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How Apple made the ultimate Snoopy watch: “You wouldn’t believe the minutiae”

How Apple made the ultimate Snoopy watch: “You wouldn’t believe the minutiae”:

That first meeting at the Charles M Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, California, was the Watch team’s first in-person meet-up after the pandemic, and what started as a two-hour drive north from Mountain View ultimately ended with plans for 148 unique animations that would be contextual depending on the time of day, local weather and activities. When you go for a swim, Snoopy dons his scuba gear and floats through your watch screen. When night arrives he’ll howl at the moon, and when you’re not up to much at all you can find him draped over his iconic red doghouse in a series of panels that are a direct lift from the comics. It all amounts to over 12 minutes of animation work that stemmed from an unexpectedly chaotic tête-à-tête.

“I’m typically a very organised person,” says Gary Butcher, human interface designer at Apple. “So I felt, ‘We’ve got a limited amount of time together and there might be some uneasiness, so I’ll print out 148 pieces of blank paper and we need to leave the room having filled out every one of those pages.’ By the end of the day, we’d not touched the wall of A3 paper, but had tons of sketches littering the table.”

[This. Is. So. Good!!!]

Snoopy watch faces 1 jpg

Exterior Sign in White Oak: Finished | David Fisher, Carving Explorations

Exterior Sign in White Oak: Finished | David Fisher, Carving Explorations:

After a lot of research, consultation of folks with exterior sign experience, and personal testing, I went with the artist acrylic paints above, although other very good brands would work as well. These pigments are all from the larger list recommended by Martin Wenham in his book. I’m trying to learn more and more about color theory and practice and Martin is a master. I mixed the brownish color from the first three, and the green from all four. Professional artist colors like these list the specific pigment used, along with the opacity (vs transparency) of each color. Notice the opacity square for each of these pigments is a completely black square, meaning very opaque/solid. Also, all of these pigments have the highest lightfastness rating, so they will be naturally resistant to fading. I thinned my mix just a touch with an acrylic medium to the consistency I wanted to work with.

[Well done!]

Collaborating away

Collaborating away:

Ideas like the shower. Ideas like our pillows. Ideas like commutes. Ideas like walks. Ideas like the morning, or late nights. Ideas like daydreams. Ideas like you doing something else so they can surprise you.

Ideas aren’t contained. They aren’t located. They don’t reside. They’re nomadic.

They aren’t something you control — they bubble up, they arise. You don’t get to have them when you want. They come to you.

[Yesss!]

Welcome to the new Verge

Welcome to the new Verge:

When you embark on a project to totally reboot a giant site that makes a bunch of money, you inevitably get asked questions about conversion metrics and KPIs and other extremely boring vocabulary words. People will pop out of dark corners trying to start interminable conversations about “side doors,” and you will have to run away from them, screaming.

But there’s only one real goal here: The Verge should be fun to read, every time you open it. If we get that right, everything else will fall into place.

[All I can say for now is “Nice!”]

DAW Power: Plugging into guitarist Mike Haldeman’s unique digital rig – Fretboard Journal

Plugging into guitarist Mike Haldeman’s unique digital rig:

I didn’t want these still, magical, mystifying moments of my interaction with music to become demystified by suddenly understanding complex jazz harmony. It’s like there’s a sound there that I love, and I want to keep its magical essence. I don’t want to understand it. I want it to be something that still remains kind of confusing and elusive and something that I have to search for.

[I want it both ways. All the understanding and all the magic. I may never get to both places, but that’s the dream.]

The Banality of Genius: Notes on Peter Jackson’s Get Back

The Banality of Genius: Notes on Peter Jackson’s Get Back:

Paul: To wander aimlessly is very unswinging. Unhip.

Later…

As viewers, we get bored of seeing them rehearse it and we see only some of it: on January 23rd alone they ran it through 43 times. The Beatles don’t know, during this long process, what we know – that they’re creating a song that millions of people will sing and move to for decades to come. For all they know, it might be Shit Takes all the way down. But they keep going, changing the lyrics, making small decision after small decision – when the chorus comes in, where to put the guitar solos, when to syncopate the beat, how to play the intro – in the blind faith that somewhere, hundreds of decisions down the line, a Beatles song worthy of the name will emerge.

[Adding it to the list…]

Brik Font: Creating Type with Lego

Brik Font: Creating Type with Lego:

Craig Ward has been creating letterforms using Lego bricks and posting the results to Instagram. The ones I really love are the anti-aliased letters — reminds me of zooming all the way in to do detail work in Photoshop back when I was a web designer.

There is just something so satisfying about meticulously rendering digital artifacts in a physical medium like Lego.

[So good!]

Source: kottke.org

Say Yes: Mel Brooks at 95

Say Yes: Mel Brooks at 95:

I’d learned one very simple trick: say yes. Simply say yes. Like Joseph E. Levine, on “The Producers,” said, “The curly-haired guy—he’s funny looking. Fire him.” He wanted me to fire Gene Wilder. And I said, “Yes, he’s gone. I’m firing him.” I never did. But he forgot. After the screening of “Blazing Saddles,” the head of Warner Bros. threw me into the manager’s office, gave me a legal pad and a pencil, and gave me maybe twenty notes. He would have changed “Blazing Saddles” from a daring, funny, crazy picture to a stultified, dull, dusty old Western. He said, “No farting.” I said, “It’s out”… You say yes, and you never do it.

This seems like quite the win as a life hack…