Back to Top

MATTer

To create anything — whether a short story or a magazine profile or a film or a sitcom — is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic. — Tom Bissell on creators and creation (via brainpickings)

new-aesthetic:

“The pixel is the fundamental unit of digital imaging, a square representation of a single color. Pixels are always the same size, and always arranged in orderly grids. This project looks at what happens when you change these universally agreed upon standards. More broadly, I’m interested in how the construction of digital images alters our perceptions of reality. Does computer-mediated vision change how we see without computers?”
Flexible Pixels | benjamin grosser

Really interesting premise. Digital is affecting the way we see the real world in every other avenue. Why not visual arts?
explore-blog:

“If everybody likes what you are doing, you’re doing it wrong.”
Words of wisdom from 20x200 founder Jen Bekman, excerpted from her fantastic Design Matters interview and immortalized in hand-lettered typography by Chris Piascik. A worthy addition to Advice to Sink in Slowly. 

Theme of the day.
Happiness Encounter by Stefan Sagmeister @ ICA Philadelphia.Love the gumball graph. See it here.
(vis PSFK)

theatlantic:

What If Your Emails Never Went to Gmail and Twitter Couldn’t See Your Tweets?

A new tool under development by Oregon State computer scientists could radically alter the way that communications work on the web. Privly is a sort of manifesto-in-code, a working argument for a more private, less permanent Internet. 

The system we have now gives all the power to the service providers. That seemed to be necessary, but Privly shows that it is not: Users could have a lot more power without giving up social networking. Just pointing that out is a valuable contribution to the ongoing struggle to understand and come up with better ways of sharing and protecting ourselves online. 

“Companies like Twitter, Google, and Facebook make you choose between modern technology and privacy. But the Privly developers know this to be false choice,” lead dev Sean McGregor says in the video below. “You can communicate through the site of your choosing without giving the host access to your content.”

Through browser extensions, Privly allows you to post to social networks and send email without letting those services see “into” your text. Instead, your actual words get encrypted and then routed to Privlys servers (or an eventual peer-to-peer network). What the social media site “sees” is merely a link that Privly expands in your browser into the full content. Of course, this requires that people who want to see your content also need Privly installed on their machines.

Read more.

Sometimes I pretend I’m a designer to help out a friend.
nevver:

Hit the Road Jack