I’m experimenting with a new format for Links Loved that would be a fast favorite “share as I stumble upon it” type of post. I call it Small Link, Big Love. Each post will be a link to a single site with very little or no commentary. This idea has gone through a few design cycles already. It began simply as a Twitter account. Then, I thought it would be cool to create a new blog dedicated to links only. I was even more encouraged that this was a good plan when I found the domain name linksloved.com. It seemed like fate. So, in the first two weeks of May I set up Links Loved, The Blog. In doing so, I was able to experiment with site takeovers and clickable backgrounds (more about this later!). Anyway, as soon as I began posting links on the new site, I realized that I had optimistically underestimated how much time it would take to maintain it. I now had one too many web sites on my plate, and not enough time to give every site the attention it needed. So I decided to stop development of Links Loved. It’s still online, but I’m not updating it. Instead, I’m going to post links here on Pugly Pixel as I find them.
So, for now, at least, this is the last Links Loved post. There aren’t any links in this post and you’re probably wondering where they are — they’re embedded between posts! These new posts have their own look. Since I may post many of them sequentially, and since many of them will not necessarily be blog design or web development-related, they won’t appear in the archives or in the RSS feed. I’ll explain how I’m accomplishing this RSS and archives omission in another post, perhaps with a tutorial or two.
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Beautifully curated and endlessly interesting. This is Paper Magazine — a fast favorite!
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Bianca over at Goodnight Little Spoon is offering some hi-res Ephemera Freebies. If you ever need a photo of an envelope that says “Confidential”, a bingo card, a fortune cookie fortune, ticket stubs, heart doilies, or a silver medallion, you’ll find them in Bianca’s collection. The old photos, postcards, and labels are my favorites. Thanks, Bianca!
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The New Flickr is Pretty, but Is It Social?
Nick Bilton for The NYT
“Where Flickr deviates from the rest of the social pack, however, is with the company’s choice not to show how many friends or followers a user has… for people browsing a social Web site like Flickr, a follower count can be a quick signal to help someone understand if a person is worth following.”
Sure, we’re all animals and have a pack instinct. But it’s also healthy to break from the herd now and then and follow your gut and maybe like something just because. Flickr may lack the social element, but who cares? When I look at any photo, I don’t need a follower count to help me form an opinion about it or to tell me if something or someone is worth following.
Yesterday, I got an email from Taylor Marie. She’s a student on break from architecture school and she was looking for advice about how she can train herself to become proficient in Photoshop on her own over the Summer. The best advice I can give is this: Turn to your favorite magazine and pick your most favorite layout and then reverse engineer it — try to figure out how the designer did it. Experiment! Poke around Photoshop, discover, and welcome mistakes! All of the tutorials I share on my blog are the result of hours and hours of experimentation. It’s through bouts of trial and error that I’ve learned Photoshop, HTML, CSS, and many many other things outside the web. As long as you treat learning as a hobby, it’s all play!
For example, in the Unique Camp promos, with their glorious graphics, I found the stencil/punched text curiously inviting. So, I tried to make some of my own and in my experiments, I stumbled upon the Type Mask Tool buried underneath the default Type Tool. The Type Mask Tool makes it really easy to create the effect of text punched out of a label. I don’t know how the designers at Unique Camp created their cool look, but I’ll show you one way in the tutorial below.
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