Lightsurgery

Lunchtime designer briefing #2

Justin Goring — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 10:27:39 +0000

First off is ‘10 Easy jQuery Tricks for Designers‘ [http://to.ly/rnc] – featuring things like automatic cross-browser rounded courners, and scrollable content boxes, all of which without the use of JavaScript can make for some *huge* CSS. One of the problems with maintaining such huge (and often multiple stylesheets is that over time we forget which selectors are redundant. Often it could be a week-long job of tirelessly cross referencing styles, which frankly is enough to make anyone put that job on the back-burner! Fortunately a list has cropped up called ‘Detecting unused CSS selectors‘ [http://to.ly/rII]. In this post is a list of the top programs, addons and web-based apps for detecting and cleaning those unused classes. It includes a firefox plugin that looks particularly interesting.

Of course this post and lots like it list items in a top-down fashion, and it’s often hard to know whether semantically this is an un-ordered list or tabular data. Both of these have taken on new properties and should be styled accordingly (XOXO Microformatting for un-ordered lists, and the use of etc for tabular data). It can be a real pain to properly style these, so often it becomes an after-thought.
So when I spotted the ‘CSS Table Gallery‘ [http://to.ly/rIL] with free templates, I thought it would be worth sharing as something invaluable to a designers arsenal. These kinds of background knowledge reference sites can be so important when trying to improve your own skills as a designer/coder.

One of the things that I think is also very important is cutting down the use of long-hand styles and repeated references. A bookmarked site like ‘CSS Shorthand – A Guide to Cleaner and Faster Coding‘ [http://to.ly/rIJ] can be invaluable, and so useful to creating cleaner, smaller CSS.

Lunchtime media briefing #01

Justin Goring — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:35:59 +0000

Photo by juliebee

Things / links and mashes that I’ve spotted so far this morning that make my fingers and toes go woooooo :)

Quite impressed by the idea of the Nikon camera as this IMHO is the beginning of realised projection hardware in small and compact devices. Only a matter of time before the first mobile phones come out with this imbuilt. At that point we will have the suck and punch result of being able to watch MP4’s large anywhere, but be hounded on public transport by socially-unaware fuckwads desperate to draw attention to themselves in any way possible blasting out Hanna fucking Montana songs into the eyeballs of unsuspecting commuters in glorious Technicolor.

Still we might be lucky enough that some of them project the new Bo Selecta MJ special that’s due soon as a one off special. Failing that I guess at the very least the reactions of such projection devices will have on individuals could be interesting, in the same way that the designs behind speed signs on roads are getting smarter, and are being designed better in order to get the desired reactions. Like, drive slower.

Elsewhere on the web, I had a good old laugh at Cassette Boy’s new vid on YouTube, and had a jolly inspired read through an article on best practice when designing a *dark* themed website. Also looking at 27 horizontal scrolling site designs – reminded me that I should dig out my old site designs asap as I had one portfolio site that I build using Iframes way back before CSS came along. It was good enough to be featured in .Net magazine in 2002.

Carved rock

Justin Goring — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 07:32:05 +0000

Fiona on Fire // Nova’s Basement photography

Justin Goring — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 18:00:50 +0000

I took the photograph above three years ago as part of a collection of prints for the Indy award nominated band Nova’s Basement (formally known as Lotus). This particular image features Fiona, the Cello player in the four piece comprising of guitar and vocals (Amy), Piano/Keyboard (Mike) and violin (Rachael).

Since that time, I’ve joined the band as the drummer, adding beats and taps to the already powerful sound :)

I’ve worked with the band on many occassions as their official photographer also, and below you can see some of the results.

[flickrset id="72157600079512778" thumbnail="square" overlay="true" size="medium"]

Visit Novas Basement to find out more

Academic research and Social Tools

Justin Goring — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 12:34:05 +0000

I was listening to a radio 4 programme a while back, where academics were mentioning the fear they had about the rise in social communication, and the effects it is having on research.

grrr. That annoyed me that did!
My thoughts:

Whilst the traditional academy has its respected place in the educational hierarchy, the academic institutional ideology is under attack from the internet, and specifically the use of social tools for two reasons:

1. The idea of knowledge remaining in one geographical location, traded as a unique commodity, is no longer a realistic proposition.
The idea that a person, corporation or institution can assert ownership over an idea is now impossible to enforce.

2. Academics with intimate knowledge of a subject and the ability to cite and reference existing discourse have always been the assessors of new learning. Today the internet is providing new understanding of knowledge by interweaving multi-disciplinary contexts such as geo-location, chronology, and emotive reference, with peer reviewed expert knowledge not limited to what is known and contained within the four walls of the academy.

The internet further breaks down the ideas of ownership and localised knowledge when issues of copyright are considered. At present the social media sphere is enabling real-time discourse around the world, DRM is being replaced by one-off subscriptions to service providers, and out of date copyright legislation cannot close down torrent sharing sites.

When pressed on current academic methods of assessment and the belief in localised ownership of knowledge, most representatives of the traditional institutions state in their defense that:

Academic knowledge implies the ability to accurately cite peer reviewed content, whereas the aquisition of knowledge from internet searches does not.
The internet is transient and in too much flux to be a permanent place to cite and reference material (often by the time a reference is included in a bibliography, it has been lost, moved, or deleted on the web).
Intimate knowledge of a subject provides an academic institution with a way of quantifiably assessing research and graduate work; the web is too large to gain intimate knowledge of all the available texts and discourse, with which a quantitive assessment can be made.

My approach to dealing with these three issues are as follows:

The interconnectivity of social peer networks is extremely powerful as a tool for referencing and collating live realtime understanding and contextualised knowledge.
Symptomatic of its constant updates, additions, and culturally reactive content, the permanence of online publishing relies upon being peer reviewed. Social tools provide the referencing and citations in terms of popularity, and each citation that is micro-published within a network, increases it’s chance of permanence and further peer review. In other words, the act of mass peer reviewing contributes to the rating and permanence of the knowledge on the web: a self solving problem for those that want to be able to contextualise and reference web content.
For a review and practical assessment of research by experts with an intimate understanding and knowledge of a subject, why not submit to the very community that the academic cites and references? The users of social tools, and the contributors to social media. These people are living, working experts, not limited to the non-vocational, and the professors and academics behind the wall of the institution.

The question of knowledge ownership, comes down to whether it may be understood that:
the users own acquisition of meaning, and any subsequent referencing of knowledge, is just a small contribution to a larger body of work not owned by the enterprise, institution, or network that assesses it;
The body of work is considered a finished article, and may not be added to.

Chasing Banksy

Justin Goring — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 17:06:26 +0000

Banksy

I was having a conversation with a friend at work the other day and the subject moved on to Banksy – the Bristol born stencil artist, which reminded me about a mini obsession I’d had with photographing his work, just before he became too well known to the wider UK population.

The search

I took this photo near Westminster bridge on the South Bank in London a few years back, in 2006. It’s been my most popular and viewed photograph on Flickr to date, which says a lot about the popularity of art, and in particular specific artists such as Banksy.

For a moment, while I was living in Islington, London, I got quite obsessed with seeking out Bankys stencils. At the time I was lucky enough to be walking to work in Kings Cross, and could spend my morning and evening saunters through the busy London streets, surveying the edges of obstacles for the ever illusive new Bansky piece.
The reward for finding, photographing, and referencing one before my friends was respect and a moment of popularity.

Street art gallery

Click on the thumbnail images below to see more street art – including more Banky art that I captured.