Tyler Sticka

Whoosh! Forrst Adopts My Favicon Redesign

Déjà vu! Brizzly and Forrst now have something in common: both have adopted my favicon redesigns.

The Forrst icon was particularly rewarding since I designed it using the app itself as a tool for soliciting and responding to feedback. You can read about the design process in last week’s post on the subject.

Forrst Favicon Redesigned

Forrst is an awesome new platform for designers and developers to share bits of what they’re working on (my buddy Pasquale created the logo and introductory graphic).

The site and accompanying illustrations are gorgeous, but I wasn’t a fan of the favicon. These alternatives were designed with feedback from the Forrst community here, here and here.

Update (July 19, 2010): Forrst now uses my redesigned icon!

The current former favicon, the logo resized on a white square:

My redesign, taking cues from the web site header:

A wooden alternative (my personal favorite):

I whipped up a userscript for those who’d like to use my alternatives, optimized for Chrome and Firefox with the Greasemonkey extension.

Firefox users can choose between the green and wooden versions by going to Tools, Greasemonkey, UserScript Commands. Forrst has adopted my green favicon as its own, so the script has been updated to apply the wooden version only.

Install Forrst Favicon Redesigned 1.1

Fragments Comic Anthology Available Now! Proceeds Go to Save the Children

I’m so wicked proud to announce that Fragments (the comic anthology I’ve been organizing to benefit the amazing charity, Save the Children) is finally available for purchase! If you like comics, or if you just like doing something awesome for a good cause, you should purchase a copy.

The book features awesome comics by Tram Ngo, Kristen Bailey, Pav Kovacic, Theodore Taylor and many more. The cover was illustrated by Tony Papesh, with a logo by Marc Roman. It’s thanks to all the contributors that this book exists.

The Fragments web site is the first time I’ve published a site written in HTML5 with liberal use of CSS3. Safari 5 users should notice a cool three-dimensional transform on the cover, accomplished via some CSS Transforms and a bit of JavaScript.

If you don’t have Safari, you can see the effect in this screencast:

A special thanks to everyone who has supported the project by tuning into its progress via Facebook or Twitter. Please continue spreading the word; with your help, this project will be a resounding success.

LCD Soundsystem and my rescue from the precipice of fogeyism

When I was in high school, I was perplexed by a trend I saw in adults’ listening habits. While I was gobbling up just about any record I could get my hands on, old folks seemed to be perfectly content with a small assortment of artists or albums. When you’re 17, every new album feels like a breakthrough, a mind-blowing horizon expansion in your eardrums. How could anyone not buy the new album by [insert critically-hyped up-and-comer here]?

I don’t think I truly understood this phenomenon until I sold all of my White Stripes records. I used to adore that band. There was a time when De Stijl would have been in the “Top 10 Albums of All Time” list in my head. But via the White Stripes, I discovered the Black Keys. I found out about Chicago blues artists like Muddy Waters, Junior Wells, Magic Sam and Buddy Guy. I bought my first Stooges record (Fun House) because of the White Stripes.

After all that, I didn’t need the White Stripes anymore. Everything I loved about them was available in purer form. They were rendered redundant by their predecessors. When you have The Velvet Underground and Modern Lovers, you wonder why anyone really cared about The Strokes to begin with. Will Black Rebel Motorcycle Club ever outdo The Jesus and Mary Chain? Probably not.

This feeling of redundancy has started to plague most new music I hear, and I only passionately dig a handful of artists that formed post-2000. St. Vincent is one of them. Art Brut are great. I love Gorillaz, but mostly because I’m jonesing for a new Blur album. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Fujiya & Miyagi and Arcade Fire are hit-or-miss. Cut Copy and Vivian Girls are pretty good.

But LCD Soundsystem? LCD are bloody fantastic.

I’m not sure what it is about a new LCD Soundsystem album that impresses me almost as much as the first time I heard the Talking Heads’ Remain In Light. They certainly aren’t immune to the same criticisms I cast upon their peers. In their music, you can hear pieces of the Talking Heads, Lou Reed, Daft Punk, The Stranglers, The Executive Slacks, The Fall, James Chance and the Contortions, David Bowie and many others. Yet somehow, it feels like its own sentient entity.

It could be that the man behind the moniker, James Murphy, has simply combined elements of dance and house music with punk and synth-pop in a novel way, but this assessment is overly clinical at best. Regardless of what musical genres LCD Soundsystem bends or twists, the key ingredient for this band remains a hardy, consistent sense of earnest authenticity.

The compositions are created without the aid of modern computers or software. The lyrics aren’t written until the day the song’s recorded. The shows are played without click tracks or samples. Any element that would distance the listener from the process of creation has been removed or minimized. Any American Idol contestant can sing and be enjoyed. It’s another quality altogether to be believable. The former is the key to radio superstardom, the latter to relevance and impact.

LCD’s show at the Roseland on May 29 was the third time I’d seen them play. The first was in 2005 at the Wonder Ballroom, an infamous show nearly derailed by overzealous PlayStation sponsorship (and exacerbated by the resultantly miffed Portland hipsters). The second was at Coachella in 2007 amidst a sea of inebriated club kids and ravers. Last week, I finally saw them perform a show without any such caveats and found myself overwhelmed by their energy, evocation and honesty.

Maybe I am becoming that cranky old man complaining about the kids and their new-fangled rock-and-roll music. Maybe I need to think about trading in my LiLiPUT and Lizzy Mercier Descloux albums for the standard-issue No Jacket Required and an Eagles compilation.

But then I hear LCD play, and all of that goes out the window.

Bing Education mentioned by Jimmy Fallon, USA Today

I was on vacation all last week exploring the unparalleled beauty of Yellowstone National Park (more on that later), so I was surprised and delighted to see that, in my absence, a site I worked on has been getting a fair amount of press.

Bing Education recently debuted a new Teacher Appreciation feature. Share a story of how a teacher impacted your life, and (once moderated) receive five bucks to donate to any Donors Choose project of your choice.

Jimmy Fallon gave the site a shout out on his May 26 show, and USA Today wrote about it as well.

I’m overwhelmed by the amount of positive vibes being generated by the site’s participants and supporters. I encourage you to participate yourself, and to learn more about the site’s creation in my portfolio.

Better Brizzly Social Icons

Now that the awesome Brizzly web app has integrated my revision of their 16-pixel icon, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a responsibility to its continued iconographic success.

Sometime last week, the folks at Thing Labs debuted a nifty new navigation paradigm with the addition of service-specific tabs. My pal Calvin Ross Carl hepped me to their inclusion, and we both noticed two oddities in their implementation.

The Twitter and Facebook icons are being sized down to fit the height of the tab, resulting in some degradation of quality as the browser struggles to choose the right pixels to maintain or omit. Secondly, if Helvetica Neue is not installed, a CSS bug may cause a serif font family to display instead of a sans-serif.

Since my Ice Cream Social Icon Pack seemed visually harmonious with the revised bear, I decided to remedy both of these problems via a quick user script. The result is much more consistent with the rest of the Brizzly header:

Firefox users must install the Greasemonkey extension to use the script, Chrome users can install it like any other extension. It has been tested in Firefox 3.6, Chrome 5 and Opera 10.5 on a Windows 7 PC.

Install Better Brizzly Social Icons 1.1

1.1 Update: Fixed to work with the Picnic update, though no Picnic icon has been created… yet!

Inbetween Projects 2: Bud the Bulldog

My girlfriend’s sister and brother-in-law have a sweet, quirky bulldog named Bud (technically Bud, Jr., after his papa’s nickname). Like my parents’ dog, Suzie, I’ve found myself doodling him incessantly. There’s just something so endearing about dogs with hopelessly distinctive personalities.

Two Christmases ago, I decided to make Bud’s owners, Lyndsey and Keith, matching t-shirts celebrating their pride and joy. Using a reference photo, I thought a thick-lined, vector representation might be most amusing.

The shirts came in on time, but ended up being a pinch too small due to American Apparel’s sizing strangeness. Nevertheless, they elicited the laughter I was hoping for, so all was not lost.

Later, I helped Lyndsey re-purpose the artwork for their first human child’s room, but in a ginchy new infant-Warhol color scheme.

Animals are way more fun to caricature than people. Dogs and cats are intellectually incapable of comprehending abstracted images of themselves, which means they can’t complain about or take offense to them (which is why I avoid caricaturing friends and family).

TweetPlus Wins WebVisionary Award

I was surprised and happy this past Thursday to take home an adorable little robot trophy from the WebVisionary Awards for my Twitter/Google Feed API mashup, TweetPlus.

I’m humbled to have been selected by such an amazing panel of judges (including Armin Vit and Brad Smith) in a competition dominated largely by accomplished companies like ISITE, Pop Art, eROI, Fashion Buddha and many more. It’s an honor to have even been nominated.

My succinct acceptance speech went something like this:

Since I created TweetPlus by myself, I have no co-conspirators to thank. So instead, I’d like to thank every other web nerd out there who creates apps just for the fun of it.

Thanks to everyone who offered words of encouragement and praise. Maybe now I’ll have to think about a TweetPlus update with OPML support for mass subscribing. What do you think?

How I improved 4.379% of Brizzly’s home link

Brizzly is my favorite web-based Twitter application. Regular readers of this blog may remember my redesign of the service’s favicon for Peter Wooley’s Brizzly Favicon Alerts script for Greasemonkey.

Shortly after the script’s debut, I was contacted by the folks at Thing Labs (they make Brizzly) to talk about integrating my icon into the app.

A few months later, a new Brizzly interface debuted. Hidden in plain sight among the numerous UI and feature improvements, my 16 square pixels of glory perched unassumingly at the top of the page.

This is why I love the Internet. If you release a compelling product, you’ll inspire users to contribute ideas, feedback, or even design assets. Keep your ear to the ground, and you’ll swiftly reap the rewards.