fun
Follow the fun
An Article by Dave RupertAnother great dissertation from Mark Brown of Game Maker’s Toolkit: The Games that Designed Themselves. It’s the radical idea that designers should ignore their preconceived notions and look to the game itself to find out where the development should lead. How does something design itself? Well… the answer is: Prototypes.
A lot of great indie game masterpieces are the result of experimentation and early gameplay demos that changed the course of game’s development. As Brown points out, there’s a whole history of groundbreaking games that were developed “almost by accident” where bugs and glitches were turned into features.
Exit pages
An Idea by Brad EnslenToday I made an Exit page. So many people end their visit by hitting the Back button on their browser. The exit page is a last attempt to get them to explore the Blog Directory to find an entertaining blog. Or failing that to try a search on a search engine they may have never tried before.
The Whimsical Web
A Website by Max BöckA curated list of sites with an extra bit of fun.
APL386 Unicode
A Font by Adám BrudzewskyAPL font based on Adrian Smith's APL385 font with a fun, whimsical look, inspired by Comic Sans Serif.
APL (named after the book A Programming Language) is a programming language developed in the 1960s by Kenneth E. Iverson. Its central datatype is the multidimensional array. It uses a large range of special graphic symbols to represent most functions and operators, leading to very concise code. It has been an important influence on the development of concept modeling, spreadsheets, functional programming, and computer math packages. It has also inspired several other programming languages.
The Taft Test
A Tool by Maciej CegłowskiDoes your page design improve when you replace every image with William Howard Taft?
Party in a shared google doc
An Article by Marie FoulstonIn the absence of the cultural spaces my work usually occupies, I’ve found myself chasing the social rituals they evoke and the reverence they embody through abstract digital recreations and pastiche. In these spaces, familiar feelings and experiences reverberate and mix with new ones.
They are events that all at once feel both practical and absurd.
In a time of such flux and uncertainty, maybe that is as good a place as any to be.
The hand and the brain
Prescriptive feedback limits creative collaboration. I’ve seen it time and time again, but I’ve struggled to articulate the exact reasons and their remedies. Recently, though, I got some insight from an unusual source: a game of chess.
Hand and brain chess
In hand and brain chess, each team has two players: a “brain” and a “hand.” At the beginning of each turn, the “brain” tells the “hand” which piece to move, and the “hand” then has to move that piece, but can move it wherever they think it should go. No other communication is allowed.
Hand and brain design
So what does hand and brain design look like?
In every feedback conversation, one person is the hand. That’s the person doing the design — they’ll leave the meeting and go back to their computer and fire up a dozen Adobe apps. The other people in the room (virtual or otherwise) are the brain. Regardless of their skill in design, it’s their job to give the hand some constraints to work within.
But not to tell them exactly what move to make.