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Toyota iQ Font

admin — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 17:39:37 +0000

What do you get when you put 2 font designers, a software developer, a Toyota iQ + driver, in a really big warehouse with a camera mounted to an elevated platform?

A: This video.

“When driving becomes writing” shows a novel and unique typeface for the iQ, by the iQ.

You can even download the font for free from the Toyota site, here.

Tumblr?

admin — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:47:41 +0000

A few friends of mine have recently started tumblelogs. One person said to me something along the lines of “it’s like twitter meets livejournal”. This didn’t immediately make me want to dive right in and give it a go, but it seemed like fun and i’ve been trying it out for about two weeks now.

What’s it about?

Basically a tumblelog is a form of microblogging, and what people post is generally quite small, for instance a photo with a caption, a quote, a video etc. The point being that people can create posts snappily, without taking too much time over it. People document things they’ve seen that inspire them, that they like or find funny, it depends really.

Customisation

When i started my tumblelog, one of the first things that i wanted to do was to jazz it up a bit and give it a personalised look and feel. The customisation and theming options in tumblr are just brilliant. It’s incredibly easy and flexible. It works by using special tags to render particular elements. A quick example:

{block:Caption}

{Caption}

{/block:Caption}

So this says, wherever you need to render a caption, use this block of code, and place the caption where {Caption} is marked. It was just a case of making a rough template, then retrofitting it with these tags for the dynamic content.

There’s lots of options for custom urls, an api, an iphone app. it’s pretty cool.

Community

One of the things I’m liking about tumblr is the community experience. Once you start to follow a few people, reblog and like their posts and vice versa, there is a quaint and individually enclosed sense of community. You can’t message or talk to people directly, but I’ve started to ‘get’ where people are coming from and what sort of stuff they’re into. It’s interesting.

Dissertation VIVA

admin — Mon, 11 May 2009 15:44:15 +0000

I just had my VIVA. I think it went really well generally. There was Andrew and Anne (my supervisor and second reader), in Andrews office. I basically had to run through the site on a laptop and explain my rationale. I pictured a lecture theatre, so it was definitely a lot less intimidating.
Anne mentioned it was good that I’d stuck to my development methodology, apparently a lot of people just say they’re going to use an agile method, then don’t. They thought what I’d managed to achieve in the time frame was good, they said the back-end was accomplished, and that front-end looked good (despite the fact I’d have liked to spend more time on that).

So all in all, i felt it went quite well. I’ll have to wait and see.