I’ll be in my chair all day coding up the portfolio, thought you might enjoy some of the same tunes.

Here’s the deal, lots of media people are talking about the “wasted potential” time because people are playing games like Farmville. The thing people forget when doing the math for hours wasted playing these games is that the people who play these games aren’t typically the people capable of curing cancer. That’s why they’re playing Facebook games. So, is X million hours really “wasted”? Still probably, but it’s certainly not fair to say that we’ve lost X million cancer-curing hours.

Problem 2:

These exploits arguably fall into line with something Van Cleave had said about how people can be heavy gamers and still find balance. “I know plenty of people with other activities and interests, their health, family, friends, and work, and who game 10 to 25 hours a week. And on top of that, they’re good parents, they have a good job. That sounds pretty healthy to me,” he said.

Uh… 10-25 hours a week? At just over an hour a day I’m willing to bet they’d be right at home next to most families’ TV watching schedule. When did average TV watcher become “heavy” gamer?

I’ve probably made this argument before, but I’ll say it again: video games can’t be any worse for you than passively watching tellie. Hand eye coordination, problem solving, reflex twitching, teamwork, Mountain Dew drinking. You know, all those wholesome things. All those things you don’t do just sitting there spineless on the sofa.

So play on! You could be doing a lot worse.

Or, for extra awesome points, actually do something awesome like cure cancer or develop a cultish religion based on this blog.

First try, just a haphazard spewing of elements over the page. It’s busy and visually annoying. Simplify:

The new portfolio should be unveiled sometime around the end of the week and you’ll notice a very strong branding similarity between these last two cards and the site itself. Since I’m designing both simultaneously, it’s interesting to see how they draw off each other; I just thought of something while doing these cards that might end up looking really cool on the site.

So, not the final product. Just experimenting and playing. There’s a sale on the cool recycled brown pulp cards which would give it a nice texture. I’m not sure exactly how the ink colours will interact with the brown, but they’re cheap enough to experiment.

I’m definitely drawing inspiration laughs from this guy:

But although his result is ridiculous I do agree with the underlying statement. It’s not about who you are (CEO, grunt worker, etc) but what it is you can do for whoever you hand that card to. Draw crowds? Design things? Awesome. Say that instead.

My cards are sort of different, and this is where I’m skirting the lines of the new media. What is a business card in the days of simple Google searching? I’m fortunate to have a unique name in that SEO-wise I’m sort of automatically there, my problem is that it’s an awkward word to remember. If nothing else my card should have “Letkeman” on it. From there you can find everything else about me. I’ll make it one step easier: a URL.

Contact information I’m debating. For all intents and purposes I don’t have a phone number. Fax machines were outdated before I was born. That leaves email and snail mail. I don’t really have a practical fixed address being a student and no one mails anything anymore anyway. Email. There’s a contact form on the website. Do I include one on the card anyway? I wonder if there’s something psychological about sending an email from their preferred client instead of trusting the internet and it’s forms to send the message for them. Something more personal to have that ‘direct line’ either real or perceived. It’s also a subtle call to action. There’s a card with one option: go to the address. From there the CTA path is learning more then hiring Brennan. But we can bypass all of that with the direct email. Communicate with me, it says.

So, that’s part of what I’m up to this week. It’s a holiday; I’m excited to use all my free time to work and get things knocked off the list.

Simply fantastic work. The above were taken from Justin’s official gallery but personally I like the snippets found in the Dribbble.

I love that vaguely Fallout future retro whimsy with references to the rockets and plasma weapons next to cantilevers and Eames lounges next to art deco style backdrops. It’s so mismatched and comes together brilliantly.

Photos click through to source.

I know I can be harsh in my holistic approach to what design should be, but I’ve really come a long way with ignoring it. I’ve grown to accept that other people like the uselessly ornate and that’s okay. I’ve even grown to like some useless things myself just because they’re lovely. That’s remarkable.

And then (and I know I need to stop this) I browse popular industrial design blogs that promote things like the above as “good” and it bothers me. I feel like I’m allowed to be bothered by this because it’s not a question of taste – it’s not something that someone else might find attractive and I simply don’t, that isn’t the issue. My issue with this is it’s solving a problem that to the best of my knowledge, no one actually has. I could be wrong, and even if I am, here’s why it shouldn’t happen anyway:

It’s made of paper cut with perforations. I’m glad it’s not plastic, but it’s still a tragic waste to be cutting down the fantastic design that is the tree – the self replicating, self healing, adaptable thing that gives life to the earth and all that it contains via air purification, shelter, erosion control and works through every stage of it’s life cycle until it renews itself 100% back into the ground from which it came… it’s marvelous, really. Our design pales in comparison. But no, we’re going to cut those down and make little triangle plates so that we can “avoid getting our hands dirty” with the food we’re eating, which, I don’t know how they eat pizza, but can easily be done already.

Part two: energy cost. How are the perforations being made? A stamp, perhaps. Lasers? Water jet? There isn’t any way to manufacture this without using some energy. Then shipping. Then the poor guy in the back of the pizza place who has to not only place the thing into the box but also make sure he’s cut the pizza and rotated it to exactly match the pre-made lines. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a pizza cut before, but it’s a large blade that just sort of guillotines back and forth a few times at haphazard angles. It works really well when you aren’t measuring to see if every piece is of equal wedge, which brings up another issue: forced sizes. You know the difference between Pizza Hut and Domino’s slices; the former has 20 thin slices per pizza and the latter has like, five giant ones. They each have their reasons, I’m sure, and they’ll continue to do it that way.

As a side note while searching for the above image I found these and winced. Forget the 14 year old boy aesthetics, why do they need suspension? It doesn’t even make sense.

Anyway.

TL;DR Solves a problem no one has, contributes to the greater problem of obscene waste / lack of trees, annoys the people preparing the pizza.

You shouldn’t be surprised to learn that after clicking through to the original source it was via Yanko “design”

The everpresent MG has some reasonable words regarding this quote by Samsung’s Chris Moseley:

TVs are ultimately about picture quality. Ultimately. How smart they are…great, but let’s face it that’s a secondary consideration. The ultimate is about picture quality and there is no way that anyone, new or old, can come along this year or next year and beat us on picture quality.

[1]

but an even more immediate example comes to mind: have you watched a streaming Netflix movie recently? My internet connection is no slouch and it looks terrible. But, I watch it because of the content and because it’s still easier / cheaper / faster / more convenient than driving to the store and buying the Bluray. Same with Youtube, granted in a different capacity. But we put up with some pretty abhorrent quality given the ability that’s already there (compressed 640×480 videos stretched to a 1920×1280 screen? Really? Because we can’t wait for buffering…)

So picture quality: Pfft. Convenience. Ease. Now.

And if Samsung doesn’t pick up on that quick they’ll go the same way Kodak did recently – trampled by their own failure to move.

We walk out of the theater into the crisp night and laugh, “That movie was ridiculous” and proceed to point out plot flaws and the bizarre events that occurred. But there’s a distinction, I’ve realized, between realism and reasonableness.

We use the word realistic to mean both and it’s not quite accurate: suspension of disbelief is actually really easy and we don’t mind much at all that there’s aliens or zombies or people with super powers roaming about. That’s fine, it’s a movie made to be fictional and larger than life; we don’t dislike that. The parts that we really mean when we say ‘unrealistic’ is that the characters didn’t do the reasonable thing given their situation.

Transformers was decent (certainly better than it’s sequels) and while we’re entirely happy to suspend disbelief for giant alien robots than choose to take the forms of American earth cars we get really upset (if subconscious) in the part where the awesome giant robot gives the AllSpark cube to the relatively weak and flimsy human to run through the battlezone with. These sorts of plot decisions are made to sensationalize the movie but it actually resonates the opposite with us as viewers because it isn’t a reasonable action for characters in that situation.

So it’s not about how real the situation could be, it’s how reasonable the characters act within it.

We have a lot of classics in the action movie category like Terminator, Predator, Rambo and Robocop that are actually very reasonable movies because of the perhaps flat acting and very static characterizations. Are they ridiculous? Yeah, sure. But the characters (namely those played by Ahnold) behave in a predictable manner. He’s a robot sent back in time to protect understandably afraid and confused humans. This is a dynamic that feels right when played out. It isn’t realistic (time travel, robot singularity etc. etc.) but the interactions between the flat, unfeeling robot and the weak and dazed humans makes sense if we as the audience were put in the place of those actors. Compare this back to Transformers where if the robot gave us the AllSpark we’d look at him like he’s crazy: “Uh… why? You’ve got guns for arms and a 10 meter stride. You take it.”

The recent rash of Marvel movies are played out in the same way: Wolverine is actually a much better character than Magneto was in First Class – one knows what he wants and does it. It’s reasonable. It’s slightly unfair to compare static and dynamic characters like that, but the way Magneto acts when confronted with things doesn’t really make sense and we lose that connection to him since we silently deplore his actions. It’s like those horror movies where the girl is in the house and we know the killer is upstairs and instead of getting the heck away she decides to explore in the dark alone and weaponless and we sit there thinking “NO! What are you doing?! Don’t go up there. Go to the police! Get away!” This is done intentionally, of course, for that tension, but it shouldn’t be happening with the character’s we’re supposed to identify with.

Even insanity can be reasonable. We look at movies like Memento and characters like Dark Knight’s Joker or Inception’s Cobb (notice: all Nolan films) and we can actually develop a fairly deep bond with characters who although don’t represent us do the actions we would do if put in that situation. Now, are we insane? No. And it’s not really fair to put ourselves in Joker’s shoes since he is actually crazy, but his actions are reasonable given that characterization. In Memento he’s just trying to figure things out like any of us would. Inception is interesting because every character except for Cobb is static and serving him, so in a way each of them is a splinter of his personality (after all, it is his dream) and combines to create one unit who we can identify with. The actions of the insane might be unstable and unpredictable but still remain reasonable to us.

So, in the blue corner we have things like Mad Men or Memento – entirely earthly, normal, real environment with people acting reasonably within them. The yellow might be the Terminators and Predators or Shaun of the Dead type where there is some element of fiction to the world but the overall reactions to things makes sense to us. Green: any number of dramas and soaps or the serial killer movie (where the killer is just a normal – if deranged – human) where the characters do things that don’t make any sense given their environment and situation. I might even put Drive on the line between blue and green; it was realistic and worked but some of his actions made no sense to me. Red could be most things that are in theaters these days: The G.I Joes and Transformer 3s. The Fast and the Furious series started in the yellow and has moved down over time. These are the movies where even if we can suspend disbelief for the unrealistic aspects the people who inhabit the world don’t seem to follow any logic for their actions and so alienate us as an audience.

I’m entirely happy watching the yellow category – often those are the best – taking some fantastic fictional realm and providing a good adventure within them. It’s not that I’m a stickler for “Oh, well that would never work in real life” because those things are the cool part. Neo can fight an entire mob of Smith agents? Sure, he’s the one. His reasons for fighting them make enough sense that we don’t even mind the sheer ridiculousness of the fight scene itself. That’s the entertainment.

TL;DR  It’s not about realism, it’s about having a character that does what makes sense instead what would raise the stakes purely for the sake of arbitrary sensationalism.

You’ll probably have to click for the bigger version to see the full effect.

Typically used for compression, the patterns are a way of taking very few colours and creating the image based on the illusion gradient that your mind can be tricked into. So, each of these images is made up of four or less colours – often only two. We see the shades and values based on how those extreme values are diffused into patterns.

I really love everything behind this. The illusion of it. Our minds are so cool.

The photos are my own, taken from this old album and run through Photoshop’s compressors.

The women of the world ask me a lot if there’s a Mrs. Acrylo Blog; well, of course there is. You’re her. And you’re still as perfect as the day we met.