Fluidesign is an award-winning interactive design agency based in Santa Monica, California. Visit fluidesign.com to check out our portfolio of hyper-text and pixel magic.
Kay, i just got this link in my inbox via Urban Daddy and it’s feeling a little, I don’t know, creepers to me?
I initially thought it was like a funny, joke site which I could have gotten into, but after further exploration it appears to be real. As in send your ex’s personal information to a random internet “investigator” who will professionally “contact” this person, (meaning, I assume, send a barrage of emails), insisting that they tell said investigator why they broke up/stopped calling the dissed person. And then the poor dissed person will have closure? Um, oookay.
It seems like the only people who would use a site like this are 1) budding stalkers and 2) people who need more than an internet detective to ease their relationship trauma. Does anyone else think this has the makings of a scary movie? Wherein both internet detective and old flame become obsessed with the diss-er and, well you know how scary movies play out.
This is a great commentary on the hyperreal bombardment of youtube “stars” we experience everyday. Weezer just literally brought them to life! Great concept.
Several computer-generated images were released by the European Space Agency on Tuesday showing trackable objects in low-Earth orbit. It would be great to see a real-time visualization (or at least a more interesting graphic representation) using the same data. Cough up an API you guys!
So long as we are in the habit of demystifying things around here, there is something regarding placeholder copy that I would like to point out: Lorem ipsum dolor is Latin not Greek.
Your first clue to this probably should have been the phrase ‘This is all Greek to me.’ That cute, delightfully antiquated colloquialism derives from the fact that languages such as French, Italian, Spanish and English stem from Latin. Greek, on the other hand, was birthed from the Phoenician alphabet. Hence, when one’s first language is English (or Italian, or Spanish or Occitan) Greek looks like gobbledygook and funny symbols. Why would we insert that as dummy copy for our clients when we know they have a hard enough time wrapping their heads around the fact that people are more than comfortable using the vertical scroll bar to see content below the fold some 13 years after the Word Wide Web’s inception?
Your second tip-off that you were reading Latin and not Greek probably struck when you noted the funny symbols emblazoned on the sweatshirts and non-hysterical catch phrase tee-shirts worn by sorority sisters and fraternity brothers in college. If you didn’t go to college, you’re excused for that one. If you did go to college, you were in frat, and you still make that mistake, I fear for the future of your children.
If you still don’t believe me, you can check out some more facts at lipsum.com. In fact, it even has a Lorem Ipsum generator so you create your own dummy text for your next comp.
Now that you have been enlightened, you can really prove your worth by lambasting someone publicly next time he or she makes this egregious error.
Somehow, I wound up in “
How You Can Reach Wealth by Using Proven Millionaires Ideas” - a book written by a Croatian named Zoran Orlov. While this was published without my knowledge or consent, and uses a copy-and-paste of random quotes and thoughts I’ve said over the past 5 years, after getting off the phone with my attorney, I decided that I didn’t mind so much being placed next to people like Mark Zuckerberg and Liz Lange. It’s also great to be in a book about millionaires, although I have to concede that this gives me a bit more credit than I’ve yet earned. As the CEO of a design agency, it would be nice if this book had been designed - at all. The mismatch of fonts, gradients, and colors is reminiscent of my first websites. And the company sure didn’t go anywhere with me as creative director.
We love working at our new office on the 3rd Street Promenade, don’t we? Ocean views, open spaces, and easy access to Fred Segal at lunch. Today our intern Joey had lunch there with none other than Vanessa Hudgens. (well, not really lunch, just kinda ran into her i guess).
I will be posting all the celebs we run into at Fred Segal. check back soon.
There’s been a lot of talk in the recent days/weeks about the joys and challenges of our new office.
Favorite joys= ocean front (ish) property, v.v. close proximity to shopping, real food daily, and our new neighbor EQUINOX fitness (aka the gym I never use but continue to pay for in hopes that I will one day decide that I am in fact a gym person even though I know I’m not).
Least favorite challenges = (this is all hearsay of course since I’ve never actually been there), potentially weeks of construction, elevators, empty wallets (see favorite joys, item 2), and crazy open/shared workspace with even more distractions than we have now.
I at least have a solution to that last one.
The office collar.
Admittedly it does look better suited for a veterinary patient, but I think we can work past that for the sake of productivity.
As you all know, I recently attended Web Design World in Boston. Besides being able to geek out for a full two days, I got to hob knob with other contemporaries as well as have an alcohol-lubed conversation or two with some of the luminaries in the business. I won’t go into the nitty gritty details of said confabulations because you likely won’t care, but down below I have highlighted a few golden kernels that Jeffrey Zeldman touched on during his presentation of Selling Design.
Happy Cog Studios has it written into every contract that they will answer to ONE decision maker and one decision maker only.
Avoid clients who provide reams of paper work, outlines, MS Paint illustrations etc. up front. This could be an early indication that they don’t trust you.
Remember that the world at large / clients are very suspicious of design. A client wants to know why choosing a cool font isn’t the end of the logo design process or why you charge more to build a website then his nephew does.
Don’t open the door for ‘pixel’ conversations. For example, if you tell a client, ‘I put a 2 pixel border around that image instead of 3,” he might ask why, and then, even worse, he might ask you to try a four pixel border. Sell the meaning of the design, not the technology or nuts and bolts behind it.
Happy Cog does a full month of research and conducts usability audits on the client’s current site (if it exists) before beginning ANY design.
None of that stuff was meant to commandments etched in stone, just some general things to keep in mind. It is possible to learn from others’ mistakes, I think, without having to go through all the hand wringing and heartache yourself.
On a funny side note, his company recently designed the AIGA website. He showed off some of the original design prototypes. One of the refinements AIGA asked for? Bigger logo, natch.
