Posted 05.11.11 by Becky Lang
This photography project showcases refrigerators around the world. They would not want to look into mine …
Check out this Flexbook design by Hao-Chun Huang. Be afraid Steve Jobs. Be very afraid.
I’m the only smoker at Zeus Jones. Maybe I should get some of these electronic cigarettes so I can blow water vapor in everyone’s faces all day. Or not. Either way, I love the crabby cynicism of the writer of this New York Times article.
This branding firm’s identity probably attracts a lot of vampires.
This tiny 9m x 9m house is probably going to get more and more common as the world population increases.
Finally, in case you didn’t hear from hundreds of people on Twitter, Buzzfeed declared us the most “hipster” town yesterday. Minnpost had some interesting thoughts about this.
Posted by Adrian Ho
MAE-WAN HO : Why beauty is truth and truth beauty from Institute of Science in Society on Vimeo.
I was back in London briefly a month ago for a conference my mum put on around the convergence of beauty and truth in art and science. I may be biased, but it was without question the best conference I’ve been to in ages. She brought together a really eclectic and group of artists and scientists many of whom had never met each other yet who spoke about their work in a brilliantly coherent way.
I left with a profound sense of relief that there are people who are asking important questions and trying to find answers through their work.
My mum’s talk which opened up the event is above. She’s planning on releasing more of the talks here on her Vimeo and also here on her main site. The full description of the conference is available here.
Posted 05.10.11 by Becky Lang
I’m a sucker for art apps on the iPad, so I got the only just-released Adobe app that I could fathom using sans CS5 today and tested it out. (The other two are one that acts like a Wacom when using the software and another that lets you create color palettes.)
Eazel is a $5 app that acts like a watercolor easel and features 5-finger touch navigation. After playing with it for 15 minutes or so, here are my main talking points:
• 5-finger touch is fast and feels futuristic, like the ultimate “iPad navigation”
• However, it makes it way too easy to accidentally delete everything you’ve been working on
• There’s only one undo level, so hello mistakes
• No layers, although I smell a $5 upgrade in the future
• Why just watercolor texture? Why not some other options?
• The branding on this app is weirdly new age. Everything is at a laying-down perspective while mysterious angel hands sweep around, creating sparkly strokes that shimmer into drawings of muscular men. It doesn’t feel like an aesthetic that designers respond well to. Could it be targeted at artists instead?
I think the message behind these apps, other than “We’re becoming an app company too!,” is “Upgrade to CS5″ already. I’m not sure what the industry standard is, but there are probably a lot of people out there, like me, who would otherwise be perfectly content (and non-broke) using CS4 forever. But look what we could do with our iPads if we could just upgrade! I could use my Wacom (the cheap one) as a sushi tray from now on.
I would say wait to buy this until the next upgrade.
Posted 05.09.11 by Adrian Ho
Image via Venture Beat
My main page on Zite (which is quickly becoming my favourite app) this morning featured this tantalizing story from Fortune on how Apple really works. If you follow the link, you see that Fortune has done something really assbaggy clever by only revealing a snippet of the story for free and putting the rest behind their paywall.
It got me thinking about paywalls and content in general. How, for instance, was Fortune able to get access to Apple and Steve Jobs for a story like this? I suspect it has a little to do with Fortune’s credibility as a source for great journalism and their penchant for covering the rich, famous, and powerful in the world of business.
But one of the reasons must also be that Fortune have built a readership, an audience who are interested in what Fortune have to say on business. And that got me thinking that the implicit deal that a magazine like Fortune make with people like Steve Jobs is that they will amplify his message in return for access.
It’s already been shown that paywalls actually compound the problem of declining readership. How long will it be before paywalls also become a deterrent to the newsmakers themselves? Or put another way, given the choice of two publications that can release your news, would you choose the one with a paywall or the one without?
Posted 05.02.11 by Becky Lang
Meet Missy Austin, graphic designer:
Before joining Zeus Jones’ staff, what were you doing?
I was interning at FAME (a retail branding agency), finishing up my degree from the U of M, and doing too many side projects.
What do you like to do outside of work?
My favorite things to do outside of work typically involve eating, being outside and a truck named “Leonard.” I like to explore various midwestern locations, visit my family cabin in the U.P, drink gin and tonics (although not excessively), and plan trips I hope to take when I can afford them.
What new skills are you bringing to Zeus Jones?
I’m an eager learner, hard worker, and a pretty good parallel parker.
Missy on Minneapolis …
What’s your favorite local dish? Cocktail?
My favorite local dish would have to be the Totchos (tater tot nachos) from Tracy’s Saloon in Seward. They sometimes sprinkle Kalamatta olives on top which makes me feel fancy. As for a cocktail, I love the Aster Cafe’s tea-infused gin and tonic.
Who’s your favorite local band? Artist?
Local Artists: My friends Tj & Beth Barnes
Local Band: The Porch Knights: it’s a friend of mine’s band and their new stuff sounds pretty awesome.
Best and worst things about Minneapolis?
Best: The Art scene, the neighborhoods, friendliness
Worst: Potholes, excessive hipster culture, February
Welcome Missy!
Posted by Becky Lang
I’m not one to complain about Facebook being a massive boon to privacy. I’ve sat out many public upsets at Mark Zuckerberg while championing the culture of openness Facebook has created. Oddly enough, it ended up being a simple poll feature that finally pushed me into the creeped out zone.
Facebook questions have now been around for over a month, giving us time to play with them and see just how well they work. I’ve found it fun to answer them and create my own, watching how these arguments over opinion play out on my feed. What I didn’t realize was that Facebook was cataloguing all of my answers on my profile, making them available for anyone to see. Here’s what it says on Facebook’s Q&A page:
You should only ask and answer questions that you are comfortable sharing with everyone on Facebook as the questions you have participated in are visible to everyone.
This becomes extra disturbing when you look at your own questions tab. After just a month, they can become detailed indexes of your entire character, including political orientation, stance on smoking, particular consumer behavior and more. When you imagine marketers wanting to know information about their demographic, this would be their motherload. You can’t delete questions you’ve answered, so what you’ve already said is out there for everyone, forever – or at least until Facebook changes the settings.
Right now, answers are not given to search engines, meaning that targeted advertising across the general internet is probably not a consequence yet. But it certainly creates a well of information that Google would love to get its hands on. Let’s try to implement some privacy settings before that happens.
Posted 04.27.11 by Becky Lang
The personal data and design gurus at Daytum have announced they’re moving west to join the ranks of Facebook. This has the ZJ table abuzz.
If you’re not familiar with Daytum or the works of its infamous wiz Nicholas Felton, prepare to waste the next hour perusing his extensive annual reports, downloading the Daytum app and setting up personal infographics that you will never actually feed data to (trust me).
So what does this mean for Facebook? On a smaller scale, we can probably assume:
1) Facebook is trying to tighten up its design creds. (Can they hire someone to redesign their photo lightbox?)
2) They probably plan to enhance analytics data reporting.
3) They are hopefully going to share the idea of designed information with the Facebook community, giving users the ability to see their stats in stylish, visual ways that we hadn’t previously imagined.
On a larger scale, Facebook is clearly trying to up their reputation for having some big thinkers on staff. They recently stole Google’s Creative Director Ji Lee, along with a lot more of Google’s top talent. From a prowl through Li’s portfolio, it seems he’s more of a guerilla artist than a graphic/web designer, so we can probably expect Facebook to make with some Google-style quirk.
Li's branding work for New Museum
Facebook in general seems to have a “climb inside” mentality for the whole Internet. Foursquare check-ins? Cool, let’s just do the same thing, on a platform people are already using. Data visualization? Let’s do that here too.
What do you think? What will Daytum create in their time at Facebook?
Posted 04.22.11 by Becky Lang
Do you ever worry about what would happen if you became paralyzed? For me, one of the saddest things would be losing the ability to be creative. But we just might be entering a period of technology when even that problem will be fixed. The folks at The Eyewriter Project are developing open-source technology that allows people who suffer from ALS to be able to draw, and presumably, write with their eyes. They want to create the most inexpensive, accessible ways for these people to create art and project it onto the world.
Watch the video, which is unbelievable: The Eyewriter from Evan Roth on Vimeo.
They even project his artwork onto buildings.
I imagine that eventually they will be able to work this kind of technology into tablets. How cool would it be to draw on an iPad with just your eyes?
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Posted 04.21.11 by Becky Lang
I admit I’ve never been on 4chan – I just popped over to its famous message board, /b, and found it very NSFW. Nonetheless, their culture is the stuff of dark, comedic sci-fi novels. Their community has done everything from hack Sarah Palin’s email to save an abused dog from its tween owner, all just using the power of the Internet. Whether you approve or not, you have to admire its power, and even more than that, it’s ability to challenge power with the mass spread of absurdity.
4chan’s reputation as troublesome hackers made it surprising when its founder, Christopher Poole, received impressive investments for his new project, Canvas. I read about it on The New York Times and immediately requested an invite, which I just got yesterday.
Here’s what the interface looks like. As you can see, it feels like Tumblr – a site famous for reblogging – mixed with Pinterest, a billboard-style site where people post images. What makes it different is its image editing tools, letting you remix photos by adding drawings and text. This means there is a collaborative aspect of “meme development” at play, which is funny to watch happen in real time.
Many 4chan devotees are disappointed that Poole didn’t make Canvas an anonymous site, especially after all of his public declarations in favor of anonymity. Users can only sign in with Facebook Login, and the content has to be SFW. This is probably because of the $625,000 the site gained from investors.
What about the visual software? It reminds me of good old Microsoft Paint – simple, usable, capable of more than you’d think. Soon the site will add video and audio features, hopefully with equally simple “remix” functionality. Sounds pretty cool.
Check it out at Canv.as.
Posted 04.19.11 by Becky Lang
Trying to keep up with the Joneses? Meet our newest hire, Heather Burnikel.
Fresh from donating her hair to the St. Baldrick's Foundation
Before heading to ZJ, Heather was a project leader at mono and an account manager at Carmichael Lynch. You might know her from her award-winning work for furniture company Blu Dot, where she produced the social media experiment The Real Good Experiment.
You can watch it here. Warning: You will want a high-design Manhattan apartment after seeing this.
So, let’s get to know Heather.
Flash questions:
What’s your favorite local dish? Mini donuts and peach ice cream at Stella’s. They don’t always have the ice cream but it’s delicious.
Favorite cocktail? Whiskey and ginger ale.
Favorite local artist? Adam Turman. I like his pin-up style.
Heather is a Green Bay native who studied advertising at The University of Wisconsin – Madison. In her time there, she helped the school win the National Advertising Student Competition with a marketing plan for DaimlerChrysler. Now she lives with her boyfriend in St. Louis Park, although they prefer to come to Minneapolis for play. In her spare time, she puts on her bowling shoes as captain of the local ad league bowling team Thumbstruction. Oh, and she just might be the only tap-dancing motorcyclist out there.
We know what you’re wondering. Does she like the Packers? Indeed she does. “I didn’t go to any Super Bowl parties because I needed to concentrate. We hunkered down and ate bad food.”
Welcome!
Posted 04.18.11 by Becky Lang
You got your Wacom on my iPad. You got your iPad on my Wacom. Wait, this is a delicious, chocolatey, peanut buttery combination of stylus and device that will soon render Wacom tablets obsolete! (At least the cheap ones. I am not important enough to have experienced a fancy one firsthand.)
Occasionally around the table of Zeus Jones, someone will say they are going to crack down and shell out $500 for an iPad. Then they ask, “Should I get a stylus?” I always say yes, if they are going to draw on it, which is one of the coolest things one can do with an iPad. Before, I used to recommend the Pogo stylus at the Apple store, but now I’m intrigued by this. Seems like it might be superior.
Trivia: Dave Annis tried to make a stylus out of tinfoil and a pen and it worked but it just didn’t feel right.
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Posted 04.14.11 by Becky Lang
Takeover ads are so two years ago. This is the future, when blogs and websites have figured out that they can get brands to sponsor posts where they write whatever they want around a certain theme. And sometimes you don’t even realize it’s a sponsored post until the end, when you’re had a good few chortles and suddenly you see:
Brought to you by TurboTax Federal Free Edition — Free to prepare, Free to print, Free to efile.
This has happened to me thrice today! Yes, thrice! You see, it is April 14th, so I know that all the little elves in the woods are filing their taxes at the last minute, and all my favorite sites like The Awl and The Hairpin have stories about taxes that I eagerly click on. “Taxes, I know about those! I just got my return yesterday and it was almost immediately taken from my bank account as a loan payment!” is what I think as I click.
I even found a TurboTax sponsored post at Design*Sponge:
Here’s an excerpt, from The Awl’s article:
Okay, but should I be scared of the IRS?
The IRS only wants to hear from you. The answer, surprisingly, is a very firm “no”! Not at all! The IRS has some of the nicest, most understanding people I have ever spoken with in my life. True fact.
There’s a lot of TV- and movie-propagated terror about the IRS. (As well, the whole idea of the government and money is anxiety-producing on its own, sure.) And the truth is… well, they kind of used to be a little mean? But that’s actually ancient history. The people at the IRS are some of the funnest people ever! I have had long hilarious conversations with them on the phone. (For real, there are some hilarious ladies down in Atlanta.) IRS employees are like most civil servants; they deal with confused, freaked out and sometimes very dingbatty people (not you, friend!) every day—the kind of people who do not follow directions, particularly. So if you are not a jerk, they will be delighted to speak to you, at length. They will sometimes be like, “Girl, how did you get into this trouble?” and you’ll be like “Oh, haha, I’m a mess! Mistakes happen!” and they’ll be like, “I hear you! I get it!” Do not be afraid. What they want is to hear from you.
Funny, funny.
I think sponsored posts are a good sign. They clearly can still lead to valuable content. They’re shareable (I found the Design*Sponge one after a friend linked to it on Facebook). They can even inspire content around a theme people like reading about: being terrified of tax season.
What do you think?
Want to whine about taxes? You can do it here. I don’t mind.
Posted 04.13.11 by Becky Lang
Someone else is suing Mark Zuckerberg! According to this article in Wired, some sketchy lawyer named Paul Ceglia thinks he owns half of Facebook because he funded $2,000 for the site. There is a whole colorful series of emails between the two of them that looks fairly real, although they could have easily been written by Aaron Sorkin or any other person who has seen “The Social Network” and has a flair for creative writing.
I think a few things are starting to become clear: When Zuckerberg was creating The Facebook (as it was originally called and I typed into my own URL bar for years), it was not his idea alone. Many people were wanting to create a new Friendster-type deal for Harvard. Big surprise. He collaborated with these people at first and then was like, “Screw you all, this is MINE. I did the work so $%#@ off.” I’m not a lawyer, but here is my layman’s opinion of the situation:
1. These people cannot prove that if they had retained some control over the direction of Facebook that it would have become as successful as it did. Ceglia apparently wanted it to sell Harvard mugs. Mark thought that was dumb and said no. Would we have spent more time on MySpace if Facebook was also an ivy league gift shop? Probably.
2. No one could have made Facebook except for Mark Zuckerberg. He’s a genius. He’s way smarter than the Winklevoss twins, Paul Ceglia and tons of other coders out there. Plus, he seems to not be socially inept. He gets the ways that people socialize and communicate. Moreover, he has integrity. He wanted to keep the site free and not monetize early. Those three things are a rare combo.
I think there is a certain Quality American Archetype in Mark Zuckerberg. Or maybe he’s a blend of archetypes. He’s a nerd-genius-savant. But he’s also kind of cool. I mean he made a Hot or Not site, he told a bunch of rich dudes to shove it, he broke rules. I think these courts ruling in his favor admire that in him. He had the balls to know what he was entitled to for the work he did. Plus, he wears cool Adidas sandals.
Paul Ceglia, you probably shall not acquire the 84% of a $65 billion dollar company that you think you deserve. Sorry.
Is suing Mark Zuckerberg the new get rich quick scheme?
Posted 04.12.11 by Becky Lang
The Fox is Black has a contest to design a proper cover for The Odyssey. These are my favorites:
Also at that site I found a post about Kehinde Wiley.
Oh, so that’s his name. I saw one of his paintings at the MIA and stared at it stupidly for 20 minutes. Stalk the work of Kehinde Wiley. Stalk it good.
Eric Frost is not pleased with the new Kindle, which features advertisements. I’d pay the extra $20 to avoid stupid ads at the bottom of what I read. But then again, I’m an iPad evangelist. Currently, I’m using mine to read Tina Fey’s book.
Whoever designed that cover should probably be fired. The book itself is great so far though. My next eBook will be David Foster Wallace’s post-humous release, The Pale King. The story of the editor putting this book together is interesting enough to merit its own book. It comes out on the 15th, in honor of taxes.
What are you reading? Give us some suggestions for what to pay Steve Jobs for next.
This study used Wordle to show the most commonly used ads in toy commercials targeted at girls vs. boys.
Oh, so that’s why a little boy my sister was babysitting once chased her around with a knife. Just kidding, I don’t think that was advertising’s fault.
Today’s last bit: a judge told the Winklevoss twins to can it.
Hope you enjoyed our nets roundup.
Posted 04.11.11 by Becky Lang
Business Insider featured a tour of Facebook’s data centers, which are not only energy efficient, but also possibly the set of a sci-fi film. Seeing this made me realize I know nothing about how major websites actually work. I kind of thought that Facebook just happened in the cloud, stupidly not realizing that it involved countless walls of alien tanning beds.
Can we take a moment to appreciate this picture, provided by The Open Compute Project? The way Mark Zuckerberg’s smiling face is Photoshopped in front of the walls of cryogenically frozen martians perfectly follows the rule of thirds. Wow.
Artsy, designery people rejoice – Adobe is releasing a bunch of new iPad apps. Color Lava is a bit lame, just letting you make color palettes. Nav lets you use CS5 with your iPad as a sort of Wacom tablet. But the one garnering the most excitement is the awkwardly-named Eazel, which lets you export paintings in any size, features a five-finger touch interface and is apparently going to make Sketchbook Pro as irrelevant as the Kindle (ooh, burn). Too bad I don’t have CS5.
This wine that uses Pantone colors to identify grape varietals is pretty cool. (via The Dieline)
This article in The New York Times points out that literary journals seem to be thriving because they often follow the same business model of online ventures: small staff, tight budget and niche audience. At the end it consents that thriving is all relative with a depressing quote from The Rumpus founder, Stephen Elliot, “No one has ever been able to make a good living writing or publishing literary fiction.” Moral of the story: All writers should go into marketing. (Just kidding. Kind of.)
This photo series, A Girl in Her Room, by Rania Matar is captivating. She photographed dozens of teenaged girls from the U.S. and the middle east in their bedrooms. There are a surprising amount of porn star posters and teddy bears.
