SIGN PAINTERS. This the official trailer for SIGN PAINTERS a documentary by Faythe Levine & Sam Macon. For information regarding screenings, and other news please visit signpaintermovie.com

There was a time, as recently as the 1980s, when storefronts, murals, banners, barn signs, billboards, and even street signs were all hand-lettered with brush and paint. But, like many skilled trades, the sign industry has been overrun by the techno-fueled promise of quicker and cheaper. The resulting proliferation of computer-designed, die-cut vinyl lettering and inkjet printers has ushered a creeping sameness into our landscape. Fortunately, there is a growing trend to seek out traditional sign painters and a renaissance in the trade.

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7x3m Modus cover. Modus focuses on the ‘bigger picture’, and employs a bold mix of photography, illustration and typography. We were commissioned to make the cover in chalk for the march Learning issue. Source

The History of Typography. A paper-letter animation about the history of fonts and typography. 291 Paper Letters. 2,454 Photographs. 140 hours of work. Source

Principles behind the Agile Manifesto

Article: Source

We follow these principles:

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer
through early and continuous delivery
of valuable software.

Welcome changing requirements, even late in 
development. Agile processes harness change for 
the customer’s competitive advantage.

Deliver working software frequently, from a 
couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a 
preference to the shorter timescale.

Business people and developers must work 
together daily throughout the project.

Build projects around motivated individuals. 
Give them the environment and support they need, 
and trust them to get the job done.

The most efficient and effective method of 
conveying information to and within a development 
team is face-to-face conversation.

Working software is the primary measure of progress.

Agile processes promote sustainable development. 
The sponsors, developers, and users should be able 
to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

Continuous attention to technical excellence 
and good design enhances agility.

Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount 
of work not done—is essential.

The best architectures, requirements, and designs 
emerge from self-organizing teams.

At regular intervals, the team reflects on how 
to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts 
its behavior accordingly.

Agile Software Development: A gentle introduction

Article: Source

Computer science is a young science. Computer programmers my age were trained by engineers. That training dictated how we approached software development for an entire generation. But now after decades of building software to be expensive, unwanted, and unreliable we have come to realize software is different. Building software is more like creating a work of art, it requires creativity in design and ample craftsmanship to complete. Software remains malleable, often illogical, and incomplete forever. Agile software development is based on fundamental changes to what we considered essential to software development ten years ago.

The most important thing to know about Agile methods or processes is that there is no such thing. There are only Agile teams. The processes we describe as Agile are environments for a team to learn how to be Agile.

We realize the way a team works together is far more important than any process. While a new process can easily improve team productivity by a fraction, enabling your team to work effectively as a cohesive unit can improve productivity by several times. Of course to be eligible for such a big improvement you must be working at a fraction of your potential now. Unfortunately, it isn’t that uncommon. 

The most brilliant programmers alive working competitively in an ego-rich environment can’t get as much done as ordinary programmers working cooperatively as a self disciplined and self-organizing team. You need a process where team empowerment and collaboration thrive to reach your full potential.

The second change is making the

customer, the one who funds the software development, a valuable and essential team member. When the dead line gets close a traditional approach to reducing scope is to let the developers decide what will work properly and what won’t. Instead let the customer make scope decisions a little at a time throughout the project.

When your customer, or domain expert works directly with the development team everyone learns something new about the problem. True domain expertise and experience is essential to finding a simple, elegant, correct solution. A document can have plenty of information, but real knowledge is hard to put on paper. Left alone programmers must assume they know everything they need. When asking questions is difficult or slow the knowledge gap grows. The system will get built, but it won’t solve the problem like one guided by an expert on a daily basis.

Perhaps the biggest problem with software development is changing requirements. Agile processes accept the reality of change versus the hunt for complete, rigid specifications. There are domains where requirements can’t change, but most projects have changing requirements. For most projects readily accepting changes can actually cost less than ensuring requirements will never change.

We can produce working software starting with the first week of development so why not show it to the customer? We can learn so much more about the project requirements in the context of a working system. The changes we get this way are usually the most important to implement.

Agile also means a fundamental change in how we manage our projects. If working software is what you will deliver then measure your progress by how much you have right now. We will change our management style to be based on getting working software done a little at a time. The documents we used to create as project milestones may still be useful, just not as a measure of progress.

Instead of managing our activities and waiting till the project ends for software, we will manage our requirements and demonstrate each new version to the customer. It is a hard change to make but it opens up new ways to develop software.

Take a guided tour of Agile Development by following the  buttons starting here. Or continue your guided tour ofExtreme Programming by following the buttons. Let’s look at how we manage by features next.

Who Is Apple’s ‘John Appleseed’?

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In its ads, keynote presentations and video tutorials, Apple has been using a person named ‘John Appleseed’ to demo its iPhones and other devices. 

But who is John Appleseed? 

For those who don’t already know—according to Wikipedia—he is “John Chapman” the American pioneer who introduced apple trees to Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois; understandably, he was given the nickname “Johnny Appleseed”. 

However, Apple’s second CEO Mike Markkula—who helped to fund Apple—also used “John Appleseed” as an alias to publish software programs he created for the Apple II. 

As a joke, someone also created a Facebook page for John Appleseed, which posts pictures and the likes of his moments of fame, when he gets featured by Apple. 

 

 

 


[via MacTrast, image via Wikipedia and John Appleseed Facebook]

Sony 13.3” A4-sized digital paper notepad is light, durable and responsive.  Source

Audio visual projection mapping with custom built tool. Developed with Processing. Points for the Voronoi Diagram can be mapped on the building, so the overall composition matches to the architecture. Moving points modifies the diagram in real time and these moving sections/points generates sound depending on how big/small that they get. Source