I just came across The Darfur Wall site and I’m really stunned how effective such a simple idea can be. There are 400,000 numbers, one for each person killed in the Darfur genocide. Each dollar donated lights up a random number. You can zoom in or out to get perspective, or view an animation of the lights coming on over time. Go and look.
Archive for January, 2007
-
Highly Original Charity
-
Keeping Things Simple
I’ve been doing a little work with PHP recently. Nothing earth-shattering, just dipping in to build a custom theme for Wordpress. Anyway, the reason I mention it is just how visible all of the markup is. I’ve always been totally sold the idea that seperating behaviour and code from the markup (from a server side coding perspective) is evolution, and that script tags mixed in with markup is mucky and hard to maintain.
The flip side that nobody talks about is how you can clearly see exactly what will be sent to the client. There is no layer of abstraction – you can directly see the markup when you’re writing code. I know there are many benefits to the server control model that ASP.NET has adopted, but I sometimes wonder if these benefits outweight the very clear advantage of being able to see exactly what is happening. I definately think this is reflected in the typical quality of markup on a PHP site compared with an ASP.NET site.
Any thoughts?
-
Not Allowed To Mention Cats
I was just musing having read Pat talking about official company blogging, and not being allowed to mention cats and the like. I thought this was a particularly cute and strange form of repression. I can’t help wondering how my life would be if I was allowed to write about any topic my heart desired, except for cats. The conclusion I’ve come to is that each day I’d just be itching to mention it, burning to express catty knowledge.
If this rings true, just bear in mind that the people have the power. If you’ve living in this kind of rigid structure, I urge you to write about cats. Just once. You can all do it in tandem. Arrange a cat post uprising. Damn the man.
-
Cinema Site Designs
In a vague attempt to combat the winter-induced sleep addiction that hangs from my eyelids each night when I get home, I thought I’d take a quick look at cinema listings. Obviously it’s much more worthwhile to walk to the end of the road and sit in a different seat for a couple of hours being entertained.
I couldn’t really find anything that appealed to me (that I hadn’t already seen). However, I did notice that Prince Charles have redesigned their site recently, and the new version is really well structured and easy to use. I think they’ve done a great job of presenting lots of information in one place without leaving you feeling like you don’t know where to look. I tend to be a little short-sighted and tired this time of night, but could intuitively get what I needed without thinking about it at all.
In constrast, the Curzon site manages to incorporate most of my pet hates about design. They have much less information on the page, but leave you feeling stressed and unsure what to look at. There’s no kind of visual hierarchy to guide the eye (everything in upper case), so you have to read most of the content to work out which piece to look at. The cherry on top is a layer of pointless and annoying animation.
I think you really have to consider your situation when making decisions around design. Cinema sites are purely functional, so I’d like to be able to get the information I want as quickly and efficiently as possible. I really don’t think animation works well in this context at all.
Anyway, as you can gather I ended up ranting about design instead of going to the cinema. Fool. At least I get to test out my tasty new keyboard.
-
Zork
We went to Game On at the Science Museum a little while ago, and although the whole trip was quite a friendly nostalgia rush, I noticed how they had no text based adventure games. I still think sometimes the simplest games are the most addicitive, so I was happy to see an online playable version of Zork.
-
Meme
I was tagged by Pat, so thought I’d share five things about myself that you might not know:
- blah
- blah
- blah
- blah
- blah
There. Now you have a warm little insight into who I am
-
Training in NewYorkiness
I accidentally skipped a place in a queue today, pissing someone off. Wasn’t my fault at all. Honestly. In fact they were not listening or paying attention, and milling around rather than looking queuelike. Unfortunately I seem to have acquired a British disease of feeling bad or guilty even when I haven’t done anything wrong. I need to pay a little New Yorker to teach me that rather than feeling bad, I should pause, say “Fuck you lady” and barge her out of the way.
Maybe they could teach me to make bagels too.
-
JL300
I think it’s fair to say that my credibility as a “real” man is shot anyhow, so I’ve decided to learn to design and make clothes. No idea how this one will turn out, but I’ll find out soon – I’m starting a course at the London College of Fashion on 20th. I used to make some clothes when I lived at home, but don’t really remember too much about how to do it.
I know It’s all looking highly amusing – living on Old Compton street, shaved head, piercings, likes to sew. I suppose I could make a little badge of Grace to wear around the place as evidence, but then again I’m not sure I really care that much what people see when they look at me.
I used to look great in trashy alternative wear when I was younger, but as an adult man it’s not really an option… any time I’ve tried, I just look like a wanabe 16 year old. I think the other main option is high end designer clothing – often this is quite unusual and distinctive. The problem is that every time I find something I love, the price tag reads £600.
I think it should be quite fun to dream up an idea for a design and be able to make something physical that matches. It’s not like I’ve taken up knitting or crochet. Yes, you can laugh at me now.
