Speaking of things I found via New York Magazine, check out LA production company Everynone. Most of their work seems to consist of quick-cut montages of everyday scenes, assembled to fit a larger theme. The images, the music, the editing and the light are all gorgeous. Very evocative.

Ex: “Words”

I love these food truck illustrations from New York Magazine. They not only make me hungry for some gyoza from Rickshaw, they make me glad to be a subscriber. There’s a lot of reasons out there for a print magazine to be cutting costs wherever they can, so it’s great to see them putting the extra dime into details like this. I totally want these as a series of vinyl toys.

I’ve been messing around a bit lately with Processing, an open source programming language for visualization (among other things). It’s been a lot of fun, mostly because it strikes the right balance for me between making visual art and tinkering around with math and logic. I like the way that writing in Processing feels like the programming equivalent of drawing in a sketchbook. You can pretty quickly put together something visually interesting, and then iterate it into something more complex as you go.

My first finished project in Processing was a visualization of traffic coming to all of Situation’s client sites on a given day, based on data from Google Analytics. There were a lot of fun challenges in putting this together, like wrangling the analytics data into a format I could use, figuring out how to match the coordinates to the projection used by the map I had, and (most exciting for me) creating the simple “throw” physics for when you drag the map around. I was helped along quite a bit by the excellent tutorials on the Processing site and by the amazing community of other Processing sketchers. The whole project came together over a long weekend. Check out the video below or click here to download the finished application.

I’m just beginning the arduous process of switching to a new hosting company. I haven’t really had any problems with 1&1, but their support isn’t the greatest, and I’ve heard some stories of sketchiness in dealing with their billing department. Since I’m at the point anyway where I need to graduate to a VPS from my shared hosting plan, I figured I might as well move to a more reputable host while I’m at it. I decided on MediaTemple some time ago (based on the features available and multiple personal recommendations), but I’ve spent the last month or two convincing myself it’s worth the $50 a month (much more than I’ve been paying 1&1).

Hoping to soften the blow, it occurred to me to check RetailMeNot to see if I could dig up an offer code and save a few bucks.

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I’ve been a longtime user of Google Docs (and Writely before it), mainly because I hate sitting through the three agonizing minutes of “font menu optimization” before Microsoft Word will finally launch (this is on my respectably equipped Mac Pro). Since my MLA-compliant college paper-writing days, I haven’t really needed the advanced editing features of Word, so I’m more than happy to settle for the simplicity of the Google Docs word processor.

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One challenge all designers come across in working with any client is deciding how much information should be displayed on a site’s homepage. Most clients can agree that if the site’s there to sell a product, that product should be prominently featured. The trouble is that the goals of any site are usually more complex than showcasing a single product. When you have a wide array of products, special offers, news, events, promotions, and other featured content that you want to draw attention to, it’s certainly tempting to give all of these things a position on the front page to make sure nobody misses them. From a user’s perspective, of course, the resulting clutter ends up having that opposite effect, and no single message really hits home. One way to think about solving this problem is to think of your homepage as the storefront to your site.

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I just released an upgrade to Wikipop, my WordPress plugin. I had a number of requests for the plugin to support Wikipedia languages other than English. I added a popup window in the visual editor that allows you to select your language, and if you want, search Wikipedia for text other than the text you’re linking. Check out my plugin page for the full changelog and a link to the download. If you already have Wikipop installed, you can just upgrade automatically from the WordPress administration panel.

Online retailers and service providers face an interesting challenge when it comes to their customer service strategy. On the one hand, one of the things people like about buying stuff online is that they can do simple shopping at home in their bathrobes while they’re microwaving a Hot Pocket, and they don’t have to bother with the trivialities of human interaction. While I’d rather buy something like a tailored suit from a brick-and-mortar store with a real live person who can assure me that I’m dropping hundreds of dollars on something that’s actually going to be worth my money, I can’t say that I would really miss the customer service experience I have every week at a place like the grocery store if I switched over to an online alternative like Fresh Direct.

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Living in New York I’ve had the pleasure to get to know a lot of talented musicians. A whole lot. And not just talented in that small pond, listenable-but-probably-still-going-to-be-working-at-the-Fashion-Bug-five-years-from-now kind of way. A lot of these people are people who I fully expect will make real-life paying jobs out of their music, if they want to. Fortunately for them, they’re launching these fledgling careers at what should be a great time, historically speaking, for the self-promoting artist. Given the tools available online, a new artist supposedly should have everything they need to make a go of it, assuming they have the talent to back up their efforts. But something appears to still be missing.

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about keeping my attention focused, inspired in part by a few things I’ve read recently, and in part by the fact that we’re in our most frenetic time of the year at work, which means attention is a precious commodity. The difficulty of the situation is that I work in a business where the fragmentation of attention is not only common, it’s sort of encouraged. The trouble with maintaining focus in any office environment is that you can’t really escape the fact that you’re in said office to work collaboratively with other people, and those people are going to want to talk to you. This problem is magnified in the tech sector because A) the great thing about the internet is that there’s all kinds of stuff happening all at once, and B) many of our exciting new communication tools (Twitter, IM, etc) are designed to capture your immediate attention, regardless of what you’re doing.

Here are a few things I’ve been putting into effect to maintain my ability to focus at work and at home. This isn’t a particularly original list, as there are a whole lot of very smart people writing on this subject, but this is what’s been working for me:

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