Previously on Ghost Street:
Just launched this website for a friend’s design agency/studio, ImageMechanics. The site itself is probably one of the more technical html / css builds i’ve undertaken, making use of embedded font technology, ajax deeplinking, among many other things.
The journal section of the website is managed via tumblr, where Jase has been posting some great little articles.
A wonderful collection of glass-fronted folder icons, The best part, however, is the x-ray modification for quicklook - a custom modification which shows the contents of a folder when quick look is invoked - preview it here
Very, very cool
Beautiful exploration of form and geometric abstraction.
(via matarua)
Dan Wineman’s explanation of the Facebook login thing:
This is called Facebook Connect, and it’s a very bad thing for security and user education. Teaching people to check that the URL starts with facebook.com before logging in is useless, because Facebook wants its users to log into anything that vaguely looks Facebookish, and it’s training them to do so. How is anyone expected to distinguish Facebook from a phishing site masquerading as Facebook, when Facebook Connect looks and acts like a phishing site by design?
In other words, this is Facebook screwing up yet again. We should be angry at them, not at their users, because the mistake the users are making is one that Facebook has all but engineered.
I understand the annoyance with Facebook Connect, but this doesn’t explain the facts I find the most amazing in this story:
- People google for “facebook login” to log in to Facebook. I understand that they don’t use bookmarks and don’t type in facebook.com, but note that they don’t google “facebook”; they google “facebook login”. Clearly users don’t even see logging in as a function of the site itself; those are separate in the users’ mental maps. This is perhaps partly explained by the excess of websites which use Facebook as their authentication system, but it’s not the whole story.
- They then click the small google result which says “News results: ReadWriteWeb” expecting they’ll be taken to Facebook.
- They land on a page with an absolutely enormous heading saying ReadWriteWeb, below which is a headline, a byline, and endless paragraphs of what is even at the quickest glance obviously a news story.
- They scroll all the way to the bottom of this completely un-Facebook-like page, with not a single thing in the way that would indicate this is a Facebook redesign.
- They then go past the big heading saying Leave a comment and instead focus on the small link which says Optional: Sign in with Facebook. And don’t tell me these folks searched for “facebook” or “login” on the page itself.
The amount of information-ignoring necessary to go from 1. to 5. here is just stunning. The degree of faith people put in Google’s top result makes Catholics look like hippies.
I don’t really blame anyone here and I have no clue what the solution is. My only takeaway is that I’m terrified of dealing with technologies of this level of popularity.
You know what I’m starting to think is behind all this?…… 4chan
Please read marco’s post on a mindblowing web artifact:
(via Zoya)
Dear visitors from Google. This site is not Facebook. This is a website called ReadWriteWeb that reports on news about Facebook and other Internet services. To access Facebook right now, click here. For future reference, type “facebook.com” into your browser address bar or enter “facebook” into Google and click on the first result. We recommend that you then save Facebook as a bookmark in your browser.
It took me a minute to grok this, since I typically walk around with the conviction that people aren’t THAT naive, but…
What’s apparently happening here is, Facebook users are googling for “facebook login” (because how else are you going to log into Facebook?), clicking the first result (which is sometimes a story about Facebook, on an unrelated site), assuming that the site itself is Facebook, scrolling to the bottom to get to the comment form - still thinking they’re on Facebook - and using the comment form to complain about how this, a wholly different website, is a terrible redesign of Facebook.
I just don’t even know how to start feeling about any of this. It’s like the Twilight Zone episode where you wake up and everyone in the world has started talking a different language.
It’s like… Like if you asked a friend if there was a Starbucks in his neighborhood and he said, yeah I think there’s one half a mile down, maybe. And you drive half a mile and see a big carwash place, and you park and walk in and ask to speak to the manager. And you tell the carwash manager how unhappy you are with this terrible new Starbucks redesign.
These people, they are our clients.
(via aboyinmidair)
Cheryl Cole - 3 Words (feat. Will.I.Am)
The seamless transitions between split and full screen coupled with a stripped back and relaxed electronic sound make this my favorite video so far this year. Unexpected and good!
update: Just tried to download this from the itunes music store and it’s unavailable in my country. Shit. Looks like i’ll have to get it from somewhere else. For free.
(via sloaneohno)
Reading comic books, especially old ones tend to piss me off in terms of art direction. I think it’s a combination of the boring gridded panells and the lack of detail and ‘dynamic-ness’ to the action that frustrate me. No doubt the interactive designer in me having a grumble - i’ve always felt they could do better, it feels like only in the last 8 years have we started to break out from this 4x6 convention into more dynamic layouts. I realise that having a collection of images and panels collaged on the page could get in the way of storytelling but ive found the more adventurous japanese manga address this the most successfully — augmenting full page illustrations with small panels which continue the plot or action sequence.
But seriously check out that sword. How is that not about to chop your face off?
This one is my favorite.
Character recently released a series of limited edition prints. 100% of the proceeds will be donated to Doctors Without Boarders.
I’ll probably get this one.
Of the multitude of iPad pre-reviews out there, I think Jeff really hits it on the head.
