Hey look, Sunday's Best posted my snapshot of Mr. Scruff! Now I just need to find the time and scratch to shoot off for another awesome weekend in Brooklyn.

Labels: Links, Photos

After noodling around with somewhere in the range of six dozen different, half-finished designs for a personal portfolio, I came across Cargo. Billed as a 'personal publishing system', it is an elegantly simple content management system geared at displaying anything visual.

I have it running at portfolio.nattarbox.com, so far so good.

Labels: design, Links

Marcio Kogan is my new favorite architect. I came across this image via automatic suggestion on FFFFound. Clicking through to the image source, I found a new design blog to read, and more importantly, several houses by Kogan. With any luck he will still be designing perfect tropical homes by the time I can afford one.

Panama House


Open Beach House in Brazil


Osler House. This one is my favorite.

Labels: architecture, design, Links, Photos

Douglas Bowman recently posted an interesting account of his time spent as lead designer for Google, as part of a public goodbye letter to the company. Particularly fascinating to me is the commentary on how an ingrained engineering culture made adopting design leadership difficult:

Seven years is a long time to run a company without a classically trained designer. Google had plenty of designers on staff then, but most of them had backgrounds in CS or HCI. And none of them were in high-up, respected leadership positions. Without a person at (or near) the helm who thoroughly understands the principles and elements of Design, a company eventually runs out of reasons for design decisions.

Reading this makes me grateful for the emphasis and priority on design that Brightcove has had since the founding of the company. We have an extremely productive relationship between design and development, I couldn't imagine what it would be like to work any other way. Doug provides specifics on how an imbalance can cripple the design process:

Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case.

While I believe that testing and empirical data are valuable in making informed design decisions, design by necessity is an intuitive practice. At some point the designer must be willing, and empowered, to be able to make decisions about the right design.

I can remember Doug's talk at An Event Apart Boston, and how he went into fascinating detail on the implications of design on products that operate at Google's scale. Specific examples of how the layout for Google calendars had to evolve based on load time requirements, and how a few bytes of extraneous CSS could multiply to massive bandwidth overhead were terribly interesting to hear. Although his talk was very positive and framed these issues as inspiring design challenges, reading between the lines one could see where his current frustration arose.

Labels: brightcove, design, Links

A good open letter from the guys at Plex to the media companies. Obviously I share most of their sentiments.

Dear Media Companies,

I’m really beginning to think that things between us won’t work.

I have to admit that I’ve been cheating on you for a while now. I’ve been spending time with USENET. She’s old, she’s unattractive, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life with her, but she does offer me one simple thing that you don’t: unencumbered access to ad-free media.

Plex is a free media center application for OS X, based on the Xbox Media Center code. A similar project is Boxee, which seems to get a lot more attention and press. Having tried both, I can say I prefer Plex. But really, having a choice between two awesome media center applications that are under active development, who can complain?

Labels: internet, Links, Video

If you are feeling generous this holiday season, may I direct your attention to a worthy cause that you may consider joining me in donating to:

www.patrickobrienfoundation.org

If you were given 2-5 years to live, what would you do?

My name is Patrick. Sometime during the fall of 2004, I noticed an involuntary shaking in my legs. For a long time the exact cause eluded definition.

On May 24th, 2005, however, I was officially diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease), a terminal disease that results in the progressive degeneration of the nerves and muscles responsible for voluntary movement. It is a fatal and incurable disease. I was 30 years old.

As evidenced by the film segments on this website I have chosen to do something with my illness. Over the course of 2006 and 2007 I will document my journey with ALS on 35mm motion picture film. This challenge has given me a focal point to channel my energies, and will hopefully inspire others to keep moving through their own adversities. At this point in my life my intention is to be at peace with myself, and to pursue my life's work of making a feature film about something which reaches for the truth. All of my adult life, I have been making films - films about unconventional characters, stories about vulnerable souls. Now, in the last years of my life, the film I am making, the character I tried so hard to write all these years, the story which eluded me on paper, is unfolding across my body, inside my nervous system, and in front of my eyes. I have become the character in the film which I have been striving to bring to the screen all these years.

Please help me complete my life's work by donating to the completion of my film. Your contribution will make a difference in the way our government and our world sees this ugly, spirit punishing, insidious illness. By bringing attention to this fatal diagnosis, victims, their families, and their communities will benefit from a shift towards better resources, more accurate healthcare policies, and improved treatment options. By donating now, you will be a founding member and key part of a landmark motion picture about the impact of ALS - what it means to be alive, what it means to die, and what is important in life.

_Patrick O'Brien

Labels: Charity, Film, Links

I just found this blog post complementing the design of the current Brightcove video players. Its nice to see someone notice and praise the more subtle interaction and design decisions.

Labels: brightcove, design, internet, Links, Video

My buddy at work just put up a new site, www.design-feed.net:

"Design-Feed is a design feed aggregator. We hand-pick the most interesting design related RSS feeds and present them in an easy-to-browse format."

Update: seems to be quite a day for Brightcove employee personal site launches. Eric brings us www.quickrisotto.com, a site for Risotto recipes and videos. And I guess this is the first real post on my new blog, so yay for me too.

Labels: Blogging, Links