My jaw hit the floor when I saw the visuals paired with this Froont post on the 9 Basic Principles of Responsive Web Design. Each animation does such a great job of showing the impact/benefits of each principle. Amazing work, Sandijs! Here’s a sample, but be sure to check out the entire post.
Naomi Atkinson and James White (aka SignalNoise) created an absolutely glorious 2014 riff on Microsoft’s 1994 homepage for Net Magazine.
Read the post about the restoration of the 1994 homepage here.
I saw Ghostbusters on the big screen for the first time this weekend. The larger scale made it easier to look past the foreground and appreciate some of the more subtle things happening off to the side. First, we have the housekeeper trying to extinguish flames with a spray bottle:
And easily my favorite of all is Rick Moranis mimicking Harold Ramis:
Bill Murray on being relaxed & being good:
I think the only reason I’ve had the career life that I’ve had is that someone told me some secrets early on about living. You can do the very best you can when you’re very, very relaxed, no matter what it is or what your job is, the more relaxed you are the better you are. That’s sort of why I got into acting. I realized the more fun I had, the better I did it. And I thought, that’s a job I could be proud of. It’s changed my life learning that, and it’s made me better at what I do.
I thoroughly enjoyed Mark Simonson’s TypeCon2014 talk on the Romance of Offset. In it, he shares his earliest work as a graphic designer doing paste ups for his Mad-Magazine-esque school paper.
You can watch the talk on Vimeo here.
One of my favorite experiences in recent years was writing for The Manual, Issue 2. I’m thrilled to see them back with a new logo (done by Brent Couchman of Moniker), a web edition, and a Kickstarter campaign to support their continued success.
There are a lot of backing options, so be sure to support The Manual on Kickstarter here.
I highly recommend reading Cap Watkins’s post, The Boring Designer. Here are a couple of my favorite bits:
The boring designer realizes that the glory isn’t in putting their personal stamp on everything they touch. In fact, most of the time, it’s about leaving no trace of themselves. The boring designer loves consistency. The boring designer loves a style guide.
Sometimes that means re-skinning a UI and making some light design/copy changes to enable the engineering team to focus on making the page loads lightning fast. Other times it means taking a V1 idea and making it a V2 or V3 idea in order to prioritize other features. Whatever the case, the boring designer supports the team and doubles down on the plan.
I’m loving the work Andy Helms did in conjunction with the gang at Cartoon Hangover. Meet SpaceBear!
This spring Microsoft’s Chris Balt asked Paravel to recreate the first version of the Microsoft homepage, originally built in 1994. We initially thought about ‘modernizing’ the page with media queries and other current HTML & CSS, but realized there was far greater value in being faithful to the original, so we were.
I remember when Benson Chan told us that we’d be working with Microsoft to design the 17th version of their homepage. It set a tone of reverence and respect for all the hard work that came before. But all that hard work—where was it now? I couldn’t help but think, “I wish I could see the other sixteen versions. I wish they were all still live.”
Picking apart the code would be invaluable, even more so accessing a README file that outlined the problems of the day and how they were solved. Similar to the way NASA hosts mission transcripts online, what if we launched sites with README files and pledged to keep them on the web permanently so that future generations of web builders could study them. Take dconstruct.org as an example. It’s archived annually back to 2005. Greg Storey takes this idea further, and I like it:
We need a museum! An institution that can help preserve first-hand accounts of how things were done, what went down in the past. The working files, important emails, formative essays, and forgotten blog posts. We need to preserve the story of how web design began and how it has evolved to today.
I’d love to see such an institution exist. It would certainly need participation from individuals as well as larger organizations. It’d need to be impartial, well-funded, and staffed full-time. I’d kickstart something like this. I’d pay dues or make annual donations to help because I believe that as an industry we could do a better job of documenting our history and progress. Dave Rupert brings up some questions about this institution in his post:
I don’t know what it looks like, who builds it, who curates it, how “archeologists” submit fossils to it, but I’d love to see something like that exist.
Of course I don’t have all the answers, but I do have some thoughts…
The original version of the Microsoft homepage may still be sitting on a hard drive deep within Redmond headquarters, but I think our recreation will serve as a great stand-in until it is unearthed. I applaud Microsoft for making this a priority and hope that other organizations that were instrumental in shaping the web follow suit. There is a lot of value in knowing how the web has evolved. As scrappy as the web was (and still may be) there’s still a wealth of wisdom and ingenuity that has formed the foundation we build upon. We’d be irresponsible not to seek to preserve and understand it, and now is the time to do it. Sites like SpaceJam shouldn’t be the exception, they should be the rule.
Thanks to Dan Schlitzkus for his work on the Star Map graphic!
