Brendan Dawes – I’m digging the experimental display of blog entries.

Safe Trip Home

Dido askd film directors in specific countries around the world to create pieces based on their idea of what home means to them, using a chosen song from her album, Safe Trip Home, for inspiration. So far the resulting film have been made in Brazil, New Zealand, Thailand, England, India, Portugal and the US.

(via Creativity)

Marblehead
Beautiful.

It has Instant Hit written all over it.

Design and the Elastic Mind
I’ve been slacking …this site passed under my radar when it launched. The style and sounds have Yugop written all over it. (thanks vb)

Looks like Adidas is doing creating some fun microsites. Hit their fun landing page and start exploring.

Jason Fried over at 37 Signals tells us Why the Drudge Report is one of the best designed sites on the web.
The strength of his opinion rests in the collective power of all the points he makes. This makes sense, since it’s all about the details with design.
Here are the main points, read the full post for the meat:
Staying power
It’s straightforward
It’s unique
This is important
It’s good cluttered
Breaking news is breaking news
One guy can run it
No news is the news
It sends people away to keep them coming back
It’s fast
It’s cheap to maintain
It’s one page
It makes him a great living
One of the pieces I found the most interesting is something I’ve forgotten about regarding the ‘stickiness’ of a site:

There’s actually no content on the Drudge Report. Well, sometimes he will post an email or a memo on his site, but it’s 99% links out to other news sources. His site is designed to send you away to bring you back. The more often you hit his site to go somewhere else the more often you’ll return to go somewhere else again. You visit the Drudge Report more because you leave the Drudge Report more. This is one of the secrets to building traffic: The more you send people away the more they’ll come back.

Herman Miller – Thought Pile by Freedom Interactive. The creative force behind the site is Vas Sloutchevsky (formally of firstborn). (link via …via)

This is true. America™ is a brand.
As George Carlin has said, this country was bought and sold a long time ago.

For people who think you do your best work when you’re in your 20’s (or 30’s …or 40’s), these cats prove that life can go well beyond any artificial cut-off marks.
My friends and I have a name for what AC/DC has – it’s called the Ten.
…The Tendency to Do It Up.
Do you have the nine, Ten?

“I think I’m getting the fear.”
– Dr. Gonzo, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
I thought it was a false alarm at first, but yes, it’s real. I have the fear.
Adobe’s problems extend beyond my current complaints of bloat and feature creep.
Their individual products are now mutating, spawning strange offspring resembling their parents but also taking on strange new dimensions. Apparently it’s no longer sufficient to have one version of Photoshop, we now need to pick from three:

It reminds me of another product lineup I’ve thankfully never had to directly confront (or install):

On Newsvine, AP writer Ryan Nakashima asks us, ‘Can Blu-ray save Christmas for Hollywood?‘
Answer: No.
Blu-ray just isn’t relevant. This isn’t the switch from VHS to DVD we did about 10 years ago. This is a move from high quality digital to higher quality digital with higher capacity discs. For the average consumer this step up is not that important.
The DVD-to-Blu-ray upgrade is going to take a lot longer than the VHS-to-DVD one. It will be indirect upgrades, such as gamers who buy the PS3 for the games, not for the Blu-ray format.
The other big reasons for a slow adoption are convenience and portability brought to us with the advent of iTunes. Sure our downloaded music and movies aren’t nearly as high in bitrate and quality as our CDs and DVDs, but I can get them right when I want them. And when I’m traveling I don’t have to carry discs along with me for my laptop or as the case is now, my iPhone.
When you live in the world of iTunes, Youtube, Hulu, Amazon Unbox, Netflix ‘Watch Instantly’, Vimeo and Blip.tv adopting a new physical storage format seems silly.
If everything else in my life lives ‘in the cloud’ on servers, like my email, social network and my photos – why not my video entertainment? At least put it in a format I can carry on my computer without the need for discs.

I was talking with Victor and John the other day in our office at Roundarch about Adobe’s products and the problems we’ve been having with them as well as our ideas for what they could be.
Victor took it upon himself to crystallize the discussion very nicely:

Adobe’s software offering is growing so robust, and their control of the content creation pipeline so complete, that they need to look to another model for what the future will look like precisely because there no longer exists a sensible explanation for why Photoshop does not allow me to create a non-closed vector shape with a stroke – other than software bloat. Enter the case for an aggregated experience – with a twist.

and:

Imagine the Adobe footprint/OS as a (relatively) low cost software that bootstraps the ability to use other Adobe content creation modules at a metered rate – let’s say yearly for instance – with an integrated way to dynamically load modules from the cloud, as needed/wanted to your local machine through a subscription service.

I’m a little late on this, but Razorfish dropped a new site not too long ago (thanks vb).