Weeknotes #3
Well, that was a shitty week.
2019
Well, that was a shitty week.
With regulators circling and others advocating a break up of the company, its understandable why Zuckerberg would want to tightly integrate Facebook’s three platforms. However, more promises broken, while the deep-rooted problems operating at scale remain. Shut this racket down.
Still digesting the content from yesterday’s @naconf, but in the meantime, I wish to thank @colly and @hellogeri for creating a space in which important and worthwhile topics could be addressed. Was a pleasure to be just a little part of it all.
Made a little modification to my @naconf name badge so as to remove the logo of @shopify, a company that still maintains its support for far-right organisations like Breitbart. A Sharpie has its uses!
Good evening Nottingham! It’s the night before @naconf. What ya doing? Who’s with ya?
Only the second edition of weeknotes, and yet the year is already 5% done. Blimey.
Slack has a new logo, and everyone hates it.
Writing a blog post. Could somebody adjust the meter?
Every interview with a politician about Brexit:
Presenter: “So, what happens next?”
Politician: “Well, what happened was…”
Following @bradshawsguide and headed to Winchester.
Stan & Ollie is a love letter to two comedy maestros and their enduring friendship. With hilarious support from their wives (“two double acts for the price of one”), this funny and heartwarming film is not to be missed.
Yup, that’s right, I’m jumping on the weeknotes bandwagon! Consider this an experiment, and we’ll see how long it lasts.
Remembering that one time in 2005 when I accidentally deleted a construction company’s website while moving some files around over FTP. Simpler times maybe, but not necessarily better times.
Rumsey Taylor discovers why Choc, a quirky calligraphic typeface drawn by a French graphic designer in the 1950s, appears on storefronts throughout New York:
Choc is far from the most popular typeface on the storefronts of New York, but it can still be found everywhere and in every borough. It’s strewn on fabric awnings and etched in frosted glass. It gleams in bright magenta or platinum lighting. It’s used for beauty salons, Mexican restaurants, laundromats, bagel shops, numerous sushi bars. It may be distorted, stacked vertically, or shoehorned into a cluster of other typefaces. But even here Choc remains clear and articulate, its voice deep and friendly, its accent foreign, perhaps, yet endearing.
Turns out the fonts wide-spread adoption can be traced back to it being included with CorelDraw (a graphics editor popular with sign-making shops in the early 1990s), although under the pseudonym Staccato 555. Software defaults strike again!
(Also, check out the specimen cover from 1955; both timeless and yet of the period. I love it!)
Colin Morris investigates whether song lyrics have got more repetitive over the years, and in doing so, provides a brilliantly annotated explanation of how compression algorithms work.
My gift to @manton, @jean and the wonderful Micro.blog community has just been unwrapped: a redesigned help site, featuring an automated topic index and quick search tool on the home page.
“Alexa, show me an example of moral bankruptcy.”
A goal for the year ahead (let’s not call it a resolution) is to read more. So starting here, with New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle.
A compelling 120-word critique regarding automated front-end development, as provided by a class
attribute.
Finally quit my dilly-dallying and got my tickets sorted for this year’s New Adventures conference. See you there?
Looking back on a well-travelled yet otherwise directionless year.
Open for Fresh Fish.
Seeking a hybrid design/front-end role with an organisation instigating meaningful change where I can make a worthwhile contribution. Not interested in disrupting the world, just improving it a little. Where should I be looking? Who should I be talking to?