Eye Magazine (like the Monocle’s and the SSIR’s of the world) is a real quality publication that I simply cannot afford. As a result I am that guy sitting in the corner of Borders with 40 magazines piled next to me. Fortunately for cheap bastards like myself, most magazines have blogs that offer a lot of the same content with the same eye for presentation. Recently Eye Magazine began a blog, which is nice because it is a UK title and ends up costing like 25 bones stateside. There are only a handful of posts at this point, but so far so good, and its future looks promising with the Eye team stating that they will be
asking a wide range of writers to contribute notes, reviews, work in progress, rants, praise and other comments to help us understand this brave new world while we get on with the job of making the world’s most collectable design magazine.
Honestly though, now they just need to revamp their main site. It’s an inaccessible piece of crap, completely inappropriate for a magazine like Eye.
If you read this thing at all, you know it draws a bunch on psfk. If you aren’t down they are a kind of creative consulting agency out of NYC with offices in London, Hamburg, Manila, Sao Paulo, and Shanghai. Anyway, other an being kinda’ a big deal they are pretty progressive/critical when it comes to their outlook on modern advertising/marketing/consumer culture/environmental stuff. So… right… they are a pretty cool/smart outfit and I have been lucky enough to blog a bit for them recently (here and here) and hopefully Ill do more soon. Anyway, look for ‘em at psfk.
An indie outfit out of Glagow, their new record, The Midnight Organ Fight, came out last week and it is really decent. I was turned on to them by these weekly Gumdrop e-mails from Stereogum. The torrent is kinda’ hard to find if you aren’t on Demonoid, so good luck. This, my friends, is a summer soundtrack.
And speaking of Demonoid, the greatest torrent tracker site on the planet (or perhaps any planet), is back online after having to relocate to Sweden. It was shut-down by Canadian authorities a few months ago after threat of litigation. It’s invite-only and I don’t know how generous they are being with subscriptions these days, but get your name in line soon so come new subscriber time you are in. Just looking out.
Being the image-heavy site that this is, I have got to tip my hat to heyokay.com. Really funny stuff. It only has been up for a few months, so you can click through the archives pretty quickly. From the About:
Hey! I’m a 26 year old information specialist that lives in Austin. Hey Okay is where I post my collection of pictures that I’ve gathered from various places. A lot of the pictures were found online, others were found in magazines, books, movies, junk stores, garage sales, and in the alley behind my old apartment. I plan on posting at least one image a day on Hey Okay, maybe two or more if I can get around to it.
Every once and a while I’ll take a look at someone who is truly changing the game and making something decent. The first !People! feature focuses on Anthony Volodkin, the genius behind my current obsession, The Hype Machine. So the Hype Machine has been around for a little bit, but for all of you who are unaware, it basically takes a look at thousands of music blogs and displays to you some of the more oft-posted songs. I remember hearing about the idea of the Hype Machine a few years back but always thought that it would be some shitty web 2.0 pipe dream that never quite lived up to its completely unrealistic expectations… so wrong… so wrong… Instead its amazing. The interface is really clean and simple (deceptively 2.0 for a 3.0 site; anyone? anyone?), the blog list is gargantuan (see here), and the programming that supposedly brings you the best new music from all these disparate music blogs, really does.
SO, this is really cool in of itself… but it gets a lot better. You can subscribe to different rss feeds via iTunes, and then you can simply download the songs into your library. whoa. This is Web 3.0 done so god-awfully right.
Also you gotta love the backlash, which I shouldn’t even go into, but the two sentence version is that all these mp3 blogs are like GOSH! We give this music CONTEXT (i.e. we tell you why its good/why it sucks) and all this site does is blindly aggregate mp3s, BLINDLY AGGREGATE MP3S!!!… Remove pole from ass. Even if you are some kind of mp3 blog purist, which I didn’t even know existed before this Hype Machine backlash, you should still be able to appreciate a new way of getting music to hoi poi (even if it eats up some of your bandwidth).
So, thank you Anthony Volodkin, thank you. From the bottom of my heart, you have made my life better.
This is the nerdiest, most awesome thing I have seen in a while… Layer Tennis from Coudal Partners and Adobe. It’s kinda like tennis for graphic designers and I am not about to try and describe the thing. Just check it out here. Last week Chuck Anderson faced off against Steven Harrington in a match that got pretty ridiculous towards the end.
For all you design heads out there… ffffound.com is a novel image bookmarking site. The concept is great and I am seriously enjoying wasting away my time on it. Still in beta at the moment and I am wondering how its going to get out of beta. The images that are currently featured are awesome but all have a similar modern design aesthetic to them. Would they be cool with opening up the point of view beyond their chosen entourage of image-finders? What happens when people start putting up porn? Or just shitty images? Maybe a vote up (or vote down?) function, a la digg or reddit? Anyway… enjoy.
