jason lynes archives

“A person who works six hours a day but with total focus has an enormous advantage over a 12-hour-per-day workaholic who’s ‘multi-tasking’ all day, answering every phone call, constantly checking Facebook and Twitter, and indulging every interruption.

It’s time we upgraded our work ethic for the age we’re living in, not our grandparents’ age. Hard work is still a virtue, but now takes a distant second place to the new determinant of success or failure in the age of Internet distractions: Control of attention.”

Mike Elgan, in Work Ethic 2.0: Attention Control

posted by jason 5 days ago · 4 comments

The Making of LittleBigPlanet, the uncontrollably cute game for Playstation 3.

posted by jason 5 days ago · 0 comments

Pitchfork’s posted 51-100 of their 100 Best Tracks of 2008. This isn’t only a great list, they’ve finally added handy little MP3 players to hear or download tracks on the list. I guarantee you haven’t heard of over half of these artists. Go explore and find some new faves.

My tops: The Veronicas (87), Justice (76), Sigur Rós (71), The Whitest Boy Alive (64), Q-Tip (61), and some freakin’ Vampire Weekend at 56.

posted by jason on Monday, Dec 15, 2008 · 1 comment

iPhone loverz, here’s a nice set of non-obvious tips & tricks.

posted by jason on Wednesday, Dec 10, 2008 · 0 comments

case study

Hot and graceful jQuery dropcaps

Dropcaps are a staple of magazine and newspaper design, but aren’t always the easiest to implement on the web. Using this little jQuery and CSS tutorial, you can easily add hot little dropcaps to your web articles without bothering your developers. This method will also let you sleep at night knowing your caps will degrade gracefully, displaying just fine in browsers without CSS or JavaScript enabled.

Please note, this tutorial is for those who are familiar with jQuery and CSS. No basics taught here. Also nerd alert.

posted by jason on Tuesday, Dec 02, 2008 · 12 comments

Zoom far into a document in the new Photoshop CS4 and pixel lines automatically appear, a nice touch to help define specific colors and fine tune your designs. (Above is 18pt Caecilia LT Std at 3200%.)

posted by jason on Tuesday, Nov 25, 2008 · 1 comment

Vintage RobFoster™ style illustrations by Patrick Leger. Above: “After the Heist”. Rob, I want to see one of these in your lounge ASAP.

posted by jason on Tuesday, Nov 25, 2008 · 2 comments

Subtle marketing strategies from Threadless.

posted by jason on Monday, Nov 24, 2008 · 0 comments

I’m going to stop listening to you because I disagree with your politics, even though you aren’t talking about politics

Today we received an email from a concerned subscriber:

It’s a very sad day – I have always found NorthTemple a great, entertaining, and informative read.

But, today I am removing you from my feed, and will no longer be sharing with my team.

I cannot reconcile the Mormon church’s views and directives on Prop 8 with my own, and refuse to support anything associated.

Good luck to all of you – you have a great team.

Northtemple is made up of 30 someodd designers who do work for the LDS Church, yes. But our About page has said for 2 years:

Northtemple.com is not an official publication of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The websites linked, opinions expressed, quotes cited, and articles written do not necessarily express the views of the Church. We bear sole responsibility for, and firmly stand behind, the content featured here.

A few points I wanted to make clear this morning:

This is a design blog. We write about design.
We rarely, if ever, talk about politics. The occasional Obama link has always had a design or tech element to it. We have never voiced an opinion on Proposition 8.
The Church does not own Northtemple.com, and has no control over what we post. The site is not an approved publication of the Church, and is hosted and owned privately. We just all happen to work here.
To reject Northtemple because of the Church’s stance on Prop 8 is like refusing to watch the Utah Jazz because a Mormon owns it, or stay in a Marriott hotel because a Mormon owns it, read any of the Twilight books (or watch the movie this weekend) because a Mormon wrote it, listen to Glenn Beck or Gladys Knight, or watch any of the many professional sports teams that LDS members play for.

While we respect the political views of our readers, we just don’t care about them on this blog. If you care about design, read us. If not, don’t. It’s a design point, not a political one.

posted by jason on Wednesday, Nov 19, 2008 · 14 comments

“It’s so hard to find things.
I’m finding it hard to not blame you.”

My wife Caryn, experiencing the joys of using lds.org.

posted by jason on Tuesday, Nov 18, 2008 · 4 comments

Motrin provokes mommy bloggers with an insensitive ad, gets nailed on twitter, removes the ad and issues and apology, and it all happened over the weekend. The best part – when a few bloggers contacted the advertising company, they had never heard of twitter and were totally clueless as to the online backlash.

Sounds eerily similar to a few of the ad agencies we’ve worked with..

posted by jason on Monday, Nov 17, 2008 · 0 comments

You’d do yourself right to pick up this new offering from mountain folkster Ray LaMontagne, called Gossip in the Grain. It’s the 3rd CD of his in high rotation around here, following Trouble and Till the Sun Turns Back.

He’s packed this thing full of his trademark raspy soul, with some upbeat funk thrown in (“You are the best thing”), a full out confession of love to Meg White (“Meg White”), a little banjo plucking action (“Hey me, hey mama”), and some heel-tappin’ blues, complete with reverb’d harmonica (“Henry nearly killed me [It’s a shame]”).

You need this. Buy now and save yourself future embarassment.

posted by jason on Friday, Nov 14, 2008 · 3 comments

Jim Coudal is twittering an experiment called startwithagrand – he started yesterday with $1000 worth of stock, and he gets “one trade per day. One stock in portfolio. No tears.”

posted by jason on Thursday, Nov 13, 2008

Carsonified launches their site for the Future of Web Apps – Dublin.
They’ve taken a page’s worth of information and blown it up to three and a half pages of design. Web 2.0 goodness, or a bloated excuse for a brochure? I can’t decide if I like it or not..

Just a note – I love these Carson workshops. I don’t exaggerate when I say they are the most professionally produced conferences out there. This note isn’t meant as criticism of their biz, just a note on the design direction of these latest sites of theirs.

posted by jason on Thursday, Nov 13, 2008 · 3 comments