Hilarious team-up between Fox and Getty Images for the upcoming Unfinished Business movie — a set of 12 cheesy business stock photos with the film cast, including Vince Vaughn, Dave Franco and Tom Wilkinson.
The stock photos are available for free download here, although only for non-commercial use.
This week, a dress broke the internet (with the help of two llamas), yielding BuzzFeed 28 million pageviews for a single article in less than 24 hours — and leaving traditional media shuffling their feet trying not to miss the tsunami.
Paul Ford on Medium tries to understand the reasons behind the dress’s success and the consequences it will bring to newsrooms around the globe:
I know from experience that Internet events like this have consequences. Meetings. Memos. Jealousy. Twenty-five million [at the time of publication] is a number to make an editorial director angry. […] How do I get that? They’ll wonder. How do I get that sweet, sweet traffic? Why do those children get the traffic with frolic while my attempts to go viral fall flat at hundreds of thousands of impressions?
Brian Morrissey echoes a similar feeling on Digiday and proclaims that “Buzzfeed won”:
In this game, BuzzFeed is winning. It must boggle the mind at traditional publishers that seemingly the entire Internet is talking about content that was created not by a seasoned reporter but a “community growth manager.” These so-called premium publishing brands will inevitably lose their pricing power in the ad market as they continue to copy BuzzFeed.
With a massive audience that‘s becoming bigger and wider every day, solid “news” coverage, an experimental app development team and a friggin’ movie studio, Buzzfeed is shaping up to be the media company of the future.
By the way, they’re hiring.
I believe comfort, not convenience, is the most important thing in software, and text is an incredibly comfortable medium. Text-based interaction is fast, fun, funny, flexible, intimate, descriptive and even consistent in ways that voice and user interface often are not. Always bet on text.
An extensive article exploring why chat might be the interface of the future.
A marvellous recap of Youtube’s 10-year history and its wide impact on our culture.
The New Yorker profiles Jony Ive — a good read, albeit a bit long. Worth skimming at least.
Lots of insight on Apple’s design process, but this quote takes the cake for most amusing:
Ive once sat next to J. J. Abrams at a boozy dinner party in New York, and made what Abrams recalled as “very specific” suggestions about the design of lightsabres.
“I thought it would be interesting if it were less precise, and just a little bit more spitty.” A redesigned weapon could be “more analog and more primitive, and I think, in that way, somehow more ominous.”
A silly design joke that spawned from the (now classic) Motherfucking Website.
Funny thing is, there’s actually good design advice in there.
Everything you feel, smell, and see is leaping onto the Internet, just as everything is becoming a camera. A Really Good Camera. Perhaps your naked image is already on a neighbor’s Dropcam, which happened to see in your window as you walked past without any pants on. (…) The nudes are out there.
We just have to stop caring about other people’s nudity. We should quit being shocked, and we should quit being shamed, because the shame is not ours, only the genitals are. And your genitals are wonderful. You should show them to the world.
Userbrain brings solid advice on writing websites — riffing on top of Writing-first Design by Signal v. Noise from last November.
Great article by Andrew Wilkinson about the importance of building a small-scale business that provides value to a small number of customers.
On the same note, Jason Cohen‘s article from 2012 highlights the perils of “successful unsustainable” companies, while Fred Destin’s article from 2013 does pretty much the opposite, in a fantastic defense of Snapchat and similar companies with no revenue or an apparent business model.
A collection of useful resources for learning how to code.
Classics
Javascript
Ruby (& Rails)
Anyone following Slack’s trajectory already knows they have great numbers, but this is just ridiculous.
It’s like every message sent generated $0.01 for them.
A great read, specially if you follow up with Dan Grover’s Chinese Mobile App UI Trends from last December.
Now I just need someone to tell me why CDiscount, one of France’s most traditional e-commerce sites, looks like a newspaper classified ads section in 2015.
He finally put the Rift off his head, his eyes were in a total state of blown away.
— I would never expect this, […] the building isn‘t finished, and I’ve already been there […] as an architect, this is cheating, my god.
I can see why this is necessary, but being able to accept friend requests after you die is just weird.
The photo editing application that will surely make Adobe lose some sleep is now available for (beta) download. Good discussion going on at Designer News.
Completely drunk from eating bamboo stems, which ferment in gorillas’ stomachs causing them to become intoxicated, the primate, who is the leader of the Kwitonda Group, is said to have felt threatened by a rival male, causing him to become excitable and defensive of his territory.
Sweet guide to anyone designing for iPhone, brought to you by the folks from PaintCode App.
Seriously people, what is wrong with you? They’re already onto us, kicking them will not help our cause.
I met Maurice on February 22nd, 2014, at a high school hackathon. […]
Later that night, I received a phone call from him, and he asked if I would be able to teach him how to code. I love teaching, and Maurice seemed like a nice kid, so I offered to help. He immediately said, “okay, go,” and awaited instruction. I explained that I wouldn’t be able to teach him over the phone, but then I found out that he didn’t have internet at home.
It’s really easy to overlook these “details”, specially with the president of Y Combinator (the most prestigious accelerator in the US) tweeting stuff like this:
also, when people say "we need to train more coders domestically": while that's true, anyone who wants can teach themselves to code online
— Sam Altman (@sama) December 30, 2014He doesn’t sleep. He doesn’t lose focus. He will even forget to eat. He executes again and again, inspiring those around him to have the same passion for the end game as he does.
Impressive account of how awesome the CEO of Uber is.
It‘s also an impressively self-serving pat on the back, as this randian-esque admiration makes for a cozy narrative in which Uber investors can accomodate Travis’ general douchebaggery and Uber’s predatory business practices.
In a statement given to Wired, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler revealed his plan to reclassify ISPs as common carriers under Title II of the Telecommunications Act.
This GREAT news, as it means carriers will have much less leeway into fiddling with the way people get online.
It’s also great news for the rest of the world, as lawmakers abroad now have a stronger example to follow in their own countries — even though Brazil already passed a Net Neutrality law last year .
Ballmer: We‘ve got great Windows mobile devices in the market today – you can get a Motorola Q now for $99, it’s a very capable machine […]
Interviewer: But how do you compete with that, though? [the iPhone]
Ballmer: Right now we’re selling millions and millions and millions of phones a year, Apple is selling… zero phones a year. There‘s just too many good quotes here. Can’t really fit them all, so go and watch the video.
Unless you can learn to be less sure of your own individual ability to come up with the right answer then you’ll struggle to make things that other people actually want.
Lots of terrific advice and process in this Made by Many article from 2012. Not that the year matters much; hard-earned lessons are timeless.
Splendid documentation on the basics of CSS.
Finally someone giving CSS-Tricks a run for its money.
