Square v. Portrait

This photo I put on on Instagram last week turned out to be one of my more liked posts.

Windows on Instagram

Though I’m a sporadic Instagram user, I think it’s an amazing product. Their early selection of the square photo format was a genius response to the constraints of the camera phone and a spot on insight into how to simplify photo composition for a mass audience.

All the same, I often lament the success of the Instagram square. Rectangles just make pictorial storytelling more interesting. Here’s how I would have cropped the same image in a portrait-oriented frame. (I had to recreate the vintage effects, so they don’t match the photo above perfectly.)

Windows Portrait

I’m not arguing that Instagram should allow portrait images. I’m just saying the world is more interesting than just squares.

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Recreating Photoshop Blend Modes

It’s kind of ironic, but one of the things that has made it easier to move away from Photoshop is the immense popularity of some of its very own features. A good example is the program’s blend modes — darken, multiply, color burn, lighten, screen, color dodge, etc. These have become so popular that when other graphics programs like Acorn, Pixelmator and Sketch implement similar functionality, they generally replicate them almost exactly. Switching made simple.

My favorite of these blend modes, by far, is multiply. As the name suggests, this mode gives you the product of two or more layers, multiplying each pixel on the top layer by the pixel or pixels in the layers directly beneath it. The result is a darker image that is usually quite visually rich. I use it all the time.

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Sticky Jots

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

A new product from two students at The School of Visual Arts’ MFA Interaction Design program. Sticky Jots are pre-printed sticky notes that facilitate sketching and brainstorming for digital products. There are versions for user stories, for phone apps and tablet apps — and there are even clipboard-like device mockups of the iPhone and iPad that the stickies fit into, for more convincing presentation of your ideas. Sticky Jots come in several different combos, and they’re already sold out of their initial run, but you can pre-order the next run.

Sticky Jots

As a side note, the app POP — which stands for Prototype on Paper — lets you snap pictures of your sketches and make them interactive easily. More here.

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My Favo(u)rite Magazine

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Compiled by Andrew Losowsky and Jeremy Leslie to benefit Bob Newman, a legend of editorial art direction who suffered a serious accident earlier this year, leaving him in a coma. “My Favo(u)rite Magazine” features dozens of designers, writers and artists honoring their favorite magazines in text and images. It’s available for sale in standard and limited editions, with all proceeds going to Newman and his family. See also the full list of contributors.

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Designer Founders and Choosing Problems

Now and then, designer founders of new startups ask me for advice on the companies they’re building. Having tried and failed to build a sustainable business as a designer founder myself, I feel a little leery about offering advice. At the same time, with the benefit of hindsight, I can recognize some of the same missteps that we made with Mixel.

The most prevalent one is not putting the user at the center of the company. This is somewhat ironic, because designers often pride ourselves on being advocates for the user experience. But there is a difference between user-centric design and building a user-centric business.

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Tension and Practice in Photography

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

In this video, veteran documentary photographer John Free gives five minutes of unrehearsed advice on how to become a better street photographer. His central concept is that tension is a major impediment to getting the right shot, and that practice — which is normally foreign to the art of photography even as it’s a core concept of most any other skill — is a key to “getting rid of tension.” It’s good stuff. Watch the video here.

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