tl;dr #018
The one where we ponder mortality.
Happy Birthday?
It feels like there have been a lot of birthdays in the team recently. Birthdays are quite morbid things to celebrate, aren’t they? Being one year closer to death? The geriatric millennials in the team have promised that your thirties are far superior to your twenties… but still….
If that wasn’t existential enough, the first thing we did this morning was go around the room choosing our death row meals…
Anywho, cheer up! We’ve got plenty of fresh content below to distract you from your inevitable demise.
#graphic-design-is-my-passion
This month has been a real noisy one for ol’ #graphic-design-is-my-passion slack channel. The loudest thing that caught my attention was Creative Director and fellow kiwi Danny Pemberton sharing this ‘Alt but gut’ link for Cameron’s World.
Initially this begged the question of who the hell is Cameron and why does he have a world? Is it some sort of theme park dedicated entirely to one person? Why does he get a theme park and not me? Fuck that guy. Or is it like a lame threequel to Wayne's World? Excellent. That was all answered by visiting the site.
The actual answer is that it’s a love letter to the internet of old. A fantastic acid trip. A throwback to the internet of the 90’s and early noughties, a simpler time where the TikToks and the Youtubes just didn’t exist. We had 56 kbit/s internet speed and screaming dial up modems.
“Cameron's World is a web-collage of text and images excavated from the buried neighbourhoods of archived GeoCities pages (1994–2009)”.
Ok cool “but I was born in 2010 what the hell are GeoCities?”. Listen up you prepubescent whippersnappers. Before Wordpress and Squarespace, building your own website wasn’t an easy task if you weren't a developer yourself. GeoCities was (key word) a web-hosting service that made it possible for people to build their own home pages. During the 90s, users from all over the world created personalised corners of the Internet. By the time the U.S. service shut down in October 2009, there were over 38 million GeoCities pages. Wow that’s a lot of Word Art.
“Cameron’s World brings together archived material from thousands and thousands of these sites. In an age where we interact primarily with branded and marketed web content, Cameron’s World is a tribute to the lost days of unrefined self-expression on the Internet. This project recalls the visual aesthetics from an era when it was expected that personal spaces would always be under construction.”
So yeah, bet you didn’t know about that. If you’re curious to what an actual GeoCities webpage would look like you can click on any of the animated gifs and sparkly images and you’ll be taken to its relevant GeoCities page. These websites still exist thanks to the Way Back Machine, which is a literal internet time machine. Maybe even go check out your old Myspace or Bebo page while you’re at it?
#code-city
After being used for millions of projects, and saving us hours…
Moment (a Javascript library which simplifies displaying date/time) has… had its moment.
Here’s what it had to say:
“We now generally consider Moment to be a legacy project in maintenance mode. It is not dead, but it is indeed done.”
Luckily, Dog found a JS prop for a temporal object - but it’s still in an “experimental” phase, where Luxon is ready to use right now.
Lane found a Youtube Video about time that he found useful entertaining
In other news, “.au” domains launched this Thursday. So now’s the time to snap some of these up and hold them hostage:
#vibe
Vibecheck, usually we ghostwrite these, but as Chief Migration Officer at LAM, I figured I'd let ya’ll know who the king of vibe is, and that he may or may not be wearing pants (it’s me. Gino).
The month opened strong with International Women’s Day. At LAM I've had the privilege of working with some of the vibey-est, most talented women I know. Apparently Urban Dictionary has deemed this phrase as for “feminine use only” but fuck it: you go girls!
Not sure if I mentioned, but pantz are sort of my thing. My expertise, my passion, my desire. After a lot of persistence, I finally treated the rest of LAM to a Figjam on Pantz (more on that in a future edition). There was heaps of debate, and some controversy as to where the pants line/drawstring(?) is drawn.
I’m a firm believer that if the length of the legs goes below the knees, they’re pretty much considered pants. Every reasonable person agreed, but not Mona - who is wrong.
We also welcomed a new Joe to the team, bit of an upgrade on old guvna Good Morning Joe (inside joke), but he’s showing potential – a real Levi’s 501/straight leg/bootleg rotation sorta guy – watch this space.
For any pants related queries get in touch, for the latest in whatever’s going on below the knee, hit subscribe.
#processes-and-platforms
We may live in the internet, but we’re still a group of (mostly) humans — and this month, we’ve been thinking a lot about human centered design methodologies. Yes, there are almost as many HCD processes as there are humans on earth, but that hasn’t deterred us from trying to figure out our own proprietary method. Why? We want to design a system that brings users’ ideas and insights into our work as early as possible, and allows for experimentation and innovation to thrive. Watch this space, fellow humans.
In other process-related geekery, we experimented with a new model for our brand essence sprint. The vibe, more or less, was:
Create four distinct design areas for exploration;
Divide into teams of two;
Sprint on one area for 30 minutes;
Rotate to a new area;
Exhibition (share back).
Adnaan kept us all on track (seriously, check out those timestamps), which allowed us to cover a ton of ground in a short amount of time. And we even had time at the end of the day to stand back and admire the beautiful work/mess we’d created together.
tl;dr
A monthly newsletter by Love + Money.
Copyright © 2022
All Rights Reserved
Love + Money Agency
”Melbourne, VIC”
-
Love + Money acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the land in which we work and pay our respects to Elders past, present, and emerging.