Tangle Blog
I saw (and enjoyed) the Gary Hustwit film 'Helvetica' recently. Yes, that's correct. It's a documentary about the font-face Helvetica. I know that on the surface, this sounds like a boring premise. Even for someone who works in design, and has spent more time than I'd probably like to admit trying to grasp the finer points of typography, it was an open question to me whether or not this topic would be substantial enough to support a two hour film. I won't go as far as to call this a riveting doc, but it is an interesting discussion of general design principles, and of the evolution of design in recent generations. Long story long , an interesting doc, worth a look. Having seen the film, and as a bit of a design exercise, I set about creating a version of Tangle.ca using just the Helvetica font, with no graphics. Here's my best crack at a graphics-free Helvetica based design.
I made you a Tangle Media wallpaper today between meetings. I'm going to call that a productive thing to have done. You can click the link below to download it. You're welcome, planet earth!
Tangle Media is pleased to announce the future of Television. Scratch that. The future of Education. Tangle Media had the distinct pleasure of teaming up with Erv Fehr Productions to broadcast the new series 'A Public Education' on a dedicated website. We put our full attention towards (lovingly) conpressing the episodes for the web, offering a pristine full-screen experience, with direct iTunes downloads. The series will eventually offer ten full length episodes of the TV show for free.
I'll admit , I've been reluctant to accept Twitter. I've sort of regarded it as an anomaly. What's it for? Aren't tweets just glorified Facebook status updates (and perhaps even less purposeful?) The answers to the above, as I've discovered them, are as follows. Nothing. And yes. I've laughed when I've seen mainstream news embracing twitter as though it were some revolutionary way to communicate with their audience. There may be a grain of truth there. On the other hand , YOU ARE CNN. It's a curiosity seeing a global leader in news , an organization that can move an orbiting satellite for a live-shot in two phone calls, get all excited about poor little twitter. it defies explanation. It's somehow like Boeing getting all excited about some meandering advance in hot air balloon technology. Sort of nice, I guess, but quite besides the point. My earliest explanation so far for this phenomenon was that perhaps this twitter is such an example of internet reductionism for the http impaired, to the point that this is the Fisher Price version of the internet that grey haired newscasters can understand. Like AOL back in the nineties, but less square. John Mayer proved that wrong. He tweets 200 times a day, and possibly while also wearing two bluetooth headsets. So there must be a broader appeal. So Tangle Media is going to get to the bottom of this. Please, follow us at twitter.com/tanglemedia. I will say nothing of consequence. It will be fun?
I was really pumped up after a recent meeting in Edmonton. A project was closer to launch. I got a 15% promo certificate to a club that had Hot Hot Heat playing the very same night. I awed the entire room by demonstrating advanced aural recall, and also I think, by using 'verisimilitude' correctly in a sentence (unverified) . There was only one thing to do. Kick the day into overdrive. By leaping from the nearest 12 story tower. So, WEM is just down the street. I wander toward the bungee kiosk. On that topic, and to answer your question; Yes. It is a concern that a life or death proposition is purchased at a kiosk. It lacks the gravitas you'd expect. Next time I bungee I want to buy the ticket from a council of wizened old men in a towering marble hall. Think of that scene from Mary Poppins with the father and the bank managers and you're halfway there. But I digress. We're at the kiosk, anyway, and I ask the bungeeist, who never introduces himself, but whose name I intuit to be either Chad, or Kyle "How do you ... control... the process?" The bungeeist replies, "Man... you just... SURRENDER to it." He then points out that when leaping off a tower, attached only at the sternum by an elastic band, that there was really no way to anticipate every eventuality. He then pointed out that this was "Relatively safe, you know, compared to that roller-coaster over there which has several fatalities associated with it." Fair enough, I reason. We get me all strapped in, and Chad/Kyle says "Oh, and you should be honored. You're the first to jump using this new cord". "And how do we know it works?" "That's HOW we know it works." Good enough for me. 54321 Bungee.
I had to post this clip. As any guitarist will tell you , the pentatonic scale is that the roots of almost all rock and blues music. Great demonstration here by Bobby McFerrin that this scale is hardwired here into this audience's collective consciousness.
World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.
I found the attached image on The Consumerist earlier today and had to make mention of it. There's something incredible about a company in 2009 using a logo that's more than a hundred years old. But even more noteworthy when that company is a giant like Coca Cola. I suppose it comes back to those basic principles of logo design. Easy to read , easy to reproduce, works as a vector, and works in one color. Enough said.
Happy Canada Day. I'm going to spend my Canada day loading this page up with sentences that look like SEO Keywords! Need to program a programmer? In Lethbridge, web development happens when on the web, Tangle Media makes websites out of PHP code and business software results. Get a databased website is easy with best lethbridge alberta website builders for hire, to program a website for small business with lots of email and online shopping for e commerce
"If you can read this, somebody stole my iPhone"
I guess it's an annual tradition now. Once a year, at WWDC, we crowd around our monitors and hope for a good bitrate on the live stream from Apple, as they hold a press conference to announce their newest OS release, and other assorted products. It is absolutely the geekiest thing that I will partake in this whole year. That said, we at Tangle Media develop websites every single day using Mac OS X, and so improvements and adjustments to that system have potentially huge bearings on our working lives. So - it's WWDC day. Hopefully a release for Snow Leopard is announced. Hopefully iPhone OS 3.0 is flat out released. Hopefully there's a game-changing 'one more thing' announcement from Jobs. And if none of that means anything to you, I guess that's OK. That's why we do what we do.
This is my favorite thing so far today. Granted it's only 9:30 , but this book-case / coffin hybrid seems like a stroke of genius. I'm also assuming it's a great piece if you move houses often enough.
I've been in typography mode for the last three days, and so I couldn't resist posting this music video.
I spent some time this week making updates to tangle.ca. This month alone, we've updated the design of our website, improved our systems for accepting online payments, added a technical support form, implemented a blogging platform, revised our portfolio offerings, and posted news items about our more recent developments. We take great pride in tangle.ca because it's the easiest and perhaps most important way to demonstrate to our prospective clients what exactly it is we do. Rather than just make promises, we want to deliver a great website ourselves. Without naming names, it often surprises me how little emphasis our colleagues and competitors can place on the very work that defines them; their own sites. Of course we say this with some prejudice, but when choosing a web developer, may we humbly suggest reviewing the ongoing efforts and emphasis that developer places on his or her site? If the developer's site talks about giving you a site that is easy to manage and update, what is the date the site was last updated? Is the material fresh? If the site talks about delivering tools to make YOUR business run more smoothly does the site demonstrate tools that may do the same for the developer? We at Tangle are proud of our own site, and it's probably true that anything we'll tell you we can do for your business is something we can demonstrate on our very own site. There can be a world of difference between the best laid plans and a proven record of executing projects to spec. There's no better way to gauge a developer's ability to deliver than in reviewing the site they represent themselves with.
I just finished the book 'Outliers' by Malcolm Gladwell. This is a study in the root causes of personal and cultural success, framed through a statistical lense. It's not really a business book, though. Gladwell examines these extreme examples of success and slices them thin; he analyzes the cases of Bill Gates, The Beatles, and NHL superstars. Gladwell also examines cultural drivers of success, using an incredible series of case studies of airline safety to demonstrate the degree to which our language and culture shape our personal skill-sets and aptitudes. The case is made that the power differential typical to certain cultures between social superiors and their subordinates has everything to do with why certain countries have been historically safer to fly in. He confronts cultural and racial stereotypes. For example, the penultimate section of the book addresses the notion that Asians are just naturally better at math. He offers a theory that suggests that linguistic differences between english and chinese might have a lot to do with that idea. The case is made that key drivers of success often look less like natural ability, and more like the results of unmatched amounts of practice, engaged by fortuitous circumstance and cultural influence. I think, even though that may seem like an obvious conclusion, the book provides a lot of insight into how out of touch our perceptions of personal success might be, and deflates the hyped up expectations and overnight-success culture that becomes pervasive. A very interesting read.
Wolfram Alpha launched this week. This is about the single most interesting thing in search since Google launched in 1999. Wolfram is a different type of search engine. It won't help you find a recipe, song lyrics, or celebrity news. What it will do is apply 'computational logic' to your search term and answer real questions as well as or better than any other machine in cyberspace.
Thanks for clicking that link. I set this blog up to really left a very important part of the work Tangle Media does show through. In our industry it's as true as anywhere else that if we're not running as hard as we can to keep up with technical developments and emerging trends in our industry, we're falling behind. Every single day, our team shows each other interesting links and articles that we've each found. We talk about interesting ways to approach the work we do, and which great new tool, language, or platform was released that week that (with a little elbow grease) we might want to consider building into our product line. Basically, I hope this blog is a place to post some of those little islands of interest that we float past on our daily voyage across the internet. Whether we're discussing great design, great programming, EPIC FAIL, or any of the above, I do hope you find that some of what interests us, interests you. Fergus
