David Emery Online

'Photoshop Handsome' by Everything Everything

This is pretty darn awesome, in all sorts of ways:

Via Abeano.

How to send the perfect HTML e-mail

Why? Well, an e-mail is not a webpage. A webpage is on the web. It’s viewed by a web browser. An e-mail gets displayed in a mail user agent (MUA). E-mails get indexed by software that is calibrated for coping with text/plain. The point of HTML is that it’s a representation format for hypertext documents. I have yet to see an e-mail that wouldn’t be better as text/plain. And, yes, other people disagree. I don’t particularly give a shit. E-mail means text/plain.

I used to agree with the whole ‘html emails are evil‘ schtick until I realised that there’s actually no good reasoning to back up that viewpoint whatsoever (it was – of course – at the point where I had to justify my ‘emails we send have to be in plain text’ in a work related context).

Other then the faintly religious ‘html email is bad cos we say so’ argument, what exactly is wrong with it?

We wouldn’t argue that web pages should be plain text, would we? I fail to see how this is different considering the proliferation of html supporting email clients, and surely no-one is really arguing that we shouldn’t be able to use such basic things as headings, bold and italics? Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of bad html email out there but that doesn’t mean the medium itself is bad.

Shifting my Opinion on CSS Animations

Having actually taken some time to implement CSS animations in an example, a light bulb clicked. The way I looked at how animations were declared and in what situations you would declare them suddenly changed. I believe I have done a 180 on this.

CSS transitions are easily my most used piece of ‘new’ CSS, followed closely by text-shadow. It makes it so easy to add superfluous, non-essential but experience-enhancing touches of animation that I’d never have time to add via javascript. I use them on practically every site I build now – it would be great if other browsers (ok, I really mean Firefox realistically) would implement them as well.

Music is not like water

Well, it turns out every generation gets its own version of flying cars—a certain-sounding vision of future technology based on a vigorously embraced present technology, which passing time eventually reveals to be both laughable and impossible. At the end of the 21st century’s first decade, the internet seems particularly susceptible to the flying car syndrome, with all sorts of zippy schemes gaining traction within our net-addled culture.

With the music industry in conspicuous disarray, it’s no surprise to see flying cars promised as inexorable destiny. There are three particular models of flying car most prominently advertised these days by the music industry’s loudest and most insistent hucksters. These are: 1) The “Free Music” model […] 2) The “Access” model […] 3) The “Music-Like-Water” model.

A very interesting – albeit long – article on potential music revenue models. I’m not sure if I agree 100% with the conclusions – I imagine that most of these models will, while probably not becoming the dominant music consumption model, carve out a decent sized niche – but it’s well worth a read.

SoundManager 2 > 360° player demo

Inline “donut player” example (experimental)… Canvas-based UI. Load progress, seek, play/pause etc.

This is totally cool – we use Soundmanager all over the place already; hopefully we can roll this out without breaking things for rubbish browsers…

Web Design

There’s something that’s been playing on my mind recently: what role does the internet (and, more specifically websites) play in the traditional world of graphic design?

This was further sparked by the recent D&AD nominations and the publication of the Creative Review annual which highlights and celebrates exceptional design and visual communication work from the last year; both cover similar ground and feature a lot of the same pieces. CR even go so far to entitle their forward to the issue ‘Digital delivers…’, highlighting what they perceive to be a shift towards digital work taking more precedence over the traditional areas of print, film and the like.

But does ‘digital’ really deliver?

I certainly don’t think that the work they’re highlighting does. It’s a veritable who’s who of tasteless, agency produced flash abominations including the Orange Ballonacy (which I spent 10mins looking at when it launched trying to figure out what the hell was going on) and the Carphone Warehouse ‘make an avatar and sing badly’ site for X-Factor, which was only interesting due to the size of the audience it was going out to. Do these kind of things really warrant highlighting? In the case of the Orange ads, the...

Cafetiere

You know how your dad or someone always has a go-to joke or phrase for something? Well over the past year mine has become, “At least, it’s something to blog about.” After walking a few hundred yards in the wrong direction to go and get some Tarantula Piss and Ritz crackers from the petrol station, I took a photo of my Stan Smiths, pressed the stopwatch on, and set off; and one of my first tasks was to ford the mighty Hanna Creek. It wasn’t that tough, really; there’s a road bridge over it.

Flip Flop Flying is the blog of Craig Robinson – him of Minipops fame – and is one of my favourite reads. Lovely little normal stories.

Fuck the foundries

Seriously. Fuck them. They still think they’re in the business of shuffling little bits of metal around. You want to use a super-cool ultra-awesome totally-not-one-of-the-11-web-safe-fonts? Pick an open source font and get on with your life.

I couldn’t agree more. The font foundries – like the music industry before them – need to accept the fact that this whole internet thing exists and there’s nothing they can do about it. What they need to be doing – as soon as they possibly can – is changing their licensing so that you can use them on websites in a legal way.

Because they’re just about to have a huge influx of new potential customers for their fonts, so it might – you know – be useful to be able to sell to them.

RED ONE Camera Shoots Esquire Magazine Cover

Esquire magazine today announced that the June 2009 issue of their rather glorious magazine (on sale May 10) features Megan Fox on its cover, and more importantly, that the image was captured with a video camera. Yes. That’s right the REDone’s 4k image is the first I know of to be sitting nicely on the front cover of a high-end, public-at-large magazine.

The march of progress continues, although I think possibly the point may be: Why? It’s a nice enough cover but it’s hardly something that couldn’t have been achieved via a traditional camera.

What I wonder is how on earth you go about wading through the footage to find the ‘shots’? For example on Monday at the Sonic Youth gig I took over 1000 shots and picking between those was hard enough – what do you do when you have 10 minutes of footage at 25fps (which works out as 15,000 frames)?

D&AD Nominations Announced

The nominations for the 2009 D&AD Awards have just been announced. After last year’s furore, will graphic design figure this time?

Never mind graphic design, is anyone else thinking that the websites nominated are almost all rubbish? All chintzy, obvious marketing rubbish with no hint of style, class or innovation. It’s quite interesting how out of touch the traditional design world is from the ‘web’ world.