This post has nothing to do with art or design…. this was just a great way for me to start a Saturday.

To cut a longer story short…. this morning my 12yo daughter mis-heard something I was saying to my 9yo daughter and said “who?”. Without missing a beat I answered “he’s on first base”. She looked at me with an extremely puzzled look on her face (and maybe slightly amused), and said “what?”, so I answered, “no, he’s on second”.

Now, to the young folk out there (like my kids), who have no idea of who Abbott and Costello are, they are 2 guys who were extremely funny, and successful in their day. Whether it was on stage, TV or in one of their many, many movies, these guys new how to be funny without having to resort to being controversial, or even swearing.

Bud & Lou made 36 films together between 1940 and 1956. Abbott and Costello were among the most popular and highest-paid entertainers in the world during World War II.

I watched this video with my girls twice, and laughed till I cried, both times. The girls smiled through the screening, and appreciated the cleverness of the wordplay, but I don’t think they truly appreciated the genius that was playing out before their very eyes.

Now to get the girls to sit through one of their movies…… but which one?

When bookmarking a site on your iOS device using the “Save to Home Screen” button, Safari will save an icon on your device which is simply based on a snapshot of the site homepage itself. However, you can add your own custom bookmark icons to be used instead. Plus it’s very easy to do. Here’s how:

1. Create 3 versions of your icon in 57×57, 72×72 and 114×114 pixel sizes.
2. Add your images to the root folder.
3. Add code to your site:

WordPress

Add this code into your header.php file in your theme folder, just above the closing </head> tag.

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<link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" href="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/apple-touch-icon.png" />
<link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" href="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/apple-touch-icon-72x72.png" />
<link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" href="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/apple-touch-icon-114x114.png" />

The above code allows for the icon to be left as it is, and not for the device to add the gloss highlight. However if you want the highlight added to the icon by the device, use this instead:

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<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/apple-touch-icon.png" />
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/apple-touch-icon-72x72.png" />
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/apple-touch-icon-114x114.png" />

Static html

Add this code to the index.html file, just above the closing </head> tag.

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<link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" href="apple-touch-icon.png"/>
<link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" href="apple-touch-icon-72x72.png"/>
<link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" href="apple-touch-icon-114x114.png"/>

The above code allows for the icon to be left as it is, and not for the device to add the gloss highlight. However if you want the highlight added to the icon by the device, use this instead:

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<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="apple-touch-icon.png"/>
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="apple-touch-icon-72x72.png"/>
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="apple-touch-icon-114x114.png"/>

That's it.

Here is a video of Jack White, from the White Stripes talking about how he likes to make things a little bit more difficult for himself, so he has to work a little harder for the end result he is trying to achieve. This is just a short piece from the documentary “Under Great White Northern Lights”.

The one comment that really struck a chord with me was “Deadlines make you creative”. Those 4 words are so true, and I personally experience this on “almost” every one of my “finished” projects. I have a draw full of half started ideas, and half-written stories that I know will never see the day, unless the circumstances change, and a deadline all of a sudden rears its ugly head.

Deadlines…. I need you!!

“Deadlines make you creative”

Jack White

I first saw this app when the developer, Galvin Scott Davis, showed me a few of the pages, in his studio in Sydney. I immediately loved the artwork, and the unique page turn navigation system that he and his developers had created. He also mentioned a “hook”, a special feature that was included in the app that the kids would love, and that added another level of interactivity to the story “experience”.

He wouldn’t tell me then what the hook was, but we know know that it is the ability to “blow dandelions from the screen”.

The app is up on Kicktarter to help with the final development production. With only a week to go, the app is approximately 90% funded and needs just a bit more help to get it over the line.

Click here to go to the Kickstarter page, to get all the info on the project including a video showing some of the features in action. Then why not make a pledge… every little bit helps.

Read below for the official Press Release:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – Dandelion – “Bullying is for people with no imagination”:
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A positive tale told with a unique tech interaction stands out amongst the current bullying news.

‘Dandelion’ is a just-launched anti-bullying project by award-winning creative Galvin Scott Davis.
The children’s iPad book encourages kids and parents to discuss bullying by interacting with an iPad App in an entirely new story…
By physically blowing Dandelion wishes from the screen of the device!

‘Dandelion’ was released this week on Kickstarter.com (the subject of many recent online success stories) and is already surpassing its daily target.
The project asks children to embrace creativity to combat the problem and spread the word that “Bullying is for people with no imagination”.

The project has taken months of development to prefect the Dandelion spore blowing, and combines hand/eye game components with interactive storytelling.

from Wikipedia:

“Above the fold” is a graphic design concept that refers to the location of an important news story or a visually appealing photograph on the upper half of the front page of a newspaper, or in case of webpages, the part of a page that’s visible without scrolling.

I was asked by a client the other day to reduce the height of the header of his website, to bring more of the information “above the fold”. Now there is a term I hadn’t heard in quite some time.

“Above the fold” is an old newspaper term that dictates all the most important information needs to be on the top half of the paper. As most papers were folded back then, people would see everything they needed to in order to be enticed to buy the paper itself. This term may have had some validity before, when the choice of monitors and screen resolution were both quite small. But not any more. With the high quality of screen technology, and prices becoming a lot more affordable, most of us can afford to have at the very least a 17″ screen size.

Also, as designer Paddy Donnelly explains in his article “Life, Below 600px“, if the story you are telling is interesting enough, people will gladly scroll further down, without giving it a second thought. Plus, keep in mind that Apple themselves determined that scrolling was just second nature to all of us, that they removed the scroll bar altogether.

So when I was given this instruction, I must admit I wasn’t exactly sure what to do. If I was to alter any sizes to comply with the clients instructions, I would need to know his monitor’s screen size, and resolution, as I saw all the information on my 27″ iMac quite nicely.

I was reading an interesting article in the latest Wired magazine, about Jack Dorsey, the man behind Twitter and Square. The interview was taking place in a San Francisco tea house, and while the tea was being served, Jack notices the worn corner on the serving tray and remarks, “that’s wabi-sabi”. Dorsey also mentions that “this mysterious aesthetic is at the core of his design philosophy, a simple yet lived-in quality that pleases and engages users on a profound level”.

Wabi-sabi is the Japanese concept of “finding beauty in imperfection”, and is a term I personally have never heard of before. This site promoting the book “Wab-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers” takes the meaning one step further:

“Wabi-sabi is the quintessential Japanese aesthetic. It is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional…

It is also two separate words, with related but different meanings. “Wabi” is the kind of perfect beauty that is seemingly-paradoxically caused by just the right kind of imperfection, such as an asymmetry in a ceramic bowl which reflects the handmade craftsmanship, as opposed to another bowl which is perfect, but soul-less and machine-made.

“Sabi” is the kind of beauty that can come only with age, such as the patina on a very old bronze statue.”

I find this theory intriguing and must admit that I ordered the book (I mentioned above) to get a better understanding of the concept. The Wired article is an interesting read, and Jack Dorsey sounds like an interesting guy, with quite a few comparisons to Steve Jobs thrown in.

Here is a link to the article on the Wired site.