Bookmarks

Amazing – if slightly spooky – photos taken in London’s abandoned underground Mail Rail.

Invaluable advise from Twitter’s Mark Otto:

If you’re a graphic designer, work towards bringing whatever print experience you have to a small single page site. If you’re an interaction designer, start checking out HTML and CSS, and then move on to some basic jQuery. By doing so, you become a much more versatile designer and contributor on any project.

Me, after a day spent exploring my former home of San Francisco:

Underground cables rumbling, sirens wailing, horns beeping. Trams ringing and drums thumping. San Francisco has a soundtrack, and I like it.

Volkswagen again giving in a lesson in how advertising is really done.

Joseph Perla explains how Facebook’s business model is built on sand:

Eventually, though, and this might take a long time, but it is finite, everyone will have tried Facebook ads and know that they are useless. Eventually, after 10 million businesses have invested $1000 each, and Facebook has earned $10 billion in revenue in total, then they will have run out of new customers and their revenue will dry up. A useless product is never sustainable.

Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre’s extraordinary photographs documenting the dramatic decline of a major American city.

This year’s movies have legitimately transformed my idea of what is creatively possible. To commemorate, I’ve remixed 270 of them into one giant ass video.

I could watch this many times over.

A truly amazing video from NASA:

This compilation of film and video presents the best of the best ground-based Shuttle motion imagery from STS-114, STS-117, and STS-124 missions. Rendered in the highest definition possible, this production is a tribute to the dozens of men and women of the Shuttle imaging team and the 30yrs of achievement of the Space Shuttle Program.

My esteemed colleague, Cennydd Bowles:

Hover states can provide subtle visual cues that help the user understand how something works. A faint glow around a ‘favourite’ star. An underline appearing underneath a link. But they should not be used for anything else. Hovering does not demonstrate user intent.

Garrett Murray:

It’s not that Facebook’s Places feature is bad, it’s just that it’s boring. It’s nothing special. They didn’t do it better than anyone else.

That’s the problem with Facebook. They are slowly destroying independent web applications with boring versions that immediately win due to Facebook’s population. There’s no demand for excellence.

Phil Gyford has built a stripped down version of the Guardian Website, featuring only articles that appear in today’s paper. He’s written more about the project on his website.

Another Adam Buxton YouTube classic:

A long time ago, in a galaxy blah blah away… Big Jobs does his best to convince a sceptical Rebel Alliance that the i-Pad really is a game changer.

I’ve not been able to get enough of Christian Bale’s recent rant on the set of Terminator 4, yet sadly there has only been audio available for this moment of madness.

Luckily, Joe Butcher has created this brilliant animated accompaniment, which sees Bale in his celebrated role as Batman, shouting at his sidekick Robin. If you haven’t heard the rant yet, be warned that it contains explicit content. Via @cyberdees