Can you identify the ’80s-era games depicted in Scott Campbell’s piece, Great Showdowns (of the 8-bit Era)?
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Design
Instant Fundas has an article featuring 3 useful image CSS tricks: 1. Make it so your images can’t be saved using the “save image” option in the context menu, 2. Label images with hovering text and 3. Making a background image clickable.
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Smashing Magazine’s “Free Fonts of the Month” for this particular month are really, really, really, good. Grab ‘em while they’re still up!
Here’s a sample of Anivers, a font created for Smashing Magazine’s first anniversary. It’s been updated for “extended language support, improved glyph shapes and improved metrics and kerning.” Note that only Anivers Regular is free:
Here’s Fresco Semi Bold, “just one member of a large and flexible type family by Dutch design legend Fred Smeijers:”
And finally, Gentium, designed by Victor Gaultney:
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Game Design Essentials: 20 Atari Games is a long (23 pages!), thorough but incredibly fascinating look at games from the time when Atari mattered as a videogame company. Back when they were something, they weren’t afraid to bust out of the genres of the time, take chances and come up with some innovative, experimental and sometimes mind-bending games with unique touches, right down to that unmistakable bell sound whenever you inserted a coin into the machine.
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According to the Economist, “The $100 laptop has been a success—just not, so far, in the way its makers intended.” The success is that OLPC inspired the development of machines that are expected to be bigger successes, such as the Asus EEE PC and the Classmate.
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UX Rule #1 – All HTML Form Control Elements Require Labels, and this rule is illustrated by showing the differences between Facebook’s and GMail’s login forms.
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Take a look at this promo ad that walks you through the gameplay of Guitar Hero: On Tour, the version for the Nintendo DS handheld game system.
My question is: is it…
- An intentionally bad promo that parodies 1980s ads for game systems like the Atari 2600, Intellivision and Colecovision?
- An unintentionally bad ad created by a game company that bought the rights to the Guitar Hero name (the original Guitar Hero team now works on Rock Band) and whose best days are behind it?
I like the attachable fret buttons-and-pick idea; I’m less sure about yelling “Rock out!” into the microphone to activate Star Power, and not at all thrilled about the silly “put out the fire on your guitar by blowing into the microphone” concept.
What do you think?
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The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet distills the best tips for improving your site’s findability by search engines down to two sides of a letter-sized sheet in PDF format. Download it, print it, design your sites by it!
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Here’s a first in a series of regular updates on the just-released and much-awaited Grand Theft Auto IV…
A Hint for Those of You Who Can’t Speak Niko’s Language
In some of the dialogue between Niko and Roman, they switch between English and (I’m assuming here) Serbian. The bits in Serbian are asides that aren’t crucial to the story and can be inferred from context, but if you really want to feel like Niko, you’d like to know what they’re saying, right?
The solution is simple: just turn on subtitles (you can do this from the Game menu). When they speak in Serbian, the English translation will appear in grey text.
Another 10 Minutes of Gameplay
For those of you who haven’t yet had a chance to try out GTA IV, here’s another video showing the next 10 minutes of gameplay (the video showing the first ten minutes is here), featuring:
- A little exploration of Roman’s apartment,
- a carjacking (which isn’t as easy as it used to be),
- exploring the hood,
- abusing a sportscar until it explodes (with Niko in it),
- respawning outside a hospital,
- noodling with Niko’s appearance,
- and fun in multiplayer mode (including a rocket launcher mishap and gunning foos down with a pistol and fully-automatic weaponry).
An Observation from GameSpy
Here’s something from Fargo’s Thought for the Day, which is included in GameSpy Daily, an email newsletter from GameSpy:
Thoughts on Sandbox Games
Since around the time that Grand Theft Auto 3 and The Sims came out, the phrase “sandbox game” or “open world” has seeped into gaming literature and even into marketing speak. It kinda drives me nuts, because a “sandbox” in and of itself isn’t very fun. It’s easy to screw it up.
Ask any game designer and they’ll tell you: if you put a person in an open world, where they can do anything they want, they spend a few minutes testing the limits and then he or she will get bored. The real trick to these games is to provide a lot of directed gameplay even if people don’t realize it. The object of an open world is to let the player set his or her own agenda, and then to provide tons of cool gameplay once they decide what to do. Sims 2 is a great example: you can do whatever you want, but no matter what decisions you make for your characters, you’ll always run across interesting mini-games or tough decisions to make in order to accomplish your goal.
Of course the Grand Theft Auto games have an overall story that you can work through via a series of directed missions, but even when you go “off the rails” and start freestyling in the sandbox world, you’re never far from the guiding hand of a designer encouraging you to collect something, discover something, set a new record, kick off a minigame, etc. Few design teams can do an open world right — but when they get it right, the experience is spectacular.
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I’ve played Assassin’s Creed only on XBox 360 and I don’t recall the procedure to quit the game being as byzantine as it is on the PC version, shown below:
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If you’re working on an app like the Church Sign Generator or Photoshopping your own roadside signs, you might want to take a look at these fonts, “Signage Standard” and “Signage Modern”, which are designed to look like the black letters on clear plastic that you see on roadside signs all across North America.
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Here’s something for people with both nerdy and interior design tendencies: ASCII curtains!
The kids today may not remember ASCII art, but those of use who grew up in the era of dot matrix and daisywheel printers will find these curtains hauntingly familiar. From a distance, designer Nieke Sybrandy’s curtains show a tree branch design, but close up, you can see that the design is made of up dot matrix printer characters:
There are some other interesting geek-friendly designs at Nieke Sybrandy’s site, including duct tape that looks like band-aids and a tablecloth that looks like a blueprint. If you can read Dutch, I’d love it if you could translate some of the text for me!
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Aaron Brazell, b5media’s Director of Technology has a blog entry on his blog, Technosailor, titled 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.5. It provides a brief overview of ten features of the very-soon-to-be-released WordPress 2.5, which are quickly summarized below:
- New admin user interface. “By far the most comprehensive change in this release was the complete rethinking of how WordPressers do their administrative tasks. Happy Cog Studios was enlisted to do usability research and testing – with the emphasis being on usability research.”
- New menu layout. “One of the first things you’ll notice is the change in the administrative navigation. It struck me as very Movable Typeish. I don’t know if the idea came from them or simply that Happy Cog had such thorough user research that it made sense. Either way… it makes sense.”
- Changes to the way you add widgets to sidebars. “Another MASSIVE shift in philosophy has been in the Widgets page. Before, you could drag and drop widgets into position. You can still reposition widgets by dragging within a sidebar, however, WordPress is relying less on Javascript “bling” for this release.”
- Dashboard overhaul. “…it is completely modularized, and though there is no “tight” way of adding your own, plugin authors can create their own dashboard widgets. The architecture is primitive at this point, but will improve offering a much easier way for plugin authors to do their thing without feeling like they are ‘hacking’.”
- Improvements to the visual editor. “I don’t use WordPress’ visual editor, but I’m told it is a vast improvement over the older version. The TinyMCE team has worked closely with WordPress on this release as well.”
- Flash-based image uploader. “For those of you using a lot of images in your post, the image uploader has been completely overhauled as well. Namely, you can uplopad and insert multiple images at once via a new Flash-based uploader. This will gracefully fallback to the original uploader if Flash is not installed, so never fear.”
- Auto-upgrading of plugins. “By default, it will try to upgrade plugins that are already in the WordPress plugin repository by writing the new files out to the existing plugins. However, this is an inherent security risk as it would require your plugin files be writable by the world.”
- Custom thumbnail sizes. “In WordPress 2.5, thumb-nailing became a whole lot more useful. You can not only set your thumbnail dimensions globally, you can also have a “medium” sized thumbnail, a la Flickr and an option to crop an oversize image instead of just resizing.”
- New tag management interface. “It works like Flickr tags where tags can be added via a list of comma separated tags or via a “type, click, add” mantra. In addition, the UI has a tabbed interface which allows for the selection of tags by checkboxes and by most used tags, useful to say the least.”
- Password strength indicator. A small enhancement, but a useful one for less security-savvy bloggers.
- Bonus: New timestamp interface. A nice enhancement by b5er and WordPress contributor Mark Jaquith. “By default, a new post has no timestamp module. Instead, it’s a publish immediately, or you can click a link if you really do want to modify the timestamp. When editing a post with a timestamp, there is also no ‘Modify Timestamp’ checkbox that caused so much confusion for so many years. If you modify the existing timestamp, it’s assumed that you actually want to change the timestamp!“
So far, only Release Candidate 1 of WordPress has been released. If you’re feeling bold, you can download it from here and give it a try.
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At the recent South by Southwest Interactive conference, most of the note-takers, myself included, took notes at the sessions using their laptops. One notable exception was designer Mike Rohde, who took notes the old-fashioned way: with pen and paper, or more specifically, pen and Moleskine notebook.
Image by Mike Rohde.
Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.
These aren’t your garden-variety lecture notes, but what he calls “sketchnotes”. Rather than being mere points taken down during the presentation, they include elements of layout, graphic design and whimsical illustration. “While sketchnotes capture concentrated concepts for each session well,” Rohdes writes, “I think they’re even better at awakening ideas stored in the minds of session attendees.”
Image by Mike Rohde.
Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.
Mike scanned the sketchnotes he took and put them up in this Flickr photoset. You can also read his blog entry about the sketchnotes here.
Image by Mike Rohde.
Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.
This isn’t his first set of sketchnotes — he also took some at the SEED conference in January and posted them in this Flickr set.
[Found via SxSW Baby!]
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Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
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