A blog about some things I know and love. I.e. Design, Technology, Music and Art
Was introduced to Andre Michelle’s latest stroke of brilliance last week. Based on the pentatonic scale over two octaves, at a fixed tempo with 16 multiplications of each note, ToneMatrix is too goddamn addicitive, not to mention creates a pretty damn good sound. Excellent stuff. http://lab.andre-michelle.com/tonematrix
Picked this up via Twitter the other day. The delivery is pretty OTT but the message is spot on! I always find it so hard to design and develop my own marketing material, but he makes the point well… focus on selling what your results are - explicitly what you can do for them. And not worry about the extraneous information that’s normally presented on business stationary. In some ways, very similar to the ethos of the Elevator Pitch.
Last Saturday I treated my lucky lady to tickets for the design tournament, Cut & Paste, that was happening @ the Coronet in Elephant and Castle.
To be honest, I couldn’t quite decide what to make of it all, and I got the feeling neither did the rest of the audience. On one hand, you had a really interesting concept, well executed, with creativity (seemingly) harnessed as it’s core philosophy. But on the other hand, you had alot of competitors producing work that reflected the rushed, pressurized approach - by being, frankly, crap.
For me it felt a little like the the person with the most efficient production skills won the day, rather than the best designer on both a conceptual and visual level. Unfortunately, that for me, wasn’t what I was really interested, but then I’m not sure what I was really going to get.
Moral of the story is: don’t design stuff in 15 minutes, unless you really can. Nonetheless I recommend any designer or geek to attend a Cut & Paste session, just for the level of mutual geeky design enjoyment.
About 6 weeks ago I started using Spotify. At first I was somewhat skeptical. The app didn’t seem to have much depth, lacked some of the nice browsing features I’d come to depend on in iTunes and generally seemed a bit basic. At face value, I just couldn’t see Spotify having much more depth, or use, than Lastfm. I.e. it was a nice service, but wasn’t going to replace “the CD” or my well groomed iTunes collection.
6 weeks has now passed, and not only has my opinion of the service changed, I’ve found it’s completely replaced iTunes and, to some degree, my iPod. I now spend my days listening to tracks from Spotify, irrelevant whether have them locally. I’ve found it not only gives me easier access to greater artist collections than I ever had but also as a great resource to other, related artists collections. Consequently I’ve found my musical tastes extending further than before, listening to artists that I may never have bothered with, as, quite simply, I would have had to splash out my hard cash for the CD, that I may, or may not, have liked.
Looking back, I think my initial reluctance was the idea of essentially denouncing my ownership of my music. To release that association with the physical copy, that somehow, for me at least, verifies and validates my interest in that artist. That somehow, moving to an online collection, invalidated my previous music collection. Once that barrier had started to crumble, I found myself more and more accepting of the service.
I now even use it instead of my iPod at home. From what was previously my library of music, something I took everywhere. It’s now been reduced to a secondary back-up for when I don’t have a Wi-Fi connection to plug the laptop into.
The next steps for me will be when Spotify break to service away from the desktop app. When they deliver music directly to your iPhone (like LastFm does at the moment), or introduce a channel for WiFi radios, to play you playlist music straight from the library, remotes for music centres that allow remote searching from the hardware (or some crazy idea like that).
Spotify no doubt raises many serious questions about the future of the music industry, in it’s current state. But, I don’t believe it means extinction, just an evolution in the current model to something, potentially, infinitely more beneficial and accommodating to artists.
http://open.spotify.com/user/pauljamescampbell/playlist/0N5UhPUuBFx3MblsauOiEn
Just been struck by an idea to build a multiple LED based light (probably spherical), controlled via an open web API. Web users will control the bulbs by programming the open control, and changing my lounge experience in whatever means they feel fit. They could program patterns, messages, images, etc, etc.
Food for thought at least!
Without a doubt, the biggest impact my CSS world is the float clearing powers of overflow. After struggling so many times with solutions to avoid mark-up based clearing (i.e. a span with a clear class), and admittedly finding some success with the Clearfix solution. I found this article by Sitepoint. Devastatingly simple, easy to implement, and I have followed this, in most cases, ever since.
The solution however isn’t without it’s own problems - scrollbars often appear on the wrapping DIVs. Particularly if you’re tightly wrapping a selection of links. I.e. a menu bar. A fix came about when a work compadré, Sam Loomes, recently made a brilliantly simple observation, that maybe the fix would work by setting overflow to hidden. God damn, it worked, scrollbars are banished and the clearing still occurs!
So here it is, CSS overflow fix in all it’s, um, glory. With no semantic or layout implications. Enjoy.
.wrapper {
overflow: hidden;
}
One of the guys @zone picked this up during a recent trip to Austria. At celebrity is being used to sell something healthy, although I’m not sure the packaging is that environmentally friendly. Needless to say, being a sucker for 80s Arnie movies, I’d buy one, or ten.
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