Russdesigns

When it came time for Radiohead to release their last album, “In Rainbows“, they decided to go against the mainstream way of selling it and offered the whole album for download, at whatever price you chose. Similar to priceline.com, except William Shatner wont let you choose your roundtrip flight to Hawaii for .01 cent. In fact many people (like myself) put in zero cents and still downloaded it.
Stupid, some said. Not the way you do business! said many others. Regardless, the bottom line is that Radiohead made some serious cash off that endeavor. After flooding the market with 128 kbps MP3s, they announced the higher rez version and the actual CD for sale. It effectively nullified illegal downloads, and increased their visibility as well. Their new online endeavor? Just as genius. Keep reading »

So according to the L.A. Times, iPhone users are all a bunch of smart asses. Whenever a trivial or inane factoid comes up that needs to be proved (or disproved), the iPhoners whip out the touch screen and hit up the Google. Is the article a bit one-sided? Maybe so. But it’s for sure hella true in my case. At Disneyland a few days ago arguing about how a guy died on the skycar? Wikipedia to the rescue. In about a minute, I had not only confirmation, but also the date, name of the guy who took the swan dive, and why the Magic Kingdom dismantled the ride weeks later.

In short? The White Void portfolio is sick. It’s a simple site in function, but the way it’s implemented is really slick. Using Papervision 3D, they give you a limited camera pan and a sense of depth for each level you open up. You’ll find yourself wanting to explore the whole site. A site like this is a clear example of how good implementation is key.

Unfortunately for me, it seems like the whole Flash world has ditched me for ActionScript 3.0. It’s middle school all over again! Feeling constricted… hard to breathe! Last night, at the L.A. Flash Users meeting, everything was in AS3. So a special thanks needs to go out to Lee Brimelow for making that transition a little bit easier with his Event Generator panel, which lets you pick the events you want and - boom - they are saved to your clipboard. Definitely making my life that much easier. Maybe now I won’t get picked last for dodgeball.

So My blog got hi-jacked for a bit (blog-jacked? Don’t steal that; I’m getting that URL right now) by a terrorist co-worker of mine; who I was letting use for a presentation. Well it’s been almost three months and I hadn’t heard back about it, so I decided to go rogue, Jack Bauer style, and resurrect this bad boy. U-S-A! U-S-A!

Their designs are super clean, unique and they cling to decidedly Euro stylings, which in a post-Ikea U.S., Americans are finally catching onto. Superfamous is a refreshing portfolio site and reminds me that websites can be just as fun to look at as they are functional.

Over the last couple weeks/months, Three Legged Legs has been blowin’ up.
Lots of great work from this animation shoppe. And they are in Santa Monica to boot.
Keep reading »

Thanks to this cool free plugin for WordPress, you can instantly format your blog specifically for the iphone when someone logs on from one. Sweet. It basically just switches the CSS stylesheet when it detects you logged on from the mobile Safari browser. The mobile page looks like the default Wordpress theme, but you have complete access to the CSS and can edit that style it to look however you like.

Last week we got back from Adobe Max in Chicago.
It feels like it took a week to decompress all the info we took in. A lot of big things are happening with Flash, and it’s pretty exciting. Some of the most exciting stuff:
1. Adobe Air: Imagine any Flash or Flex web application. Now imagine it running natively on the desktop with no browser, on either Mac or PC. Keep reading »

Kanye West’s latest album. Overall it’s not bad, but for the hype, it doesn’t push any boundries. It comes across as a very ’safe’ LP, one step above phoning it it. Still, its has some good beats and is chill music to work to.

I’d have to say the song with Coldplay’s Chris Martin ties with Can’t Tell Me Nothin’ as my album faves.
Had this in my playlist rotation for a while now and would give it a 3.5 out of 5. Good effort, but again, with the amount of buzz built up around it, it just doesn’t hold up to the hype.