First off, every Every Frame a Painting video is worth your time, but the latest one about the state of cinematic music composition is extra fascinating. I found lots of parallels for any industry that can be tempted to (over)imitate itself—especially when the process includes lots of people and phases.
Creativity and uniqueness take some risk.
I love burgers, but wasn’t fully-aware of beef’s tax on our climate/environment. As Pat O. Brown, CEO and founder of Impossible Foods, states:
If you eat a quarter-pound impossible burger instead of a quarter-pound burger made from a cow, you save greenhouse gas emissions that are equivalent to driving 18 miles my yourself in a typical American car, you save water thats equivalent to taking a 10 minute shower, and free up a land area of 75 sqft.
I can’t wait to try one of these.
I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Jeff Veen’s new podcast, Presentable. In the latest episode (#7) with Stanley Wood the two discuss how style guides, process, and org structure fit together. One bit in particular that stood out to me was where (at the 32 minute mark) Jeff asked about the Spotify team structure and how Guilds come into play. It seems to break down like this:
While this may not be totally unique to Spotify, hearing phrases like “cut across” paint a clear picture in my mind of how groups like these need to be able to move laterally across the entire organization as well as how these groups can coexist within the context of business goals and road maps. Great stuff—the entire episode is worth a listen.
I’m adding Sharp Sans to my list of fonts I hope to find an opportunity to work with soon.
A description from Village Type & Design:
Sharp Sans injects some much needed humanism into the Futura model. With its sheered terminals and true italics, Sharp Sans combines the appealing typographic compensation of the grotesque, with the plump circular bowls of the geometric. The result is a typeface suited for both text and display use that breaths life into the genre of the geometric sans.
Let’s just take a minute to bask in how cool everything associated with Stranger Things is. The synth tones of the opening credits and the appropriately evocative use of ITC Benguiat and ITC Avant Garde Gothic had me hooked. I love it like I love the Halt and Catch Fire intro.
The texture on the lighting and the way those G’s slide into the N’s… There’s so much to love.
And then I saw the Struzan-esque poster art done by Kyle Lambert. It’s right up my alley (having recently commissioned a similar work from Paul Shipper for The Many Faces Of), and it drives home the Stephen Spielberg & Stephen King inspiration around the show itself.
I don’t know the television & film business, but I can’t imagine a world where this show exists without the internet, and thus, the Netflix create-your-own-content approach. More of this, please!
Fonts In Use just published an excellent writeup with more detail about the show. Miguel Sanz also tracked down the creators of the main titles, Imaginary Forces.
Letterboxd is easily one of my favorite sites. I started logging movies in 2013, and began using it to find movies to watch shortly after. The community is great, and its reviews rarely (or never) reach Amazon Watch Instant levels of unhelpfulness. There are a few views I find incredibly useful on the site:
http://letterboxd.com/films/by/rating/
View the highest rated movies on Letterboxd. Sort by availibity (select your streaming service of choice), or filter to hide the ones you’ve already seen. Thanks (again) to the community, this list is top-notch.
http://letterboxd.com/lists/
There are piles of great lists to dig through. Here are some of my favorites:
http://letterboxd.com/trentwalton/year/2016/
(See also: 2014 & 2015) If you regularly log/add films (in addition to marking them as liked or watched), you are rewarded with a year in review page. In part, the pages inspired me to be more purposeful about what I watch. Instead of just using trailers and recommendation engines to find movies, I think more about influences, themes, and directors.
http://letterboxd.com/director/alfred-hitchcock/
http://letterboxd.com/director/michael-mann/
These days I follow directors more than actors or franchises—recently enjoying Hitchcock and Mann streaks. I’ll watch most/all of a director’s films over the course of weeks/months and see where the thread leads. With Hitchcock, it led me to wonder what else Joseph Cotton starred in, which led to discovering Touch of Evil and The Third Man.
I’ve been in a boat similar to Khoi for a while—wanting to spend less of my screen time on television and more on movies. Letterboxd has added structure and purpose to that endeavor.
Ok. Sign up, get the app, and go pro!
I always get excited when I see a new release from Com Truise. The album art is consistently great…
I’ve been thoroughly enjoying this new web series featuring rapper/chef Action Bronson. He seems to know his stuff culinarily, and his strong personality somehow disarms others—resulting in some surprisingly candid interviews.
My favorite episode so far features Top Chef competitor, Isaac Toups.
I’ve been using Sass variables for quite a while, so I’m interested to see how native CSS variables (AKA CSS custom properties) compare to preprocessor variables.
Philip Walton does a great job of explaining the difference between native and preprocessor variables. He also outlines some potential uses in his post. I like that he calls out “CSS custom properties” as being the more accurate (and in my opinion, more intuitive) term …
CSS preprocessors are fantastic tools, but their variables are static and lexically scoped. Native CSS variables, on the other hand, are an entirely different kind of variable: they’re dynamic, and they’re scoped to the DOM. In fact, I think it’s confusing to call them variables at all. They’re actually CSS properties, which gives them an entirely different set of capabilities and allows them to solve an entirely different set of problems.
Pretty cool stuff—don’t miss the helpful CodePen demos he made to accompany the post. (1 & 2)