possibly the worst jokes i’ve heard in a while. all religious, most offensive to the point of an immediate lightling strike. as su will attest, i am a huge fan of horrifying jokes. try these at work! really!
design observer’s adrian shaughnessy is apparently just now writing his undergrad thesis, and the kind editors have allowed him to post it at their site. adrian is bothered that clients have opinions that counter their designers’ wishes, and that professional designers must honor those requests to some point (i didn’t get it either).
the discussion gets weirdly dishy when the author characterizes vaughan oliver as put upon, to which rick poynor basically retorts, “please. have you seen his car? and all the money inside of it?” and then a bunch of people dance around vaughan’s “personal issues.”
anyway.
about halfway throught the discussion is a really good duscussion between poynor and tom michlig about attitudes towards designers both inside and outside their industry. read the entire thread, and make that your takeaway. so many designers refuse to believe that a client knows anything about their communication, and this discussion is, albeit a car crash, a sharp look at how designers should attempt to perceive themselves.
amusingly, adobe ceo bruce chizen describes microsoft as having no heart.
he’s accurate in saying that microsoft is on a wildly inefficient development cyle. but chizen seems to have forgotten that he’s put all of adobe’s customers in a lockstep upgrade cycle of twelve to eighteen months regardless of need. adobe’s new culture of sales is a direct result of his experience at microsoft.
chizen has turned adobe to a company which abuses its’ custoemrs needs as readily as it serves them. under his leadership, adobe has begun to act in a suspiciously microsoftian manner: changes in native file formats from version to version resulting in an accelerated and unnecessary obsolescence, over-hyped and under-supported software with buggy installers and patchers. chizen, take the bench, please. you’ve got no room to criticize.
i like these guys’ work. a lot. but they were the first ones to post into this phenomenon, and are therefore the example i ended up with. guys, i’m sorry. it’s not you i’m yelling about, anyone could have posted this. your own work is magnifico.
why is it the second apple does a damned thing, the web development community coughs up a photoshop file to duplicate it? why!? is it so hard to consider style that nobody can do it besides apple? you’d think that apple is the first and last word in style, usability, and brownie points from god. and i guarantee you, the entire web will look like this shiny plastic crap in a few months. think i’m wrong? just wait. how many glass-buttoned sites are there floating around, based on aqua? and how many blog templates borrow a note from on Mac OS 10.4?
ugh. rant over. apologies. as you were.
i’m wiped, so this will be short, possibly riddled with typos, and not in the slightest bit poetic. milan, su and i just launched a new site for new york’s we are scientists, whose first album on virgin records goes on sale today in the UK. their first EP is on sale in the itunes music store now, so grab that for optimal chairdancing here in the states.
in other inaugural news, this is milan’s first kind-of-solo design (meaning he hasn’t followed my cues for the first time, and i have forced myself to simply direct and watch my designerly control freak instincts simmer, much to mil’s vast amusement) while he’s worked with su and i at pretty. this is also my first time directing a young designer with any degree of success, and the first time su hasn’t groaned every time the client calls.
okay, i’m kidding. psych! not really.
