Content & Advertising.
Those two are usually fighting in the media.
While there’s plenty of examples of corralling each into their own space and co-habitation, Advertising is usually the one doing the bullying. We talk of the need for advertising to move beyond dis/interruption, but I’m not sure that’s possible. At best we can attain a salad dressing-like mixture of oil and vinegar. It might taste good, but look closely and you’ll see they never fully unify.
And I’m fine with that, because there’s 3 tools that put Content back in the drivers seat – Instapaper, Readability and the Reader tool in Safari 4.
It’s interesting these tools exist. It implies readability is not a priority for news and media websites.
advanced tip – many news sites break articles into multiple pages, somewhat crippling the tools below. The solution is to view the Printable version of articles. This *usually shows the article on one, continuous page.
Quick breakdown:

Instapaper

This is an iPhone/iPad application. First set up an account and download the app to your iOS device, then you set up a bookmarket in the bookmarks bar of your computer’s browser. As you come across articles you want to read later, you click on the bookmarket, which places the article into you Instapaper queue. Now, when you launch the Instapaper app, all the articles you ‘Saved for Later’ will get downloaded to your device (provided you have an internet connection). The best part of the app is it downloads just the article and associated images. No banner ads, no navigation, just the content.

Readability

Readability also uses a bookmarket. It’s simple, when you’re on a page you want to read, click on the bookmarket and the page instantly gets stripped of all formatting, leaving you with a clean white page with a single column of easy-to-read text. It also gives you links to: Return to Article, Print and Email.

Safari Reader Tool

This tool works the same as Readability, except it’s baked into the Safari browser. The only catch to this tool is it only shows up in the address field when you’ve reached a page Safari deems eligible, such as individual article and blog post pages. It won’t, for instance, be available to use on the home page of the NYTimes.

I decided to turn on the Battery Percent display on my iPhone 4 a few weeks ago. It’s off by default.
After I did this I notice what seemed to be irregular spacing/alignment on the numbers. It happens with most of number pairs.
I thought it was misalignment, but on closer inspection, the numbers are technically aligned horizontally. What seems to be happening (or not happening) is that rounded numbers are not dipping below the baseline as they should.
Characters in a typeface, when designed correctly, need to rise above the cap height and dip below the baseline in order to appear balanced when sharing a line with flat characters.
This is the problem with having a super high resolution display (326 dpi) like the iPhone 4 has – mistakes and much more obvious.
Get on it, Apple.

I can tell when someone is inspired.
Matt Buchanan over at Gizmodo just wrote a scathing review on Samsung’s answer to Apple’s iPad – the Galaxy Tab. He’s sarcastic, and is obviously having fun reacting to the piss-poor quality of Samsung’s product.
Could he be lying? Making up a bad review? Sure, but my money says this is a really bad multi-touch tablet.
Here’s some juicy parts:

The Tab feels like a grab bag of neglect, good intentions and poor execution.

This thing is just a mess. It’s like a tablet drunkenly hooked up with a phone, and then took the fetus swimming in a Superfund cleanup site.

Typically, the point of a compromise is to bring together the best of both sides. The Tab is like a compromise’s evil twin, merging the worst of a tablet and the worst of a phone.

This Google/Samsung schädenfreude tastes almost as good as yesterday’s news that Microsoft might have only sold 40,000 Windows Phone 7’s.

There’s a difference you know – and one is not dependent on the other.
You can have something very low in fidelity and very high in fun.
Case in point – The Incident for iPhone.
It harkens back to the days of NES. It’s pixelated by design, despite the fact that the new iPhone 4’s screen is 326 dpi. It doesn’t matter. A lot of time and effort went into making it fun.
Now the makers of The Incident are porting it so that it can be played on your TV using your iPhone as the controller:

You hear it a lot in the world of design, but it’s true – constraints can be good.

The human brain is funny.
I’m up at the ass crack of dawn to grab a flight to chitown and remembered my dream.
I was in an auditorium watching Bush Junior campaign against OBama. It was a movie theatre so he was projected huge on the screen.
When he finished he went back to his seat up near where I was sitting with Bama.
They barely acknowledged each other as they crossed paths, both were visually annoyed with the presence of the other.
As Bama left to grab the stage next, Steve Buscemi (Nucky???) sits down right in front of us. He’s not dressed like Boardwalk Empire, he’s dressed like a working class thug from Newark. He seems to be W’s muscle.
The guy next to me and I both start talking shit to Buscemi. Then he turns around and looks at the dude next to me and says something like,
“I can get 16 for you today, 25 for you tomorrow.”
I assume he’s talking about a 16 thousand dollar bounty or something.
I’m slouched in my seat with my arm above my head looking away and Buscemi unexpectedly turns to me an pokes me in the armpit and says something like,
“….and this is a warning to you too, kid.”
This is what I get for telling my friends he plays an unconvincing thug on HBO.

I will not say concept when I mean idea. I will not say impacted when I mean affected. There will be no hands-on state-of-the-art networking. We will not maximize, prioritize, or finalize…and we definitely will not interface. There will also…there will also be no new-age lingo spoken here tonight. No support-group jargon from the human potential movement. For instance, I will not share anything with you. I will not relate to you and you will not identify with me. I will give you no input, and I will expect no feedback. This will not be a learning experience, nor will it be a growth period. There’ll be no sharing, no caring, no birthing, no bonding, no parenting, no nurturing. We will not establish a relationship, we will not have any meaningful dialogue and we definitely will not spend any quality time. We will not be supportive of one another, so that we can get in touch with our feelings in order to feel good about ourselves.

And if you’re one of those people who needs a little space…please…go the fuck outside.

–George Carlin, Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics
Words to live by.

Maybe he was just doing the grumpy old man skit from Jackass.

A great article at A List Apart by Dan Mall on the differences between art direction and design. I know for a while I wasn’t sure what the differences were outside of heirarchy in studios and agencies.
What is art direction:

Art direction brings clarity and definition to our work; it helps our work convey a specific message to a particular group of people. Art direction combines art and design to evoke a cultural and emotional reaction. It influences movies, music, websites, magazines–just about anything we interact with. Without art direction, we’re left with dry, sterile experiences that are easily forgotten. Can a New York subway ad about the homeless provoke you to donate money? Why do you want to beg Clarice Starling to turn around, even though you know she can’t hear you? How do candles transform a regular meal into a romantic evening? Art direction is about evoking the right emotion, it’s about creating that connection to what you’re seeing and experiencing.

and design:

By contrast, design is the technical execution of that connection. Do these colors match? Is the line-length comfortable for long periods of reading? Is this photo in focus? Does the typographic hierarchy work? Is this composition balanced?

Thanks Vic.

This post at the Daily Telegraph folds in nicely with my recent post on noting and flipping. I’m not sure if Twitter is responsible for making handwriting cool again (maybe it is?). Being a designer, I’ve always been surrounded by note/sketchbook toting people. People writing down thoughts, sketches, schematics. People giving form to the abstract things floating around their heads.
From the article:

Wohlgefühl: it’s one of those enigmatic words the German language excels in constructing. It can mean ‘wellbeing’ or ‘good feeling’, but it is the word Meike Wander, owner of Berlin’s RSVP stationery shop, uses to describe the timelessly simple delight of handwriting: of pen in hand, ink on paper and skin on surface as thoughts and images transfer from the imaginative to the material.

‘It’s a physical experience, it’s your body doing something,’ Wander says in her hesitant English. ‘Handwriting produces a good feeling – a wohlgefühl.’

Yes and yes.
Like most things, it’s not and shouldn’t be the exclusive tool for artists and designers. Everyone can benefit by getting their thoughts down on paper.

via Khoi Vinh via Daring Fireball

My wife bought me a Kindle when it first came out. While I’m an early adopter of new technologies, gadgets and services (or at the very least, keeping a close eye on the more intriguing ones), I wasn’t anxious to get one. I had the same beef with DRM on books as I did with music. Information wants to be free, etc, etc… you know the deal. I thought it looked like a well thought out product (and product ecosystem), but it wasn’t for me. It would be another year before Apple would announce an end to copy-protection on their music, but it had also been a year since Steve Jobs posted his Thoughts On Music on Apple.com. So I was mentally primed for a DRM-free (music) future. Then the Kindle comes along with their copy-protected media and we’re back to square one. I wasn’t naive to think they’d use open file formats, but I was still bummed. Now let’s fast forward 2 years to today. I still have my first gen Kindle and I still use it somewhat often although I usually prefer to use the Kindle app on my iPhone, especially during my day-to-day commuting on the Manhattan subway. But my Kindle still can’t do two things that are important when I read – scribbling down notes and flipping pages. These actions were important while I read the new book by Steve Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From.

On Noting

Some might look disapprovingly at image above, with all those crude lines and chicken scratch writing, but for me, being able to underline chunks of text, scribble notes and circle words I want to look up later opens up a deeper level of comprehension into the book I’m reading. Of course this method can be adapted with an e-reader by simply pairing it with a physical notebook, but it’s a little more effort and not well-spent effort. I’m not a psychologist but something about physically interacting with a book takes reading beyond simple consumption. It becomes a form of creation. By the time you reach the end of your book you’re not left with the same pages you started with. No, no … these are my pages now. Sure, the author is making his points, but I’m deciding which ones are important. Once I’ve read through and made sufficient notes I can begin the fun game of flipping back and reading over the passages I marked up.

On Flipping

This might seem like a minor point, but the fact that I can’t easily flip between pages on a Kindle is a huge frustration. No, this doesn’t mean I’m not able to remember what I’ve read, but sometimes I want to reread passages. Great books, like great movies, are meant to be read over and over (unless you’re satisfied watching a Kubrick movie once). I’m completely confident this technological limitation of e-books will be resolved but until then, my thumbs rule.

On Flying

This is more my beef with the airline industry than with e-books, but it’s relevant to this post. If we’re going to live comfortably/efficiently/normally in the 21st century, we need to start adapting our procedures to technologies and devices our generation is creating. Gadgets like iPods, iPads and Kindles are useless if I’m not allowed to use them during takeoff and landing. I’m waiting to hear of a plane that went down because 5 or 20 or 50 Kindles or iPhones were on during takeoff. It’s very likely many people never turn off their devices when they’re instructed anyway (not me of course). So to recap, I’m not giving up on technology. I love technology. I love tinkering, hacking and experimenting with new gadgets, but I encourage everyone to grab a printed version of the next great book you read. Don’t be afraid to get dirty and really make it yours.

If we don’t, remember me. (via Twitter via BITM)