Finally, Spring has arrived in SF. Below, Yerba Buena Gardens on a warm Saturday and the walkway to SFMOMA.
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Spring
Posted: May 30th, 2010, 7:56am CEST by Emily Chang
Tags: Living
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“Fair Trade” Electronics
Posted: May 28th, 2010, 6:48am CEST by Emily Chang
Tags: Bookmarks
From Foxconn Suicides: Is It Time For “Fair Trade” Electronics? Would You Buy A “Fair Trade” iPhone? by Tom Foremski
All the large tech companies such as Apple, Nokia, Dell, etc have agreements with their suppliers that they do not employ children, and that they will abide by certain standards to protect workers. But it’s not clear how these are monitored, enforced, or how much in common they share across the electronics industry.
What is common across the electronics industry is a relentless focus on reducing manufacturing costs, and the largest manufacturing cost is labor; which is why employees are pushed to work faster, while maintaining high quality work, and at the lowest wages acceptable.
We reap the benefits in the form of cheap digital gadgets, gizmos, and computers. We have absolutely no idea about all the blood, sweat, and human suffering that went into creating our digital devices.
I’ve been following the Foxconn issue since it came to light and find it extremely troubling. Like many others in the tech industry, I would welcome a global solution to ensuring human rights and humane conditions for all workers creating consumer electronics. Much like the fashion industry had to be held accountable for their manufacturing practices, so should the tech/electronics industry.
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Giant Map Pin at Google I/O
Posted: May 20th, 2010, 10:11am CEST by Emily Chang
Tags: Living
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On Staying Small
Posted: May 17th, 2010, 7:47am CEST by Emily Chang
Tags: Bookmarks
Stefan Sagmeister on being a designer and design company at 99%:
The conventional wisdom in our business is that you have to grow and keep moving to survive. We never grew, always stayed tiny, and it serves us very well over the years, allowing us to pick and choose projects, and keeping our financial independence from our clients. We actually have a rather good track record, because we do select projects carefully. Most of our ideas don’t eat dust but glimpse the light of day because we find it much more helpful to spend some serious time and effort before we start working on a project, rather than suffer through it afterwards.
I feel the same way. In the last five years, our design company, Ideacodes, has had the chance to grow. While we’ve expanded a bit over the years, it’s been a conscious decision to remain small, agile and selective about who we work with and the type of work that we do. As a result, we’ve enjoyed true collaborations with our clients, creative and financial freedom.
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Mobile Digital Workstation
Posted: May 12th, 2010, 11:45am CEST by Emily Chang
Tags: Living
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More Typefaces Coming to the Web
Posted: May 10th, 2010, 9:14am CEST by Emily Chang
Tags: Bookmarks
After designing for the web for over 15 years, it’s exciting to see more typefaces finally becoming available for the web beyond the original 7-10 web fonts, or image replacement with JS/Flash. For a quick background on how web fonts have evolved, see the excerpt below from FontFeed from November 18, 2009.
The August 2007 announcement of the “@font-face” CSS declaration led to two years of intense anticipation, hesitation, speculation, and — finally — innovation. Web browser support of this rule meant that one could write simple code to define non-system fonts in a style sheet. When a visitor loaded the web page the fonts would automatically download — just like images — load in their system, and then render in the browser. Web designers applauded the development, seeing it as the critical first step in bringing freedom of font choice to the web. Type designers held back, concerned that the method distributed work too openly and made no distinction between fonts made and licensed for print and those made and licensed for the web. Months passed, seemingly without much progress. The web had the technology, but it didn’t have the fonts.
2009 brought two crucial developments that broke the deadlock: Typekit and the Web Open Font Format (WOFF). The first is a service which hosts fonts and serves them in an optimized, secure way. The second is a new font format designed specifically for the web. The importance of these two breakthroughs was made clear three weeks ago at Typ09 in Mexico City where industry leaders came to the consensus that the delivery mechanism is no longer a sticking point; what is in question now is the quality of type on various browsers, displays, and devices.
Typekit gave the font industry a push and has been making fonts available from different font foundries since they launched their service around November 2009, and FontShop started web fonts in February, but now more font companies are making their collections of fonts available for web use as well. The Los Angeles Times has a story about this today:
Beginning Tuesday, Monotype Imaging, a Massachusetts company that owns one of the largest collections of typefaces in the world, is making 2,000 of its fonts available to web designers. The move follows the San Francisco-based FontShop, which put several hundred of its fonts online in February. In just a few weeks, Font Bureau, a Boston designer of fonts, will make some of its typefaces available online as well.
Web designers, understandably, cannot overstate how big of a deal this is.
If you’re a designer, you’ll know that Monotype is the owner of fonts such as Helvetica, Frutiger, Univers and the Linotype collection. Exciting!
You can sign up for the beta for Monotype Imaging (Fonts.com). See the FontShop blog post to see their available web fonts. Visit Typekit to see their growing selection of web fonts and free and paid options.
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TiltShift Waikiki
Posted: May 7th, 2010, 10:13am CEST by Emily Chang
Tags: Living
