Jason Nunes

From the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences. A very useful overview of user centered methods, activities and techniques and how they fit into various stages of a standard design/develop/deploy methodology.

On LowBudgeGirl’s blog:

Me bloviating on how to effectively write for low budgets.

Practice? You can waste your time practicing, oooor you can work on a project for them. Check out the History of African American Music timeline.

Just listened to a fun little piece on NPR about production designers, particularly Mike Riva.

This part:

In The Goonies, a beloved 1985 children’s film, the kids go in search of lost treasure. The prop people had made a treasure map, but Riva thought it looked too new. Already on location, he spent the day in a hotel room dumping coffee on it. He wanted it to be speckled with blood as well, but the small town where they were filming didn’t have paint.

“So we actually had to cut our fingers and edge the sides of it with blood,” Riva explained. “You do these crazy things. You get so into it.”

…totally made me reminiscent of the good ol’ days–making a 50 gallon drum of sewage for Fast Getaway II so we could spatter Peter Liapis with it after he fired a grenade launcher into a porta-pottie trying to hit Corey Haim. Or the two Hudson sprayers, one of fake blood, one of fake bile, I carried around on my back to coat the abatoire set of Necronomicon. Or tossing the dummy of Melinda Clarke off the 6th st bridge into the LA river in Return of the Living Dead III. Or the million and one other little things I got to do just off camera to “make the magic happen.”

Ah the glamour…

Head over to DarkWasTheNight.com to get your own player widget.

The music on this soon to be released album from RedHot is amazing! Can’t wait to get my hands on the CD.

From Vladimir Carrer.

Blank, lined and 2 different grids–10 px, and 100 px.

Now all I need to make my life complete is a 10 px, or 100 px grid on a whiteboard.

On LowBudgeGirl’s blog:

About my low budget filmmaking experience-both my beginnings working on films like Leprechaun 2 and Return of the Living Dead 3 in Hollywood and my current work as a screenwriter here in NYC.

Fascinating article in Gawker today about what Pepsi got when they paid several hundred million to revamp their logo. Check out the draft of the brand brief.

See, there’s no way the branding agency could charge millions if they just went in and told Pepsi, “Yea, we kinda rotated your old logo a little bit, and made the wavy white line thingy in the middle go diagonal.” Instead, they prepared this 27-page document, titled “BREATHTAKING Design Strategy,” to prove that this logo is a veritable Da Vinci Code of branding, drawing on everything from magnetic fields to the “Golden Ratio.” Highlights:

Convention is transformed into innovation with Pepsi’s DNA of the future:

Feng shui; the Renaissance; the Mobius Strip. All of it was leading up to Pepsi.

The earth itself? A mere precursor to the Pepsi logo.

The theory of relativity? That was Pepsi, too.

The entire universe? Pepsi.

The pinnacle of human achievement: this logo. Breathtaking.

[Full document here]

Me? I much prefer this reading of the new logo from Lawrence Yang:

I stumbled across this awesome Ted Talk by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, on the impossible things we expect from artists and writers…