The Objective Blog

Keep up with what we're thinking, reading, and doing.

The Radar: August 26, 2015

August 26th, 2015 - by Julie Hale - Salt Lake City, Utah

Keeping up with design and technology is a lot of work. Luckily, we enjoy wading through the noise just to find the gems of awesomeness sprinkled throughout. The Radar is our gift to you, Current or Potential Client, so that you can enjoy all of the awesome without any of the drudgery. Unwrap it each week, and know that you’re loved by the geeks and pixel-pushers at Objective.

App Prototype Testing

Here are two apps for interactive prototyping and user testing in the early stages of concepting and design, rather in the development stage when it’s often too late to fix problems.

Marvel   Flinto

Design Is History

This is a comprehensive catalog of influential designers and design principles throughout time.

Catalog

Security Flaws

Understand why buffer overflows happen—and why their impact is so grave on the computer security landscape.

Full Article

Responsive Upscaling

Most responsive design thinking has revolved around covering the mobile experience to the regular desktop experience, yet little attention has been paid to create an experience optimized for modern, large-scale monitors.

Full Article

Cuba and the Internet

The internet is so easily accessible in our lives, it is hard to imagine life without it.  These people in Cuba talk about using it for the first time.

Full Article

Bootstrap 4

Bootstrap 4 has been announced. Main features include moving from LESS to SASS and adding flexbox support.

Bootstrap 4

Good User Interfaces

A good user interface has high conversion rates and is easy to use. In other words, it’s nice to both the business side as well as the people using it. Here are 72 ideas to create good user interfaces.

Full Article

Fixing Ruby Bugs

When you create objects in Ruby, they eventually need to be cleaned up. This article explains how to fix garbage collection related performance bugs that slow down performance.

Full Article

Trendy Apps

Check out these 5 new can’t miss apps: Fastcap, Flipboard, Giphy Cam, Pac-Man 256, and Walk Me Up.

Full Article

Writ

Check out this small stylesheet for making plain-old HTML documents (like those created from Markdown) look nicer.

Writ

PHP7

The first feature-complete beta of PHP7 has been released and it is great to see the massive performance improvements, better error handling, 64-bit support and many more cool things you should check out if you are using PHP as your language of choice.

Full Article

Windows 10 Privacy Issues

Windows 10 has been out a few weeks now and while it finally nails user experience, it introduces a couple of not so cool privacy issues you should be aware of. Take care if you upgrade.

Full Article

The Radar: August 19, 2015

August 19th, 2015 - by Julie Hale - Salt Lake City, Utah

Keeping up with design and technology is a lot of work. Luckily, we enjoy wading through the noise just to find the gems of awesomeness sprinkled throughout. The Radar is our gift to you, Current or Potential Client, so that you can enjoy all of the awesome without any of the drudgery. Unwrap it each week, and know that you’re loved by the geeks and pixel-pushers at Objective.

Become a Git Guru

Learning the basics of a version control system is a must if you are involved in any type of technical project. Atlassian’s updated Git tutorial site is my go-to recommendation for anyone who is new to version control systems and Git.

Tutorial

Punctuation Changes Everything

Volkswagen’s clever new ad campaign uses a typographical metaphor to market the Passat.

Full Article

New Flag for New Zealand

New Zealand is considering a complete redesign of its flag, in large part to distance itself from the Union Jack symbol.

Full Article

Nuggets

Check out this interesting Chrome App (iPhone and Android coming soon) that helps you remember what you learn in 200 words or less.

Nuggets

Drawing Curved Paths

Badly drawn outlines can cause headaches. Your letters may look mangled or not appear at all. You can avoid these difficulties if you keep a few basic rules in mind.

Tutorial

Google Becomes Alphabet

Larry Page, co-founder of Google, explains why they have created a parent company called Alphabet.

Full Article

The Age of Infographics

In a world of information overload, infographics have become an effective way to quickly communicate information. This creative website gives 13 reasons why infographics are on the rise and are so successful.

Infographics

Material Design Lite

This material design library lets you add a material design look and feel to your websites. It doesn’t rely on any JavaScript frameworks and aims to optimize for cross-device use, gracefully degrade in older browsers, and offer an experience that is immediately accessible.

Material Design Lite

Sleeping Solution for the Homeless

Architectural designer James Furzer has a developed modular, parasitic sleeping pods to address London’s homeless issues. This crowdfunded project hopes to not only help the homeless have a place to sleep, but also hopes to increase public compassion towards them.

Full Article

Relational Databases

This original paper from June, 1970, describes a relational database and how it should work. There are different types of databases, but relational ones (like MySQL) are still the most popular.

Full Article

Disparaging Tech Luminaries

Magazine cover designers continually treat tech leaders as follies rather than respectable figures.

Full Article

The Radar: August 12, 2015

August 12th, 2015 - by Julie Hale - Salt Lake City, Utah

Keeping up with design and technology is a lot of work. Luckily, we enjoy wading through the noise just to find the gems of awesomeness sprinkled throughout. The Radar is our gift to you, Current or Potential Client, so that you can enjoy all of the awesome without any of the drudgery. Unwrap it each week, and know that you’re loved by the geeks and pixel-pushers at Objective.

A Bizspeak Blacklist

Writing clearly is difficult. Improve your writing by avoiding the following buzzwords.

Full Article

Formatting CSS Source Code

Make your CSS look better by running a script from the command line or a couple lines in Node.js.

CSSmft

The Illusion of Control

Seth Godin reminds us that we’re not in control of outcomes, but we do control our actions and thoughts.

Full Article

Redis for Caching

This post has some good pointers on how to optimize your Redis cache configuration to make it use your server’s memory more efficiently.

Full Article

Combining Artistry and Engineering

Sony uses captivating animations and parallax scrolling to tell their story of how art and engineering come together to create great technology.

Sony Be Moved

Relay Technical Preview

Web developers face a common problem in deciding how to get data stored on the server to the client.  Relay is a novel approach that allows developers to fetch data in a declarative form.  In summary developers describe what data to fetch, and not how to fetch it. 

Full Article

Why Did Google Create Alphabet?

These 26 GIFs and photos show Google’s visions for the future from A-Z and why they created a parent company named Alphabet to house them all.

Full Article

Copywriting and User Research

This in depth article explains how user research is needed to write truly effective copy.

Full Article

How to Design an Enduring Logo

Paul Rand and his design of the IBM logo has withstood the tests of time.

Full Article

iTunes Icon

This visual history shows a breakdown of all the changes that have ever been made to the iTunes icon for Mac.

iTunes Timeline

The Radar: August 5, 2015

August 5th, 2015 - by Julie Hale - Salt Lake City, Utah

Keeping up with design and technology is a lot of work. Luckily, we enjoy wading through the noise just to find the gems of awesomeness sprinkled throughout. The Radar is our gift to you, Current or Potential Client, so that you can enjoy all of the awesome without any of the drudgery. Unwrap it each week, and know that you’re loved by the geeks and pixel-pushers at Objective.

The Secret Weapon of Ruby and Rails Speed

The rack-mini-profiler gem is a Ruby gem that’s meant to be used in production, and will profile your app’s memory, CPU, and SQL queries.

Full Article

Replenish Your Creative Mind

Creative Days can help refresh teams while learning new things.

Full Article

Ramda

Ramda is a practical functional library for Javascript programmers.  One of many libraries, but most competitors offer a toolbag of functions where Ramda’s stated goal is to provide a functional API that respects immutability.

Ramda

Back to the Basics

Have a smartphone, but don’t feel like it makes you smart? Maybe this should be your next phone. </distractions>

MP 01 Mobile Phone

Disney’s Hyperion Renderer

This is an interesting article about 3d rendering explained by Disney animators.

Full Article

Replaced by Robots?

In the near future, many jobs will be replaced by automation, and men will be hit harder than women.

Full Article

Design History 101

Here’s a behind the scenes look at design/client interaction of Saul Bass and Stanley Kubrick over The Shining poster designs.

Full Article

Pretty Diff

This program shows you the differences between two text files (either code or just plain text).

Pretty Diff

Why Impact?

A brief history of both the typeface, Impact, and why it is used for all memes.

Full Article

Elastic Terrain

Make the terrain jiggle like jello.  Not sure the usefulness of these maps, but they are sure fun to play with.

Elastic Terrain