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Djonckheere

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Your site is the second one I've seen using the JetBrains Mono typeface -really easy on the eyes, even when set light grey #eff1f5 on a very dark #07080d background.

Very cool, very creative. I found myself hitting refresh multiple times on the index page to see the random ascii art headlines. Finding the hidden menu in the corner leads you down a rabbit hole of fascinating experiments.

Apparently less than 15-minutes of athletic action in a typical 3-hour game, with ~45-minutes devoted to advertising: [2020] How Much American Football Is Even in an American Football Broadcast? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22218909

This explains why NFL RedZone exists.

Fun comparison, a typical Formula 1 Grand Prix clocks in at ~1.5 hours. Live race broadcasts (e.g. Sky Sports F1) will typically show the entire race with no commercial breaks or interruptions. Same goes for MotoGP (e.g. TNT Sports), where a sprint race (~10-12 laps) takes just 25 minutes, not including post race podium and interviews.

English Premier League game durations come in at just under 2-hours with a full hour of athletic action, the remaining 50% occupied by a 15-minutes halftime, substitutions, free kicks, and a mere 10-minutes of commercial interruptions.

What a sobering indictment of our screen-obsessed world. It seems all roads lead back to the introduction of the smartphone —the mid-2010s, a critical turning point:

"Never before has there been a technology like the smartphone. Where previous entertainment technologies like cinema or television were intended to capture their audience’s attention for a period, the smartphone demands your entire life. Phones are designed to be hyper-addictive, hooking users on a diet of pointless notifications, inane short-form videos and social media rage bait."

"The average person now spends seven hours a day staring at a screen. For Gen Z the figure is nine hours. A recent article in The Times found that on average modern students are destined to spend 25 years of their waking lives scrolling on screens."

The WSJ piece only reaffirms what is playing out in large urban centers around the world (not just the US): that it's getting tougher to get ahead these days.

In Toronto, for example, the average selling price for a home has almost doubled in the last 10 years from ~$570,000 in 2014 to ~$1.1 million dollars in 2024; the average monthly rent ~$1,100 in 2014, now ~$2,300/mo. in 2024.

Is it any wonder this has created a housing affordability crisis forcing younger adults to delay many of the so-called traditional markers of adulthood mentioned in the piece?

Compassion — not compression — is a big part of design and creativity; coming up with original and unexpected results. What we see in these explorations is that AI is, I think, good at generating a bunch of novel yet visually repetitive and nonsensical outputs. The helpful-looking-elf-santa-hat-robot iterations from AI all look like variations of 1 concept with their monotonous use of gradients and brush stroke styling. Good for brainstorming? A good human designer, based on these same instructions, would ideate and generate a wider range of concepts. And we see that in the results from humans, which are actually much more interesting and diverse in terms of contrasting styles, their use of form, colour and negative space in my opinion.

Curious, was the inspiration for the Labelf AI logo the Wall-E animated movie character Eva?

Interesting app.

Some UX design feedback:

1. The sort filter (sort by "new" and "hot") is bewildering.

2. The search iconography gets lost on the teal coloured background. I would suggest more visual contrast is needed. (make the search icon consistent with the camera icon on the home screen)

3. Branding: the script font used for the app icon logo ('OS' monogram) is different from the full logo wordmark ('One Set') -is that intentional?

4.Inconsistent menu colour conventions: the header background is teal (#00838f) on which a pale teal colour (#8ac6cc) is used to denote inactive items and a pale white (#edf6f7) is used to denote an active menu selection. The 'Category / Muscle group' toggle uses the inverse: teal (#00838f, the same colour as the header bg) to denote the active selection and grey (#757575) to denote the inactive selection. May I suggest consider using the darker teal colour that appears on the landing screen ("Welcome to OneSet..." message) for this toggle and follow the colour cues used in the top nav (i.e. #edf6f7 = active, #8ac6cc = inactive)

5. Menu orientation: considering the app only appears to work in portrait mode the horizontal menu forces users to do a lot swiping back and forth (as I found myself doing). May I suggest get rid of 'Home' and replace with an arrow icon; represent 'Profile' with a gear or avatar silhouette icon or relocate to the 'more' menu (the vertical "..." icon) that appears next to the camera icon when you tap 'Profile'.

6. Perhaps more on the subjective front, I would reconsider the rainbow of colours used for the Category and Muscle group buttons.

Stop Using LinkedIn 11 years ago

Among the alternatives listed is Behance -last time I checked this network was owned and operated by Adobe. btw, the stopusinglinkedin.com site links to behance.com which does not exist. It's behance.net

Dribbble (the other design resource listed) I understand was co-founded by designer Dan Cederholm, but oddly if you visit his current Wikipedia page there's no mention of his involvement with Dribbble -only on his SimpleBits bio page: http://simplebits.com/about/

hahahaha! Great response. Yes, mass digital surveillance or mass collection of data if you like. This is arguably Google's hidden agenda and perhaps the most compelling reason to dump Chrome aside from performance issues.

This is a great post chalk full of many excellent hiring tips for technical roles. Although I'm curious, you mention 2 to 4 hours of "programming challenges" as a component of your 'on-site interview'. These are followed by paired programming sessions (presumably several of these) involving debugging with team members --say, 1 to 2 hours? This, along with the usual meet and greet chit-chat/Q&A and walking tours of the office. So basically you're asking short listed candidates you've identified as "qualified" to spend an entire day with you and upwards of 5 hours demonstrating their programming and problem-solving skills.

This sounds excessive.

Your company must have unlimited resources or incredible cash flow to be able to invest an entire day on each candidate and then pull team members off "paying" tasks and projects to prepare mock programming exercises. If you're talking junior or intermediate roles, this might work. But good luck getting any senior developer with decent experience and programming chops to spend 5 hours of their day on so-called "challenges" unless you're one of the Googles or Facebooks of the world.

How not to be alone 13 years ago

I'm curious about the notion of the so-called '4G lifestyle' which could be partially defined as an unhealthy fixation on technological substitutes to face-to-face communication, as Safran Foer describes in his piece. Perhaps smartphones (and now Google's Glass Project) are the most iconic manifestations of diminished substitutes fueling these robotic behaviours you mention.

Web Design Trends 14 years ago

Regardless, typography as a primary graphic element——and to be clear, we are talking about the Web——is not really a trend in my mind.

Web Design Trends 14 years ago

The last item cited, typography, could hardly be seen as a design 'trend' itself. That's like saying a designer's use of colour or negative space are regarded as stylistically in vogue today but may have been less prevalent or even nonexistent in use at points in the past. Typography is a core element of design. Period. It's not something that falls in and out of favor as a trend.

You either have far too much free time on your hands or you're attempting to break into advertising. If anything you've exposed one of the dirty little secrets about the Web: essentially that people can quite easily be fooled and will routinely accept things they see and hear at face value without fact-checking or understanding if the information originates from a credible source.

Thank you Apple 14 years ago

This post is riveting. No really. Bewildering to say the least. As the post drags on and on the reoccurring "Thank you Apple" takes on an increasingly sarcastic tone.

Regardless of the author's fluency with computers (who really cares?) one can only marvel at the sheer absurdity in squandering the better part of a day (or was that several days?) mucking around with OS updates. Really? What a colossal waste of time.