Finally!

SWFAddress is a small script that sits on top of SWFObject and provides deep linking for Flash websites and applications. In other words it enables the Back, Forward and Reload buttons of the browser and creates unique URLs with page titles that can be sent over email or IM. SWFAddress uses the ExternalInterface functionality introduced in Flash Player 8 and comes with a technique that enables search engine indexing for deep Flash links.

Excellent. Will definitely be trying this for a few upcoming projects!

Check out SWFAddress here:
http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/

Mato Atom
Graphic and Motion Design. Fabulous!

Marimekko
Fantastic fabrics and textiles from Marimekko!

Josh Robenstone
Photography, Josh Robenstone in Melbourne. Hot

Arts Unwrapped
40 Open Studios, 3 Weekends, London.

Motoda Hisaharu
See Motoda’s post-apocalyptic lithographs of Tokyo. Striking!

Matt Keers
Graphic design student Matt Keers shows great promise!

Hawaii Design
London based design studio, slick work!

Chris Erickson
Sexy responsive portfolio and work of Chris Erickson

Surface View
Great use/execution of Flash for Surface View, makers of bespoke large scale wall murals!

Superuse
Where recycling meets design. Wicked!

Fluorink
Graphic designer Aurelio Sanchez in Barcelona. Wicked typography!

Gomma
Gomma v4 launches!

Andres Hernandez
The Flickr set of fashion photographer Andres Hernandez. Nice!

Postit!
Post your notes online, for everyone to see. Uh.

While digging around for a bit of Björk on YouTube, I discovered this little gem which I’ve never seen before!

The track is from the Homogenic era and is absolutely one of my favourites. The video was done by LynnFox for her Greatest Hits tour.

Due to popular request I did a wallpaper using the bubbles appearing on the start page and in the comment section on this site. But instead of just publishing the wallpaper, I thought it would be nice to once again turn it into a wallpaper devkit so you can customize it.

Work is love made visible. And if you can’t work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of the people who work with joy.

~ Kahlil Gibran

It’s funny sometimes. I look back at my education, and I wonder if spending four years in college studying entrepreneurship was the right thing to do. Do I regret it? Nah. But I would certainly say at this stage that I’m not a normal entrepreneur, if you’d call me that at all. For example, money only comes first for me because it has to—I have a to-be wife and four cats to care for. The phrase, “financially independent,” makes more sense to me than “rich.” Although I wouldn’t mind it, I think I’d be too paranoid to say, drive a $60,000+ car around. But on another layer, I’m a very material person. I’m sure it’s hard not to be these days and I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t be reading this if you weren’t one to some degree. Is that a bad thing? Nah. At times, it’s what keeps me sane. I’m in that stage of life where I can look at a lot of the things in my apartment and think to myself, “I bought all this, I worked for all this.” It’s gratifying in it’s own right but serves as only a small part of the motivation for doing what I do.

As many of you know, my entry into a world where the web was my career almost didn’t happen. If it wasn’t for Jen and my parents slapping me upside the head saying, “You’re a web designer right? There have to be jobs for it,” I’d probably be stuck in an entry-level management position at a local Enterprise Rent-a-Car. My chance to work at Facebook also came about—by chance. If I didn’t have the slightest inkling as to what Facebook was, I probably would have never noticed their job listing on LinkedIn.

There’s a relationship here, I’m getting to that.

I was a very casual Facebook user. I was in the middle of my senior year when Johnson & Wales University finally got access to it, so I never really spent much time on it other than the usual profile surfing and member poking. I had friends that took care of my would-be addiction for me. So when I found the listing for a job at Facebook, I was intrigued. “Why not?” I thought. “I use the product, it’d be a cool place to work for.” I said the same about LinkedIn, as I was interviewing there when I found the Facebook listing.

So to start out, I got x dollars. Let’s call that my base salary, since it was my first job right out of college. x would have been an awesome salary for a designer if Facebook were located in any other place besides Silicon Valley. But x got Jen and I a very comfortable life, especially coming from a place where Jen had to work full-time while I was going to school with a part-time job. Jen was finally able to focus on her studies, while I took care of the bread.

However, that didn’t last. No matter the reasons or circumstances, I had to move on. Although I started out as a casual user of the product, I really did find great pleasure in working for that company and seeing them grow almost 10-fold in the time I was there.

I remember when I first laid my eyes on WordPress, I disliked it, because I never quite got the concept of designing around piece of software rather than having the software plugged into a design. Needless to say, I was an avid b2 user. I think this was when 1.2 was about to come out. By the time I found myself looking at WordPress again, I had already been through LiveJournal, Blogger and Movable Type. After discovering version 1.5, I became serious about using it and never looked back. So when I got the chance to work for Matt and Team Automattic, I was ecstatic. I was more than a casual user, I was close to the line of fanboy-ism.

At Automattic, I took a cut in pay. Clearly the company was no Facebook, but I didn’t care. The sheer excitement of being able to help the team out was what drove me past that. So let’s say it was y and y = x - .15x. Small cut, still living in Silicon Valley, the family made appropriate adjustments and everything went smoothly.

Then December rolled around and things weren’t quite working out there either. No matter the reasons or the circumstances, I had to again move on. To ease the pain, I joke around that it took me working for “the man” twice before I realized I just couldn’t work for “the man.” The moving on wasn’t as devastating as Facebook because I had something around the corner, Revyver.

The price of controlling my own destiny.

The entrepreneur. A man with lots of ideas and a very empty wallet with little pieces of paper inside signifying the potential revenue from said ideas. When I “discovered” business back in my freshman year of high school, the first dream I had was to start my own business. There was always that mass appeal about being your own boss, being in control of your own destiny. So after, high school, college and two jobs, it was finally my chance. I could have very well jumped right back into the foray of the day job, but I felt like taking the risk. After consulting Jen with it, I announced that Revyver had officially received my full attention and was off to work.

After about 5 months of being self-employed—a freelancer, an entrepreneur, whatever-you-want-to-call-it—the comfort level took a dastardly drop. To bring the equation back into it, letting Revyver be z, z = .5x. Still living in Silicon Valley, but in a new apartment no less. Just as people in the last post probably thought I was a bit of an idiot, I’m sure the same people are looking upon z and wondering what the hell is wrong with me. Or not. To reference to quote above, we were always told (by a few of the “better” teachers at JWU) to love what you do, no matter the price. I can say now that it has been a damn hard road for our family, with constant scares and a breakdown here and there, but we’ve learned a lot as well. Sure, that could be a statement begging for pity. The reason it’s not is that this family made that choice knowing the trials and tribulations that lied ahead. We’re both proud because we love the comfort we’ve created out of the situation. Every minute I work is for this family, and there’s no better gratification than that ¹.

The relationship I’ve really tried to look at was one between the love for what you do related to the hit you’re willing to take for it. I’ve seen a lot of this lately—people leaving higher paying jobs for a better company, or to go on their own. There was a lot of that at Facebook actually and Ryan Boren made that move too. When I found out about Ryan, I was on the other side of the fence. “Why?” I thought. But it’s really hard to see that unless you or somebody close to you has been through it. On the other hand, people have moved to jobs they love and have gotten a lovely bonus! Each situation is equally admirable because the person in question realizes that there’s something better out there. A better cause, a better company, a better opportunity in general.

So my question to all of you—applying the relationship I’ve been looking at—is how far would you go for your dream job? If you’re already there, how has it been treating you? How have you been holding up? Did you regret leaving behind what you ended up having to and would you do it the same way if you had the chance?

This is the all new Stuff and Nonsense web site. Things have changed a great deal around here since the last time you may have stopped by. This site is a merger of two domains, the Stuff and Nonsense company portfolio plus the archives from And All That Malarkey.

If you have any comments or suggestions, or you find something out of place, please contact us. We look forward to hearing from you.

Sorry, it seems like more of a weekly catch these days! But here we go:

Mark Leary
Photography. Beautiful.

Shiira
New browser for OS X. Sexy!

Mario Hugo
Art Director/Designer/Illustrator. Fabulous.

Bryce Domingues
Graphic design. Interesting!

Untitled 2
Vance Wellenstein, Graphic Design. Great typography.

Shane Lavalette
Peculiar but intriguing photography.

Making Known
Ryan G. Nelson. Fabulous typography.

Magnetosphere
Feed your pyromania with this explosive iTunes visualizer. Wow.

Kris Van Assche
Beautiful clothing and accessories for guys. Nice site too.

Project Playlist
Create playlists which harvest the music already on the web.

Anna Wolf
Photography. Beautiful, and sexy.

Lateral
London based interactive studio. Crazy, daring site navigation.

Skywalkers in Korea cross Han solo

Best. Headline. Ever. (Via Kottke.)

Back in May of 2000, there was an idea headed by James Widegren, Anders Schroeder and eight of the most popular design sites at the time. This was back before I had bought Avalonstar and back when digital art consisting of splines from 3D Studio Max was just getting off the ground. When those eight sites went offline for a week and then reappeared on May 1st, it sparked the global event we’ve known for the past 7 years as the May 1st Reboot.

It was an amazing idea at the time. Hide your site for a week, then reveal it on May 1st along with other designers, writers and artists around the world. The original description of the reboot is as follows, taken from an interview with James by Nick Finck of Digital Web Magazine:

May 1st Reboot is an international relaunch of web sites by authors and creatives working within the field of web design. As a collective event it makes a manifest demonstration of the very idea of community. It is, quite simply, an indeterminate group of designers subscribing to one event in order to publicize their work at one specific time across any number of different locations. And it is in that sense that it is most interesting to us, and by extension to those involved in or entering the world of Web Design online.

I didn’t participate in the event until 2002, but what I saw and experienced during that time floored me. Since most of the sites I followed participated in the reboot, just seeing all of them with that infamous reboot holding page got my blood rushing. Although, I do have to admit, it was definitely a boring week. But I’d try and think of how my favorite artists would outdo themselves, and most of the time, they did. For most of us, the first four months of the year went by until the reboot was announced. Then we’d shut down our sites and try to finish something within the week that the sites were down, all for the fun of it! Well, there was also the juicy prize of lifetime hosting from (mt), but we always knew one of the uber-Flash sites would get it. All-in-all, it was an awesome experience for anybody involved and really was a “reinvigoration of the web.” (I seem to be addicted to that word these days.)

Hello reboot for “the rest of us.”

Then in March of 2005, B. Adam Howell came up with the idea to give the reboot a more standards-focused approach.

Now that’s all well and good, but unfortunately what the May 1st Reboot is most certainly not is a CSS and web standards-minded community project. The entries have been famously lopsided in the Flash department. So I got to thinking today that maybe this year could be the year to change all that. We can call it the May 1st Reboot Reboot… or something.

Yeah, yeah, I know we’re all busy but come on we’ve got almost 2 whole months! I’m participating — want to join me? Better yet, want to join me and help spread the word on this new era of the May 1st Reboot? Redesign your site with CSS and web standards in mind and show the entire world all at once just how great accessible, standards design can really be.

Through a mere idea and a blog post, the original CSSReboot was born. A new era of the reboot. One that would focus on standards and try to tip the scales away from the growing number of Flash-relatated reboot entries. It was an awesome idea, the standards movement was at full-throttle and it was a perfect kick in the ass for those of us who never got to redesign¹ or always pushed it off. Unfortunately, I strolled in about 2 months late since I was busy graduating. From what I saw, it was a success as there were a handful of awesome sites that came out of the woodwork. Sure, Adam didn’t require the reboot holder, but that made some sense, since many of the participants were bloggers. I personally had a qualm with that, since the week before reboot was an intentional week of silence, much like the silence before the storm. Then woooosh! Open the gates. Everybody goes nuts, and all that malarkey². But, then there was the voting. Five-stars for you, and one star for everybody else! Everybody ended up doing pretty mediocre if one actually took the voting into consideration. Glass half-empty or half-full? Your choice. :)

But one reboot didn’t seem like enough, so a few months later, Adam spawned the infamous fall (November) reboot. To the community at large, this was sort of a “say wha?” kind of thing. But, hell, it was another chance to redesign. Over 1,000 300 people took part in it, and again, there were some awesome redesigns and I actually almost made it on time. One could certainly call the second reboot a success, I’m sure the sponsors did. Well, wait. Sponsors? Hmm… maybe to pay for the hosting and all that jazz. Then there was the voting. Wait, already said that.

When May 2006 rolled around the CSSReboot was back once again. Although something didn’t feel quite right. At least to me. Could it be that this yearly event had already lost its backing before its second year began? It seemed that way, but I had planned on rebooting for quite some time coming into 2006, so I didn’t mind too much. The reboot had always taken a lot of Adam’s time, so it seemed only natural that he’d offer some advertising spots and a place for donations. People were comfortable donating because it was supposedly for a good cause. But then came the first of many missteps in the reboot’s history, and it cost people $25. I’m sure there are quite a few people that remember it, pay $25 and get your site on the front page during the reboot stage. It was a pretty sleazy idea to be honest, but I paid, mainly because I was helping Adam out³. So for a third time, May 1st came and went, may1reboot was a success, and we were all voting each other to hell. You know, when Dreamhost wasn’t eating it. But there were some great designs that came out of it! Needless to say, I was late again, but by only a few hours this time. After everything was said and done, a lot of us left with a bit of a sour taste in our mouths.

Something about the meaning of reboot was lost, and from then on, it would never return.

About two months later, the unthinkable happened. Adam was selling the reboot. I remember I was in #9rules when this happened, and the lot of us were left a bit dumbfounded.

The CSS Reboot is a year-and-a-half old event where web professionals from all over the world simultaneously redesign their sites on May 1st and Nov. 1st. The event has been held 3 times now and each time it has doubled in popularity— as far as traffic and buzz — and participation — as far as rebooters and voters.

CSS Reboot has a Pagerank of 7, an Alexa rank of 25,819 and there are 564,000 unique results in Google for “CSS Reboot”. May 2006 the site received 410,820 pageviews and 167,983 unique visitors. This June — post-Reboot and a month I took completely off from the site — it has so far received 83,748 pageviews and 37,683 unique visitors. The past Reboots have been archived for posterity and also receive a good amount of traffic — http://spring2005.cssreboot.com and http://fall2005.cssreboot.com.

I’m selling the site because I no longer have the time or desire to keep it going and don’t want to see it die. I think it’s a great opportunity for a company or individual to make money as well as a great name for themselves in the web designer and developer community.

o_O?

That last line is what got me. Cue cough.

Now, I think Adam’s a great guy. I had some lunch with him while I was still with Facebook. It was Mexican and we had a good time talking. But this… threw a knife right through my eye. Cue the blood and the loud screaming. I guess it’s different because I’ve followed the reboot since it’s origins, but I stopped following the reboot after it was sold to Peter. Actually, I’ve been in a state of denial ever since. No, I don’t believe it’s Peter’s fault for buying it, I believe it was Adam’s fault for selling it. If he truly believed in the mission of the reboot, he could have passed the torch on to people who cared equally if not more about the cause. But as this Wikipedia article states,

[The CSSReboot] was also used by Adam as a means to make money for him - a point which strongly differentiates the CSS Reboot from the May 1st Reboot.

It was never about the money, not for James, Anders or the people that curated the event in the years thereafter. (mt) sponsoring the hosting was always great, but most people who participated in the early years of the reboot already hosted with them, so it was never about a prize. It was about the communal silence and reinvigoration of the web. There are people out there who are now extremely sour towards the event, people who have never truly known what the event stood for.

In mourning…

So another May 1st has come and gone, and a lot of people have rebooted. David did a good job trying to rekindle the spirit, but the damage has already been done (read the comments). Matt Brett and I even thought of doing the same thing after the debacle of last May happened, but again, the damage was done. It’s unfortunate that such a great idea had to be influenced by money, ads and sponsors, but a lot of things are these days. All-in-all, this was meant to be an educational piece about the reboot and a memorial to, again, an idea that died at the hands of greed.

I still hope that one day, the people around me can enjoy the reboot for what it once was, and in the real reboot’s case, still is. And when May 1st comes around again, if you plan on reinvigorating your identity, join the official reboot (if you can deal with the Flash) and be a part of that cause that James, Anders and now Paul strived to create and uphold. With that, I leave you with the rewritten mission of the May 1st Reboot.

May 1st Reboot is a worldwide, international, cross-disciplinary event. It is unique and of growing significance to anyone interested in the community of Web Design and the creative industry of those authors who take part. Wholly independent, and not-for-profit, May 1st Reboot is a call-to-arms without an impinging manifesto; an instance of collectivity across global parameters through the digital arena; a celebration of the richness of this community, of its creativity and diversity.

May 1st Reboot offers a chance for convergence within, what continues to be, an increasingly fragmented and segregated medium. The event is a public showcase of collectivity and individuality, of cohesion without uniformity, part of an increasingly pressing drive to demonstrate the significance and potential of digital authorship in a medium becoming more and more saturated by bland conformist methodologies⁴ and insipid commercialized aesthetics.

And yet May 1st Reboot is not prescriptive in any aesthetic or political sense, it is merely the global culmination of creative endeavor undertaken by a number of artistic voices who publish independent of any conventional obligations. It formulates a scope or focus, through which those unfamiliar with the online design circles can come to appreciate the intriguing and bizarre contradictions and collisions of design for the Web, or more specifically, design on the Web that circulates within this far reaching community.