March 22, 2020No Comments

I Love Your Work | March ’20

I hoped the 20ies would have been more glam­orous than being stuck, self-quar­an­tined, at home because of Coronavirus.

Start­ed a new job at the begin­ning of Jan­u­ary, it kept me pret­ty busy, so I’ve had much less time to “look at nice things online”, hence the long hiatus.

I’m slight­ly obsessed with maps (this beau­ty hangs in my liv­ing room) and had a go Anvaka’s City Roads. It draws each road from city maps extract­ed from OSM. Results can be export­ed in raster or vec­tor for­mat to play with.
Lon­don Vs Rome:

Exer­cise Book Archive – an ever-grow­ing col­lec­tion
of old exer­cise books from all over the world.

Now, a few play things that will make your GPU/eGPU happy:

david.li – (awe­some) exper­i­ments in WebGL.
Code from the projects on GitHub too!
This is his par­ti­cle sim­u­la­tion in action:

Par­ti­cle Love by Edward Kwan, of Lusion Stu­dio.

Also, in oth­er news, fol­low­ing the recent injec­tion of cap­i­tal, the guys at ReMark­able unveiled the new ver­sion of their tablet, that seems to fix a few short­com­ings of the orig­i­nal ver­sion (bat­tery life, cpu speed) and made it look sleek too: https://remarkable.com/

November 26, 2019No Comments

I Love Your Work | November ’19

Pro­ce­du­ral­ly gen­er­at­ed vec­tor for­mat scrolling Chi­nese land­scapes, by Ling­dong Huang. GitHub repo here.

Been deep div­ing into 3D art late­ly:
Lee Grig­gs, Fed­eri­co Ciuf­foli­ni, his dio­ra­mas are great, and Paar­sec: fol­low her on Twit­ter for a steady stream of 3D and visu­al arts exper­i­ments and links.

Kessel­sKramer for Tim­ber­land.

Brand New’s iden­ti­ty for their 2019 con­fer­ence is phe­nom­e­nal, espe­cial­ly the neon light details and the pro­gram covers!

Crowd­sourced New York hyper­lapse by Sam Mor­ri­son:

And now, for the cute side of the Inter­net…
Seeds of Dream, by Mer­ci-Michel for L’Oc­c­i­tane.
Touch­bar Tam­agotchi by Grace Avery. (GitHub repo here):

October 8, 2019No Comments

Introducing: I Love Your Work

“Intro­duc­ing” might be a wee bit pre­ten­tious. Just a bit.
I Love Your Work is going to be a month­ly col­lec­tion of links to (most­ly) design and pho­tog­ra­phy work that I admire.
The kind of beau­ti­ful stuff that makes you feel both com­plete­ly worth­less and inspires you to do bet­ter next time. 

In the first batch of links for this Octo­ber:
The bril­liant self por­trai­ture of Juno Calyp­so, and some more about her work on the British Jour­nal of Pho­tog­ra­phy.

Juno Calypso - The Honeymoon

Zhenya Rynzhuk’s stun­ning port­fo­lio site. Found via Val Head­’s UI Ani­ma­tion newslet­ter.

Der­ry Bir­kett. UX Design and a very inter­est­ing col­lec­tion of blog posts, both on the site direct­ly and, lat­er, on Medi­um.

Lucas Zan­ot­to. Check his Insta­gram fil­ters too!

Ian Howorth’s pho­tog­ra­phy places south east Eng­land in a delight­ful­ly dark cin­e­mat­ic dimension.

While on the theme of cre­ativ­i­ty (risky word), in today’s era of most­ly cor­po­rate-anaes­thetized con­tent, art, and cen­sored nip­ples, it is worth to sit back and relive the amaz­ing­ly chaot­ic cre­ative process of the leg­endary Nation­al Lam­poon mag­a­zine via Dough Ken­ney’s life sto­ry and the sto­ries about the mak­ing of Ani­mal House. 

Doug Kenney and Chris Miller

In par­tic­u­lar order:
Fat, Drunk, and Stu­pid by Mat­ty Sim­mons;
Drunk Stoned Bril­liant Dead: The Sto­ry of the Nation­al Lam­poon;
A Futile and Stu­pid Ges­ture, on Netflix.

September 23, 2019No Comments

Atkinson Dithering Machine

In the last cou­ple of years I start­ed being more and more obsessed by e‑paper dis­plays. I part­ly blame my Kin­dle – by far my favourite and the best elec­tron­ic device I own to date – and my love for 1‑bit graphics.

My first com­put­er was a Mac­in­tosh SE and most of my ear­ly years in front of a mon­i­tor were spent exper­i­ment­ing with Hyper­card: you tend to devel­op a cer­tain (life-long) taste for black and white graphics.

Before sum­mer I bought an Inky pHAT dis­play and put it to use with a spare Rasp­ber­ry Pi Zero W I had in a draw­er in the office, and my old Playsta­tion Eye camera.
The Playsta­tion Eye works “out of the box” with the Pi: tak­ing pic­tures with it is pret­ty straight­for­ward. The next log­i­cal step for me was to dis­play them as beau­ti­ful dithered black and white images on the small e‑paper display.

Read more

August 12, 2019Comments are off for this post.

Elsewhere

Assort­ed links from around the web for the first week of August.
Great, tidy, prod­uct design port­fo­lio site:
Thi­a­go Dalcin

Prod­uct relat­ed & gen­er­al geek­ery:
The 8 point grid
Ambush (Dig­i­tal Prod­uct Stu­dio)
The Ori­gin of HyperCard

Rhythm in design is every­thing,
I’m aware I’m clear­ly fail­ing at it at the moment:
Ver­ti­cal Rhythm in Sketch

Design ❤️
Ven­mo’s Iden­ti­ty Refresh
IBM’s Plex Type­face
New Iden­ti­ty for Corre­os (Span­ish mail ser­vice)
Link – Idee per la TV (sim­ply beau­ti­ful)
Scope Design Con­fer­ence App

April 30, 2019No Comments

Here we go again.

I grew up online. I have quite an exten­sive dig­i­tal foot­print, I’ve also kept a blog (www.jnkmail.com) in glo­ri­ous bro­ken Eng­lish from the ear­ly 2000s till I got sucked up, like many, in the first wave of social media – prey of short quips on Face­book and the like.

I grew up online. And then grew old­er (a grumpy old man) see­ing this mag­nif­i­cent tool we had reduced to a cesspit.
I design dig­i­tal prod­ucts for a liv­ing today, and my activ­i­ties online over the years sort of helped/shaped what my career is today and, to an extent, where I end­ed up liv­ing (the ever sun­ny Lon­don town).

Writ­ing here is prob­a­bly part detox­ing from the afore­men­tioned cesspit I can­not stand any­more (or recoil­ing back in nos­tal­gia of the good ‘ol sim­pler days of the web – ‘mem­ber?), part hav­ing a space where to share, and keep archived, pet projects, dis­cov­er­ies, thoughts, rants – lots of rants, trust me – about design, dig­i­tal, and (pos­si­bly) motor­bikes… in bet­ter Eng­lish this time.

Good night & good luck.