Blaine Allen Brown

Here is something I made by messing around in Gimp. I merged a picture of a desert with a red background to make it look like Mars, and then I added a sandwich. I then used the gradient tool with a radial setting to make the sandwich seem like it's the most glorious thing in the Mars. Delicious. Originally Posted on a blog for a class project . I liked this image so I wanted to share it here as well.

Today, Lindsay Small-Butera, co-creator of Baman Piderman , posted a complaint on her Tumblr about a site called Videohall that downloaded her work from YouTube and posted it to the Videohall Tumblr without including a source. I have a few thoughts about the whole thing. "Hey mother fuckers. Thanks for stealing my video by ripping it off of youtube, putting an mp4 of it on your site, not sourcing it at all, and getting a ton of notes." "Stealing" is kind of a nebulous term. Usually we use stealing to indicate taking a physical object, but in media it is often called stealing when a number of different things happen. Piracy is one example, where someone takes a digital item (video, music, software) and distributes it to other people without paying the creator. So the kind of "theft" that Videohall has committed is much more accurately categorized as piracy.

Design Rules is a series of posts I'd like to continue to make, where I focus on one aspect of design. This one is a mistake that is so obvious, and yet, it keeps happening in new products that come out. Hopefully I can worm my way into the backs of people's minds so that they will intuitively know that these designs are bad ideas. Design Rule #1: Never install a lanyard into the cap Imagine you purchase a product like a flash drive. It comes with a cap to cover the metal contacts that will connect to your computer. Also, for your convenience, the flash drive has a lanyard, or some sort of lanyard attachment hook, so you can connect the drive to your keychain. The problem is, the lanyard is attached to the cap. This raises an obvious red flag for me. I immediately imagine carrying around a lonely cap attached to my keys, while my flash drive sits in an abandoned park. You see this kind of design constantly, and not just on tech products. Poor lanyard design is present on a...