“In 2007, the ‘artist’ Guillermo Vargas Habacuc, took a dog from the street, tied him to a rope in an art gallery, and starved him to death.

For several days, the ‘artist’ and the visitors of the exhibition have watched emotionless the shameful ‘masterpiece’ based on the dog’s agony, until eventually he died.”

Its a sad sad day for animal lovers and pretentious art idiots everywhere. Im not sure what is more sad in fact, that this poor animal died as an art exhibit, or that these human beings justified the action in the first place.

I know I know. Reaction is the point, did it make you feel something then its art, blah blah blah. It a tired, lame, lazy, and disgustingly self important argument for an artist to make, let alone incredibly unintelligent. Yeah no shit watching something die will illicit a feeling.

And it doesnt stop there. The so-called artist has been invited to re-execute his exhibit for the Central American Biennial of 2008. You can help stop this disgusting action by quickly signing a petition below.

SIGN THIS PETITION

A new article by Jakob Nielsen addresses a couple of usability issues with right-justified menus.

Aligning a navigation menu with the right margin might look cool, but the resulting ragged left margin severely reduces the speed with which users can scan the menu and select their preferred options.

Jakob Nielsen isn’t exactly qualified to speak on the subject of things looking cool, but the example from the University of Michigan who changed their menu shortly after reading this article is a good example of how to increase usability at the expense of elegance.

When designing for usability and esthetics, I find it most effective to focus more heavily on general typography rules of the print world, i.e. leading, kerning, point size, emphasis, etc. How might you have addressed the scannability and other legibility issues of these menus without ending up with an uglier menu?

There is much to be said for the usability issues of horrifyingly ugly things. A dead ton-ton carcas may be super snugly at night, but I’d still opt for the quilt my grandma made me. Non-antialiased text is my personal festering carcass.

On our new site for 2k we discovered a super error message on IE: “Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site *** Operation aborted.” Google turned out this solution. Turns out it was a swfobject conflict with lightbox. Also, god I hate IE.

All I can say is that New York is an amazing place and I can’t wait to go back! Thank you, BKWLD, for giving me the opportunity to experience New York for the first time! Click the image below to see more pics.

One of our clients, Bill Janis, sent me this link to an Analytics app for Air. Pretty dope, I tried it out at home and it behaved beautifully. I favor the design of the Google one though.

RC Cars perform the Super Mario theme song on bottles. Human beings keep getting more and more amazing. Link via ejb.com (link not friendly for some employers)

The Library of Congress has a Flickr account. Check out the 1930s-40s In Color set. It will blow you away.

You can quick look excel files! Pretty amazing. That’s it.

I did say that I wasn’t going to bother with IE6 fixes on my new site. In fact, I was planning on insulting IE6 users with a special graphic overlay. I remembered however that this would include people like

a) 50% of our clients (guessing)
b) 66% of my family (my brother introduced me to firefox)
c) 30% of everybody (according to current stats)

So, that’s a lot. So, I spent the whole day (literally) fixing the site for 6 (argh) + 7 (which was admittedly easy). Anyway, for the IE6 users, I’m using a little script from this site:

http://savethedevelopers.com/

It’s cool, it animates in a pretty image at the top of the page saying how you should upgrade and provides links to current/modern browsers. So, while not an affront to each users’ browsing sensibilities, it does provide a nice recommendation that is rather obvious.

This tool has been used and abused ever since the filter was introduced in photoshop, but if cleverly used it can be extremely powerful.

This link features a small introduction on how to raster vector images and apply the liquify tool to create rich lighting effects.

http://mos.futurenet.com/pdf/computerarts/ART146_tut_1.pdf

I have used this technique for the following sites:

Drop Dead Gorgeous
http://www.worsethanafairytale.com/launch/
• The entire landscape was created using the liquify tool on landscape/nature photos. Once this was done I altered the perspective and burned and dodged the hell out of it to achieve the illusion of a natural light source.

Kelty
http://www.kelty.com
• Same technique used here for the landscape.

Who Do U want to B?
http://www.whodouwant2b.com/
• Liquify tool was used here again for quick and dirty “ribbon” effects.

Thalia
http://www.thalia.com/2.0/
• By now you should be able to spot my liquify action.

Anyhow, digging up abused filter effects in photoshop and applying them in clever ways can be powerful.