Frank Chimero sums everything he knows as advice to graphic design students. This one was particularly interesting to me:

If you can’t draw as well as someone, or use the software as well, or if you do not have as much money to buy supplies, or if you do not have access to the tools they have, beat them by being more thoughtful. Thoughtfulness is free and burns on time and empathy.

And this one made me think:

Be wary of minimalism as an aesthetic decision without cause. Simple is almost a dirty word now.

I’ve been linking to Frank’s blog a lot, and that’s because he really is on a roll lately.

A series of posts by designer, illustrator and teacher Frank Chimero, about visual culture, consumption, and nourishment. It is wonderfully written, and it’s easily one of the best things I’ve read all year.

It’s about the unceasing and unstoppable quest for greatness, the never-ending and quasi-neurotic search for fun and delight in consumption and living, the disappointment with the design landscape and the disbelief in a brighter future, the refusal of shallowness, the stimulus and excitement of challenge, the humanity of loving one’s craft, it’s about learning and working hard and the nourishment that never comes.

I think I like it so much because Frank brings up some thoughts that have been in my mind for some time, such as the fear of smallness and stagnation, or not knowing what’s good anymore. But even if that’s not your everyday concern, “The Back Side of Your Gullet is Decadent and Depraved” is still fun and nourishing, it’s good, profound and enjoyable, and it’s the best thing you’ll read for quite some time. And don’t stop on the first post, because it keeps getting better.

When I grow up, I want to write like Frank Chimero.

Devour is my new favorite website, featuring YouTube videos curated by the Uncrate folks. It’s all there: independent chocolate makers and denim companies, great songs with original videos, beautiful games, song mashups, two-handed sword commercials, lovely everyday images or just plain weird but awesome stuff.

I’m checking Devour everyday and not missing a bit. And so should you. You won’t regret it.

The new season of Layer Tennis is upon us:

Announcing two live matches (and two Baldwins) this Friday afternoon to start the season. LYT veteren Armin Vit takes on newcomer Matt Stevens with Matthew Baldwin providing the layer-by-layer analysis and motionographer/designer Nick Campbell plays illustrator/designer Aaron Scamihorn with Rosecrans Baldwin in the booth.

I’m already looking foward to next week’s match, with Joshua Davis facing dConstruct speaker Brendan Dawes. The finals are scheduled to December 10th.

Friday afternoons are going to get even better, again.

Virb.com, once a social network competitor to MySpace, was recently relaunched as way to create and mantain simple websites. I used it for a bit. It’s very simple, the limited number of features works great, the copy is brilliant and design is, well, gorgeous to say the least. It’s such a pleasure to use that I wish I couldn’t make websites just to have an excuse to do it.

It takes guts to completely repurpose a product, and the result, in this case, is amazing.

What is all this stuff for any way? Is it even worth it? Maybe I should do something with my life and teach kids how to add and read or about evolutionary biology, and let someone else worry about how that button looks on that website.

Frank Chimero on his love-hate relationship with design. Worth your time.

Jason Santa Maria posted an amazing piece where he talks about his design process, compares web design applications and makes a wishlist for a better one. Please read it before going on.

For me, the most interesting debate in his article is also an old one: designing in the browser vs. designing with a desktop application. But Jason has a very interesting proposal for an hybrid app that would combine the best of both worlds.

I’m asking for something that sits on the fence between all of this. I don’t think any of the current desktop apps or any given browser gets the job done. […] So why not build a desktop app for web design around WebKit? […] an actual desktop application built with WebKit as the core to its display. It could have accurate rendering and previews for the way page elements would look, but with some of the WYSIWYG tools desktop design apps have.

This is an amazing idea, but I think it’s incredibly hard to achieve. I’m sure it will happen someday, but not in the near future. I’d love to be proven wrong, though.

Before this proposal, Jason complained about existing applications, and wrote about the problems he finds with the alternative at hand — designing in the browser.

By now you must be saying, “hey moron, just design in a browser!” Well, I half-agree with you. […] I’m more inclined to suggest the way forward probably lies with the help of a browser. But I don’t think the browser is enough. […] The imaginative process is cut short by the tools at hand; and it’s that imagination—or spark—at the beginning of a design that lays the path for everything that follows. Without it, you’re at best able to make a website that looks like a website—rather than a design that tells a story in the form of a website.

This was the part that appealed to me the most. Influenced by the work and writing of Andy Clarke, I mostly use the browser when I do any web design work. I find it very natural, I love using selectors to set global colors or typefaces, designing with web fonts and having true browser type rendering.

However, I feel that Jason is on spot here. During the design of The Pilcrow, I used the browser, but sometimes I really felt the constraints of my choice. When I suddenly wanted to try a radically different thing but I didn’t want to code a lot of CSS just for that. When I wanted to use a color picker and instantly see the background color of some element change, but I couldn’t. It was annoying, and it undoubtedly influenced the final design.

As Jason concluded, there’s no silver bullet. But on my next project I’ll be giving him the benefit of the doubt, and trying a little more Fireworks before I move to the browser. It can’t hurt.

Today, An Event Apart and MIX Online announced 10K Apart. It’s a contest for web developers and designers, and the rules are simple:

1. Create a client-side web app, HTML5 and CSS3 are encouraged.
2. Make it work in IE9 Dev Preview, Firefox and Safari 5 or Chrome 5.
3. Make everything under 10KB.
4. jQuery, Prototype or Typekit don’t count against the 10K.

Entries can be submitted until August 25th. The King of Web Standards has spoken:

We want beauty. We want utility. We want excitement. And we want it all under 10K.

Let the game begin.

Faruk reviews another book on HTML5, Introducing HTML5, written by two of the HTML5 Doctors, Bruce Lawson and Remy Sharp. Faruk tells us:

The book continues with the new HTML5 Forms, serving as a nice segue into the more JavaScript-reliant HTML5 Audio and Video, before it hunkers down on the real new technologies in HTML5, starting with Canvas and going all the way to the Messages, Web Workers and Web Sockets APIs.

Considering the authors, publisher and the favorable review, this seems to be a must-have for web developers and a perfect companion for the great HTML5 For Web Designers I recently reviewed.