Global Nerdy » Design

Turning Ho-Hum Colour into WOW! with Photoshop

Joey deVilla — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 16:45:03 +0000

My old co-worker Darren “Problogger” Rowse IM’d me to let me know about a new article on Digital Photography School titled Turn Ho-Hum Color into WOW! with Photoshop written by guest blogger Helen Bradley. The “before and after” photos show some pretty impressive results.

This technique makes use of the Lab colour space, which people tend to eschew in favour of the CMYK (Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-blacK, which comes from the print world) and RGB (Red-Green-Blue, which geeks are comfortable with).

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about Lab colour:

Unlike the RGB and CMYK color models, Lab color is designed to approximate human vision. It aspires to perceptual uniformity, and its L component closely matches human perception of lightness. It can thus be used to make accurate color balance corrections by modifying output curves in the a and b components, or to adjust the lightness contrast using the L component. In RGB or CMYK spaces, which model the output of physical devices rather than human visual perception, these transformations can only be done with the help of appropriate blend modes in the editing application.

Lab’s channels are:

L: Lightness. You can use this to adjust the lightness of the image without changing any of the colour settings. This is what makes LAB stand apart from CMYK and RGB, where lightness and colour are tied together.
a: Green and magenta.
b: Blue and yellow.

Bradley says that “The process is ridiculously simple, it requires no selections to be made, and it can be recorded as a simple action. It’s my kind of fix – quick, easy and very powerful.”

Salmagundi for Friday, November 7th, 2008

Joey deVilla — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 22:18:20 +0000

Interview with Chris Slemp, MSDN

Here’s another video interview featuring Yours Truly at the PDC: it’s with Chris Slemp, Program Manager for the Server and Tools Online group at Microsoft. In the interview, we talk about MSDN and its new social bookmarking feature.

Click here to watch the video.

“Grim Fandango’s” Puzzle Document

If you’re looking to get into the mind of a game designer and the design of one of the most highly-regarded computer adventures games, be sure to check out the Grim Fandango Puzzle Document. Tim Schafer, in “a temporary fit of Cake-induced Grim nostalgia,” decided to put the game’s puzzle design document online in PDF form (it’s 2.3MB in size).

Here’s a great summary of the Grim Fandango Puzzle Document, written by Andy Geers:

I use that word "crafted" because that’s exactly what this newly released document shows: true craftsmanship. We see the incredible attention to detail, the pacing of the narrative as it builds and as the puzzles get increasingly sophisticated, always coaxing the player along with them. As somebody whose spent the last few years trying to write my own adventure game, what struck me most about this document is the sheer simplicity of it - it’s well established that it takes a great deal of clarity and hard work to boil down something so vast as Grim Fandango into such a simple representation that conveys so much information in such a succinct way.

It’s a considerably more interesting read than most specs.

My Job-Related Reading List

Nothing gives you that frozen-caveman-thawed-in-modern-times feeling like returning to a software platform after not developing in it in seven years. Getting back into the swing of Microsoft’s development tools has been fun so far, but it is, as a lot of people have told me, like drinking from the firehose.

To quickly get acclimated with C#, ASP.NET and XNA, I’m expensing the following books I bought today:

Pro C# 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Platform by Andrew Troelsen
Professional ASP.NET 3.5 in C# and VB by Bill Evjen, Scott Hanselman and Devin Rader
Beginning XNA 2.0 Game Programming by Alexandre Santos Lobao, Bruno Pereira Evangelista, and Jose Antonio Leal de Farias

I’ll let you know what I think of these books as I read them.

“Zero Punctuation” Reviews

And finally, a couple of reviews from my all-time favourite game reviewer, Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw. The first one’s for Saints Row 2, which includes a great argument for why it might actually be a better game than Grand Theft Auto IV as well as a brilliant concept for a new game:

and here’s the latest review, for Dead Space, which he summarizes as “competent but bland”. Luckily, his review is anything but…

Herman Miller’s “Embody” Chair: Aeron++?

Joey deVilla — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 13:47:28 +0000

Gizmodo has a photo gallery of Herman Miller’s follow-up to the popular (and very comfortable) Aeron chair: the Embody chair, which was designed by Aeron co-designer Bill Stumpf. They declare that it’s “The Best Chair We’ve Ever Sat On”:

This is supposed to be an extremely comfy chair. Its backrest is described as “a matrix of pixels creates dynamic seat-and-back surfaces that automatically conform to your every movement and distribute your weight evenly.” The seat is “a series of plastic bands providing suspension, the second is a sheet of coils for support, the third is a system hexagonal rings that shift with your weight and the final layer is a mesh that allows air circulation to keep the sitter cool.”

It’s also supposed to be a “green” chair: made from non-toxic and sustainable materials and 42% recycled content. The entire chair is 95% recyclable.

By now, you’re probably asking “How much?” The answer: $1600.

Gizmodo’s subjective verdict:

…it is the most comfortable chair we’ve ever sat in. You can adjust the amount of recline, the tension of the recline, your seat depth, your back curvature, your armrest positioning and how high the seat is. But you can do this on many other chairs. What makes this one special—and more comfortable—is that the backrest has individual supports. Think of a Simmons mattresses with individual coils; this adjusts and supports whatever contortions you’re putting your spine through in your daily routine of reading Gizmodo.

It looks really nice. It’s a crying shame this chair is outside my budget; I think I’m going to opt for the Steelcase Leap chair, which is also quite comfy, and sells for a good $1000 less.

But wow, I’d love to have an Embody…

Pair Programming Chairs

Joey deVilla — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 15:33:41 +0000

The development tool company Cenqua have a cute gag ad for a pair programming chair called the “PairOn” — an Aeron built for two:

They list the PairOn’s “key features” as:

Fully unit-tested in our ego-free ergonomics lab
Essential office furniture for any eXtreme XP Pair (XXPP)
Fully adjustable via individual or pair control
Can be levered to standup-meeting height
40-hour-week alarm buzzer built in
Available in a range of attractive colours

Here’s a pair programming chair that really exists: it’s a set of drawers that doubles as a stool:

These are drawer sets mounted on some very good wheels and topped with well-padded upholstery. If you wanted to pair program with someone, you’d simply pull the drawer unit out from under their desk and sit on it. These things were surprisingly comfortable; I’ve spent upwards of two hours sitting on one of these with nary a complaint.

Alas, these aren’t available in stores. They were custom-built for a startup for whom I briefly worked, whose CEOs was more in love with the idea of running a start-up than actually running a start-up. Their last programmer recently ditched them, and I’m hoping to pick up one of these in their bankruptcy sale.

Great Showdowns (of the 8-bit Era)

Joey deVilla — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 14:09:44 +0000

Can you identify the ’80s-era games depicted in Scott Campbell’s piece, Great Showdowns (of the 8-bit Era)?

3 CSS Image Tricks

Joey deVilla — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 15:59:00 +0000

Instant Fundas has an article featuring 3 useful image CSS tricks: 1. Make it so your images can’t be saved using the “save image” option in the context menu, 2. Label images with hovering text and 3. Making a background image clickable.

Great Free Fonts via Smashing Magazine: Anivers, Fresco and Gentium

Joey deVilla — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 15:50:21 +0000

Smashing Magazine’s “Free Fonts of the Month” for this particular month are really, really, really, good. Grab ‘em while they’re still up!

Here’s a sample of Anivers, a font created for Smashing Magazine’s first anniversary. It’s been updated for “extended language support, improved glyph shapes and improved metrics and kerning.” Note that only Anivers Regular is free:

Here’s Fresco Semi Bold, “just one member of a large and flexible type family by Dutch design legend Fred Smeijers:”

And finally, Gentium, designed by Victor Gaultney:

Gamasutra’s on Lessons from Atari Games

Joey deVilla — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 14:50:18 +0000

Game Design Essentials: 20 Atari Games is a long (23 pages!), thorough but incredibly fascinating look at games from the time when Atari mattered as a videogame company. Back when they were something, they weren’t afraid to bust out of the genres of the time, take chances and come up with some innovative, experimental and sometimes mind-bending games with unique touches, right down to that unmistakable bell sound whenever you inserted a coin into the machine.

What Hath OLPC Wrought

Joey deVilla — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 15:59:25 +0000

According to the Economist, “The $100 laptop has been a success—just not, so far, in the way its makers intended.” The success is that OLPC inspired the development of machines that are expected to be bigger successes, such as the Asus EEE PC and the Classmate.

All HTML Form Control Elements Require Labels

Joey deVilla — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 15:22:14 +0000

UX Rule #1 - All HTML Form Control Elements Require Labels, and this rule is illustrated by showing the differences between Facebook’s and GMail’s login forms.

Promo for “Guitar Hero” Nintendo DS: Really Bad or Ironically Bad? I Can’t Tell.

Joey deVilla — Thu, 29 May 2008 17:11:44 +0000

Take a look at this promo ad that walks you through the gameplay of Guitar Hero: On Tour, the version for the Nintendo DS handheld game system.

My question is: is it…

An intentionally bad promo that parodies 1980s ads for game systems like the Atari 2600, Intellivision and Colecovision?
An unintentionally bad ad created by a game company that bought the rights to the Guitar Hero name (the original Guitar Hero team now works on Rock Band) and whose best days are behind it?

I like the attachable fret buttons-and-pick idea; I’m less sure about yelling “Rock out!” into the microphone to activate Star Power, and not at all thrilled about the silly “put out the fire on your guitar by blowing into the microphone” concept.

What do you think?

The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet

Joey deVilla — Thu, 01 May 2008 01:01:00 +0000

The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet distills the best tips for improving your site’s findability by search engines down to two sides of a letter-sized sheet in PDF format. Download it, print it, design your sites by it!

GTA IV Grab Bag #1

Joey deVilla — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:30:19 +0000

Here’s a first in a series of regular updates on the just-released and much-awaited Grand Theft Auto IV…

A Hint for Those of You Who Can’t Speak Niko’s Language

In some of the dialogue between Niko and Roman, they switch between English and (I’m assuming here) Serbian. The bits in Serbian are asides that aren’t crucial to the story and can be inferred from context, but if you really want to feel like Niko, you’d like to know what they’re saying, right?

The solution is simple: just turn on subtitles (you can do this from the Game menu). When they speak in Serbian, the English translation will appear in grey text.

Another 10 Minutes of Gameplay

For those of you who haven’t yet had a chance to try out GTA IV, here’s another video showing the next 10 minutes of gameplay (the video showing the first ten minutes is here), featuring:

A little exploration of Roman’s apartment,
a carjacking (which isn’t as easy as it used to be),
exploring the hood,
abusing a sportscar until it explodes (with Niko in it),
respawning outside a hospital,
noodling with Niko’s appearance,
and fun in multiplayer mode (including a rocket launcher mishap and gunning foos down with a pistol and fully-automatic weaponry).

An Observation from GameSpy

Here’s something from Fargo’s Thought for the Day, which is included in GameSpy Daily, an email newsletter from GameSpy:

Thoughts on Sandbox Games

Since around the time that Grand Theft Auto 3 and The Sims came out, the phrase “sandbox game” or “open world” has seeped into gaming literature and even into marketing speak. It kinda drives me nuts, because a “sandbox” in and of itself isn’t very fun. It’s easy to screw it up.

Ask any game designer and they’ll tell you: if you put a person in an open world, where they can do anything they want, they spend a few minutes testing the limits and then he or she will get bored. The real trick to these games is to provide a lot of directed gameplay even if people don’t realize it. The object of an open world is to let the player set his or her own agenda, and then to provide tons of cool gameplay once they decide what to do. Sims 2 is a great example: you can do whatever you want, but no matter what decisions you make for your characters, you’ll always run across interesting mini-games or tough decisions to make in order to accomplish your goal.

Of course the Grand Theft Auto games have an overall story that you can work through via a series of directed missions, but even when you go “off the rails” and start freestyling in the sandbox world, you’re never far from the guiding hand of a designer encouraging you to collect something, discover something, set a new record, kick off a minigame, etc. Few design teams can do an open world right — but when they get it right, the experience is spectacular.

Assassin’s Creed, I Wish I Could Quit You

Joey deVilla — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 05:00:32 +0000

I’ve played Assassin’s Creed only on XBox 360 and I don’t recall the procedure to quit the game being as byzantine as it is on the PC version, shown below:

Roadside Signage Fonts

Joey deVilla — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 22:44:38 +0000

If you’re working on an app like the Church Sign Generator or Photoshopping your own roadside signs, you might want to take a look at these fonts, “Signage Standard” and “Signage Modern”, which are designed to look like the black letters on clear plastic that you see on roadside signs all across North America.

ASCII Curtains

Joey deVilla — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 14:46:31 +0000

Here’s something for people with both nerdy and interior design tendencies: ASCII curtains!

The kids today may not remember ASCII art, but those of use who grew up in the era of dot matrix and daisywheel printers will find these curtains hauntingly familiar. From a distance, designer Nieke Sybrandy’s curtains show a tree branch design, but close up, you can see that the design is made of up dot matrix printer characters:

There are some other interesting geek-friendly designs at Nieke Sybrandy’s site, including duct tape that looks like band-aids and a tablecloth that looks like a blueprint. If you can read Dutch, I’d love it if you could translate some of the text for me!

[Found via GearCrave]

10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.5

Joey deVilla — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 19:25:51 +0000

Aaron Brazell, b5media’s Director of Technology has a blog entry on his blog, Technosailor, titled 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.5. It provides a brief overview of ten features of the very-soon-to-be-released WordPress 2.5, which are quickly summarized below:

New admin user interface. “By far the most comprehensive change in this release was the complete rethinking of how WordPressers do their administrative tasks. Happy Cog Studios was enlisted to do usability research and testing - with the emphasis being on usability research.”
New menu layout. “One of the first things you’ll notice is the change in the administrative navigation. It struck me as very Movable Typeish. I don’t know if the idea came from them or simply that Happy Cog had such thorough user research that it made sense. Either way… it makes sense.”
Changes to the way you add widgets to sidebars. “Another MASSIVE shift in philosophy has been in the Widgets page. Before, you could drag and drop widgets into position. You can still reposition widgets by dragging within a sidebar, however, WordPress is relying less on Javascript “bling” for this release.”
Dashboard overhaul. “…it is completely modularized, and though there is no “tight” way of adding your own, plugin authors can create their own dashboard widgets. The architecture is primitive at this point, but will improve offering a much easier way for plugin authors to do their thing without feeling like they are ‘hacking’.”
Improvements to the visual editor. “I don’t use WordPress’ visual editor, but I’m told it is a vast improvement over the older version. The TinyMCE team has worked closely with WordPress on this release as well.”
Flash-based image uploader. “For those of you using a lot of images in your post, the image uploader has been completely overhauled as well. Namely, you can uplopad and insert multiple images at once via a new Flash-based uploader. This will gracefully fallback to the original uploader if Flash is not installed, so never fear.”
Auto-upgrading of plugins. “By default, it will try to upgrade plugins that are already in the WordPress plugin repository by writing the new files out to the existing plugins. However, this is an inherent security risk as it would require your plugin files be writable by the world.”
Custom thumbnail sizes. “In WordPress 2.5, thumb-nailing became a whole lot more useful. You can not only set your thumbnail dimensions globally, you can also have a “medium” sized thumbnail, a la Flickr and an option to crop an oversize image instead of just resizing.”
New tag management interface. “It works like Flickr tags where tags can be added via a list of comma separated tags or via a “type, click, add” mantra. In addition, the UI has a tabbed interface which allows for the selection of tags by checkboxes and by most used tags, useful to say the least.”
Password strength indicator. A small enhancement, but a useful one for less security-savvy bloggers.
Bonus: New timestamp interface. A nice enhancement by b5er and WordPress contributor Mark Jaquith. “By default, a new post has no timestamp module. Instead, it’s a publish immediately, or you can click a link if you really do want to modify the timestamp. When editing a post with a timestamp, there is also no ‘Modify Timestamp’ checkbox that caused so much confusion for so many years. If you modify the existing timestamp, it’s assumed that you actually want to change the timestamp!“

So far, only Release Candidate 1 of WordPress has been released. If you’re feeling bold, you can download it from here and give it a try.

Mike Rohde’s SxSW Notes

Joey deVilla — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 15:35:42 +0000

At the recent South by Southwest Interactive conference, most of the note-takers, myself included, took notes at the sessions using their laptops. One notable exception was designer Mike Rohde, who took notes the old-fashioned way: with pen and paper, or more specifically, pen and Moleskine notebook.

Image by Mike Rohde.
Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.

These aren’t your garden-variety lecture notes, but what he calls “sketchnotes”. Rather than being mere points taken down during the presentation, they include elements of layout, graphic design and whimsical illustration. “While sketchnotes capture concentrated concepts for each session well,” Rohdes writes, “I think they’re even better at awakening ideas stored in the minds of session attendees.”

Image by Mike Rohde.
Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.

Mike scanned the sketchnotes he took and put them up in this Flickr photoset. You can also read his blog entry about the sketchnotes here.

Image by Mike Rohde.
Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.

This isn’t his first set of sketchnotes — he also took some at the SEED conference in January and posted them in this Flickr set.

[Found via SxSW Baby!]

Now THAT’S a Computer Book Cover!

Joey deVilla — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 05:00:27 +0000

Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

Mockup vs. Reality

Joey deVilla — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:18:54 +0000

Pictured below are two photos:

The mockup of an International Space Station module at Leicester’s National Space Centre, and
The reality — a photo taken a week ago aboard the actual International Space Station.

Click the photo to see it at full size.
Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

I think it’s a pretty apt visual metaphor for the difference between your application’s design and the actual implementation.