Just discovered this great two part interview with legendary title designer Kyle Cooper on Forget the Film, Watch the Titles. Cooper explains some of his methods and shares some of title designs that inspired him in the past. Among the few are the The Dead Zone, To Kill A Mockingbird, and Walk on the Wild Side. During my undecided college years it was Kyle Cooper’s work that inspired me to pursue a career in film, motion graphics, and design. Head over to to Forget the Film, Watch the Title’s to check it out!

It’s been awhile since I posted here so I thought I’d share some videos I’ve come across on Vimeo that I really enjoy. My favorite out of the bunch is a short abstract animation titled Sonar; created in flash with zero action scripting. Hit the jump for the rest!

• Sonar by Renaud Hallée
• ENVISION : Step into the sensory box by SUPERBIEN
• The Sandpit by Sam O’Hare
• Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull – May 1st and 2nd, 2010 by Sean Stiegemeier
• Skateboardanimation by Tilles Singer

One thing about Mobile Safari thats always bugged me is that there’s no home button. It’s a common feature of almost every web browser so why exclude it on the iPhone? Firefox recently did something similar with ver3 beta 3 and removed the home button from the top toolbar. This caused a minor stir and they promptly added it back in for the next release.

So why is the absence of a home button such a problem? If a user browses several pages deep there’s no quick way to get back to square one. When my mom gets lost on the interwebs it’s the one button she knows will always get her back to a comfortable starting point. Now I know what you’re thinking… just make a bookmark! Yes that would work… but that would require the user to actually add it to their bookmarks and shuffle through them every time they wanna use it. Seems like a lot of work for an action so common.

Here’s a quick idea for the possible placement of a home button. When the user taps the address bar at the top, the standard navigation bar expands down and a home button is positioned all the way to the left (see the concept below). Currently that space is reserved for page title which is important, however the page title gets displayed in full when the address bar is closed so you never really lose any information or functionality with this layout. With a home icon up on the left the user is two taps away from getting back to their homepage. As for setting a new homepage, this action could be added to the menu that appears when you tap the + symbol on the bottom bar. I’m sure there are other possibilities but this seemed like the most convenient. Check it out:

This year for Christmas I decided to get Mom a netbook! She’s pretty web savvy and needed something ultra portable to surf the interwebs and check email on the go.

After some searching I found a Dell Vostro A90 for only $184! The specs on it are pretty weak but Mom isn’t playing Modern Warfare, strictly web browsing and email.

When it came time to choose an operating system I decided to go with Linux because it doesn’t come bloated with any of the crapware. When I got it in the mail my intent was to customize Ubuntu to mimic XP (which is what she’s been using), however, I stumbled a upon a blog post somewhere about a new OS called Jolicloud which is similar to Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Long story short… I love this little netbook OS. Check out the video above for a quick video review.

Awhile back I followed an Instructables article on how to build flower sculptures out of old hard drive parts. I always thought about trying to make something else with all the pieces but some guy named Miguel Rivera has already taken the idea to a whole new level of awesomeness. Rivera managed to build a motorcycle, go cart, and giant robot. Check out the Wired article for more details.

Director Federico Alvarez just secured a $30m deal to develop a feature film based on his short “Panic Attack.” Alvarez runs a visual effects house in Uruguay and created the short with a mere $500 and some spare time.

The short film is basically five awesome minutes of giant robots blowing stuff up! Now all it needs is a killer story line to make it to the big screen. (via news:lite)

From a development standpoint I really wanted to make use of a few jQuery plugins and advanced CSS. On the landing page I decided to use easySlider to move between featured work. I also created a CSS sprite to combine most of the images and improve load times (good article on what CSS sprites are).

I’m still using WordPress as as the underlying CMS and blogging platform.

Coming up with Halloween costumes every year is one of my favorite things to do. So when I saw this handmade Big Daddy costume my mind was totally blown. For those of you who don’t play video games, the Big Daddy character is from the XBOX 360 game Bioshock. Hit the link to see how it was made!

Wow it’s been a busy month! Sorry for the lack of updates… I’ve been insanely busy with our new website ShirtsTasteGood.com! I’ll leave you with this cool video by Charlie McCarthy titled flight patterns: