Beautiful Bitmaps The wonderful folks over at UPPERCASE Magazine invited me to participate in a fun typographic project called “ Beautiful Bitmaps ” for their latest issue: For issue 15, we invited 26 typographers, designers and illustrators to make beautiful bitmaps by taking this vestigial part of…

Pixar story artist Emma Coats has tweeted a series of “story basics” over the past month and a half — guidelines that she learned from her more senior colleagues on how to create appealing stories: #1: You admire a character for trying more than for their successes. #2: You gotta keep in mind what’s…

Answer: $13.47. Asking “How much does a responsive web design cost” and expecting a cut-and-dry, prescriptive answer just ain’t happening. Brian Hoff ( @behoff ) handily explains why in his article What Does a Website Cost? Imagine asking a Real Estate company, “How much does a house cost?” Well it…

http://jasonsantamaria.com/articles/stealing-sheep

March 27, 2012 The Mac App Store Needs Paid Upgrades The Mac App Store has been a huge boon to Mac software developers, but has an enormous flaw: it needs to allow developers to charge existing customers a discounted price for major upgrades. Right now developers selling through the Mac App Store…

Shaping the Page Work Work Twitter Startups, development teams, and passionately creative companies: Meet your UI/UX design director. Starting at just $3,950 a month. . “Andy is one of the most thoughtful designers and strategists I’ve ever worked with. Some people think about the specific pieces of…

by Jason Blumer January 31, 2012 Published in Business ∙ Strategic pricing helps your brand and helps you to make more money. Issuing a price is like handing out a business card—it’s a great branding tool, but be careful about what it says to your market. Beginning relationships with customers at a…

I wish I had a thousand-yen note for every journalist who, over the past decade, has asked me whether Japan is still as futurologically sexy as it seemed to be in the '80s. If I did, I'd take one of these spotlessly lace-upholstered taxis over to the Ginza and buy my wife a small box of the most…

I was intrigued that a few people saw my recent article about iBooks Author as a criticism (in the negative sense). That wasn’t my intention at all, and indeed I’m very enthusiastic about the ecosystem (iBooks Author, its file format, iBooks 2 as a reader/viewer, and the iBookstore as a storefront…

Introduction Many of the best ideas we’ve funded were ones that surprised us, not ones we were waiting for. There are, however, some startups that we’re very interested in seeing founders apply with. Below is an updated Request for Startups (RFS), which outlines some of those ideas in general terms.…

Learn To Code January 1st, 2012 If learning to program is even a minor goal for you, Code Year (via Brent Simmons ) might be just the encouragement you need. They promise to email you on a weekly basis with coding lessons to help you achieve your goal. I’m one of those computer programmers who…

Can ExpressionEngine Do That Be Responsive Scale Output JSON Fly Kites Be The Backend ? Yes! The answer is always yes. Ideas come in all shapes and sizes. And whatever the idea, ExpressionEngine can. But don't take our word for it, just look at what You and ExpressionEngine have already done…

In my earlier 20s when I knew everything, I was a much bigger evangelist for my technology choices. I’m accused of fanboyism a lot more these days, but only because Hacker News keeps sending huge waves of people here who tell me I’m an idiot. But I used to be much more annoying with pushing my…

“Hello, Windows 8? This is iPad. You win.” That’s Paul Thurrott , tweeting from Microsoft’s Build conference. I’ll file it away for future claim chowder, sure, but right now let’s think about this in the unsnarkiest terms we can manage. This tweet, to me, says a lot. One of the implications of…

No 5 The Bike Maker Our fifth film turns to bike maker Ezra Caldwell (Fast Boy Cycles), who was diagnosed with cancer in 2008. When the cancer threatens to shatter his love of bikes, Ezra survives by documenting his illness as thoroughly as his craft. credits No 1 The Distiller In our inaugural…

Peter Bright wrote a good piece earlier this week at Ars Technica , documenting his attempt to buy a MacBook Air-like Windows laptop (he doesn’t want an Air running Windows using Boot Camp because he doesn’t like Apple’s U.K. keyboard ) and finds the experience confusing (too many models to choose…

With the recent release of The Last Rocket and this past weekend’s Ludum Dare I’ve been thinking a lot about touch screen controls in platformers. I’m increasingly of the opinion that onscreen buttons are not the way forward. Overlays are a poor substitute for a physical d-pad or buttons; it’s too…

David Drummond, Google senior vice president and chief legal officer, “ When Patents Attack Android ”: But Android’s success has yielded something else: a hostile,organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple andother companies, waged through bogus patents. They’re doing this by…