover) by Sam Brown
15. ‘Heat Lightin” by 1,2,3
16. ‘California Sunrise’ by Dirty Gold
17. ‘Rainbow’ by Oh Land
18. ‘Ticking Heart’ by The One AM Radio
19. ‘Shake’ by Jared Mees & the Grown Children

Download

wes-anderson: Wes Anderson & Marc Jacobs Cameo: LV bag...

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 17:09:46 +0800

wes-anderson:

Wes Anderson & Marc Jacobs

Cameo: LV bag from Darjeeling Limited.

“You Know What I Mean” by Cults.

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 15:24:00 +0800

“You Know What I Mean” by Cults.

ben: MoMA purchased some fonts recently (23 to be exact), most...

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 10:46:00 +0800

ben:

MoMA purchased some fonts recently (23 to be exact), most of which having some sort of historical significance.

One of these typefaces was OCR-A by American Type Founders, which is probably best known as the font used for routing numbers on checks. It’s used in other business contexts as well because it was designed to be perfectly readable by computers. The characters are distinct enough that individual characters won’t get mistaken for other ones.

I love the fact that each character is uniquely distinguishable.

You gotta hear this one song - it’ll change your life, I...

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 00:21:44 +0800

You gotta hear this one song - it’ll change your life, I swear.

This is so fun.

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 13:15:00 +0800

This is so fun.

Photo

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 06:18:00 +0800

He on a boat. He got skill. Make sure you check out the full...

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 05:30:00 +0800

He on a boat. He got skill. Make sure you check out the full song.

PS: He kinda looks like that actor. Jon Seda (had to IMDb “Selena”. lol).

Anyone wanna start a folk band with me so we can do amazing...

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 07:19:00 +0800

Anyone wanna start a folk band with me so we can do amazing stunts like this? No pay, beard and banjo is a plus.

Video

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 15:55:39 +0800

Photo

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 22:51:00 +0800

Marie Antoinette (2006)

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 12:26:10 +0800

Marie Antoinette (2006)

PSDs and OCD

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 14:29:00 +0800

Every now and I again I’ll make something, and for a period of time after “completing” it, I’ll continually revisit it, staring at it and nitpicking on details, trying to see if it’s perfect and if there are any improvements to be made. Everyone knows someone annoying like this. These details can be anything from a line, a color difference, a shadow, even a pixel.

At the moment, this little white triangle is causing me a tiny bit of grief:

If you’ve been following my twitter you might’ve known that I’ve just recently put up the latest installment in my series of Magic Hour Mixtapes. I finished up the cover art pretty late last night and uploaded it to Flickr (where I usually post up the tracklist and download link).

After that I attached it to the songs, compiled a zip, and set it to upload before going to bed. When I woke up this morning, Photoshop was still running with with the cover file open so I ended up looking at it again. Then I started to wonder…

“Does the ‘M’ look enough like of an ‘M’?”

That’s when the little white triangle came to mind. I figured if I placed it on top of the shape it’ll make it look more like an ‘M’, so I tried it out and made a second version.

With or without, toggle layer visibility, zoom in, zoom out, I still couldn’t decide which was better. Eventually I figured I wouldn’t be bothered with re-uploading everything if I decided to change it anyway, so I just let it go. But obviously since I took the effort to actually write about this I probably still care one way or another. Someone tell me which one looks better. Or not.

It’s like Claire Dunphy with her perfectionism and getting a family portrait done in last season’s finale of Modern Family. I think the message they tried to make was that sometimes it’s the imperfections that make something work. I think I’m just trying to say that sometimes we simply can’t help it. You should see the minuscule changes I did to the already minimalistic cover of the last mixtape. lol

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 18:00:00 +0800

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)

"Some people want to make the world a better place. I just wanna make the world a better-looking..."

Sat, 12 Mar 2011 16:00:26 +0800

“Some people want to make the world a better place. I just wanna make the world a better-looking place.”

- Banksy

The Development of the Biohazard Symbol

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 19:24:00 +0800

I’ve been noticing this symbol quite a lot lately, and I started to wonder about who the designer was and the story behind its conception. According to this New York Times article, it was designed by now-retired environmental-health engineer Charles Baldwin in 1966, who at the time was developing containment systems with the Dow Chemical company for the Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health.

He employed the help of the Dow marketing people with the original design brief of creating something unique, strikingly memorable, but meaningless (so the meaning could be educated to people). There was yet to be a standard for this type of symbol, and there was an obvious need for it. The process was an interesting one, and one which demonstrated consideration of several good logo design principles.

Uniqueness. They compiled a collection of 24 different symbols - a mix of half a dozen of their original symbols, and other commonly recognizable symbols (such as the Planter’s peanut man, the Shell symbol, the Red Cross, the swastika) - and presented it to people from survey groups across the country for them to guess their meanings. The biohazard symbol got the fewest guesses.

Memorability. The following week, the same set of people were presented with the same set of symbols, plus 36 more common ones, but this time they were asked to indicate which they remembered the most. They picked out the biohazard symbol.

Color. The blaze orange color decision was inspired by the fact that it was identified in Arctic exploration as being most visible under most conditions.

Function, Versatility. The symbol’s three-sided nature came about because they figured a mobile biohazardous container was likely to end up in different positions. Also, it had to be easily stenciled.

I couldn’t find much more discussing the development of the actual aesthetics of the symbol, but in my opinion it contributes to a few other pretty important principles.

Simplicity. The symbol is comprised of fairly simplistic shapes (which also aids in its memorability).

Semantic. Although it was initially intended to be meaningless, this was only done so for the ultimate purpose of eventually creating meaning. The shape of the design contributes a lot to its meaning. The circular shapes are natural and organic, but are contradicted by its sharp edges. The resulting tension that this creates works perfectly for use as a warning symbol.

Almost half a century later, this symbol is still widely utilised globally. I think any designer would be happy with that kind of impact and contribution. Charles Baldwin obviously did his homework.

Photo

Sat, 05 Mar 2011 23:28:30 +0800

The Internets, the Land of Dreams

Sat, 05 Mar 2011 15:23:00 +0800

Last year, after a few months of being a registered iPhone developer and feeling like a bum for not having anything to show for it, I gave myself the goal of getting an app up on the App Store. At the end of May I was told to take some time off work to clear some leave, so I thought I’d take this time to embark on a fun little personal iPhone app toe-dipping project.

There’s a common guiding question in software development when building something (or probably even any other type of business endeavor for that matter), and that question is: “What problem are you solving?”. For me, this one particular problem came to mind: we could never decide where to go for lunch. What if someone (or some thing) could do this for me? Light bulb.

In early June, as an attempt to jumpstart my efforts, I decided to pay $99 to register myself as a paid developer. Made some sketches, read some sites, watched some YouTube videos, pulled some hair. By the end of the month, The Fate Machine - the product of my resoluteness, boredom, glory, and temporary lapse of contractual office obligations - my answer to universal indecisiveness - was approved. It was exhilarating.

I made 2 versions: one free, one paid. I set the paid at $0.99. I even released an update to the free version incorporating ads from Apple’s iAd service.

Last night out of curiosity I decided to check up on its performance after several months of not doing so, and according to the stats from June 2010 up to the point of writing, my silly little baby raked in 84.57 USD in App Sales and Ad Revenue! That’s apparently like almost a day and a half of minimum wage work in the States!

At the rate that it’s going, I might even be pulling in a profit of a couple of dollars by the time June comes around (and my annual Paid Developer fee is due).

JEAH ROLLING IN THE CENTS.

But seriously though folks do some things for the love, not the money. And maybe do it on the Internet.