breakthebeatorg

[breakthebeatorg]

The next episode

And it’s official: I’ve joined Coinbase full-time in sunny San Francisco.

It’s been a hell of a ride so far, we've started many companies and projects — from OdpiralniCasi with David to joining Y Combinator and founding DoubleRecall and Dubjoy with Robert, Rok and Rok. Oh and then there's the Timekiwi episode.

As I look back it's clear these were some of the best years so far and I'm very grateful to all the people I've met and for the experience I've gained.

Now off to the next chapter, where I'll help Coinbase with new products that will change the financial industry forever.

Oh, and I’ll finally be able to fully live up to my tagline "I design, build and ship products." as we deploy new stuff to millions of users worldwide.

[breakthebeatorg]

Cooking Pho

It was in Jersey City, NJ that I first discovered Vietnamese food. And not the soups, but the other stuff like spring rolls and garlic beef with vermicelli.

But after a couple of visits at Pho Thanh Hoai it dawned on me that everybody was actually eating the soup.

Fast forward to 2014 and I've eaten lots of Pho in NYC (my fav is An Choi) and in San Francisco (my fav is Golden Star).

So when I moved back to Slovenia I missed the piping hot broths that warm a man, as there's no Vietnamese restaurants here (not a very multi cultural place).

The natural thing to do was to try cooking my own and here's how it went down.

I used this recipe as my basis. It seemed solid and I figured I could actually get all the ingredients.

Char onions with some ginger

Everything started with this and room was filled with the sweet smell of roasted onions and the intensiveness of ginger.

Start up the broth

You'll need lots of marrowy bones and a good piece of beef meat for this. I also added some cilantro, parsley by myself and it didn't hurt. But the real key is in the spices, particularly cinnamon, star anise and cloves.

As soon as I added those spices, the whole room started to smell like the Pho places. Yum!

Prepare the toppings

Pho is usually served with some fine sliced white onions, some chopped scallion, chillies, cilantro and sprouts. I didn't get the sprouts this time, and they were sorely needed.

It's also good to soak the onions in cold water before, so they lose their edge a bit.

Thin cut meat

There are many types of Pho, mainly differing in the type of meat that you add.

I like my Pho with thin cut beef slices so I bought some top round steak, froze it for 30min so you can easily cut it thin.

Pho

Here's the end result, you can't see all of the toppings clearly, but they were there alright.

It's particularly fun to put raw meat in the bowl and slowly sip the broth over and watch it cook instantly.

[breakthebeatorg]

Bonobo Live in London

As a special birthday gift for @particija we went up to London for a fun weekend. Stayed with some good friends in the hipsterish borough of Hackney and everything culminated in this very awesome performance by Mr. Green & Co. on Nov 23rd.

Since London is his home-court they put on a hell of a play, including many vocalists that don't usually go on tours around the globe. Check out the setlist.

Stay the Same (feat. Andreya Triana)

First Fires (feat. Szjerdene)

One of Bonobo's finest IMHO was performed by Szjerdene instead of the Reverend, just like in this goosebumpish clip from Seattle. (seek to 6:30 for First Fires or feel the whole thing)

[breakthebeatorg]

Bariol Light

One of my favourite typographies is Bariol in its light variant. It can be purchased with a name-your-price system for as low as $3.

Go get it now!

[breakthebeatorg]

Simple

As much as I love tethering to a big screen like the 27" Cinema Display, there is just something magical in this minimal and light setup.

I guess fine-crafted aluminum machines sit on massive wooden tables like both were made for one another. It just feels right.

[breakthebeatorg]

Of taste and persistence

Do you know how sometimes you feel something and think in a certain way, but you just couldn't write it down, because you'd have to get more specific? But then you would someday read an essay and it would all just make sense.

This is it:

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me.

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not.

But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit.

Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn't have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work.

Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

— Ira Glass

[breakthebeatorg]

Orion

I've been playing recently with blacks, magentas, violets and spacey purple haze. This is what came out and I'm happily using it as my primary wallpaper on all of my devices.

It'll fit the 27" Cinema Display and everything smaller, so give your eyes some treat when you show the desktop.

Desktop (2560x1440) | iPad with Retina display | iPhone 5

[breakthebeatorg]

CodeArtists identity (The Process)

It was about time! Time for what? To make a visual identity for our group that's making products that is.

This is the final result.

I've been struggling with what to do in terms of iconography and meaning. The brand name itself has two pretty juxtaposed words you could say. Code and artists. But the point here is that we combine both aspects into a beautiful whole. The identity should thus reflect this.

This is the avatar, the square, the icon in different shades.

The process

In my mind I was playing with the idea of an artists brush, maybe drawing 0's and 1's in some pattern, but those ideas quickly faded, because it would involve some drawing which I'm just not any good at.

Also my style has always been utterly simple, clean and primarily typography based. You can see that clearly showing on the DoubleRecall, TimeKiwi and my own personal identity.

So one day, I woke up and I said sans-serif and serif! Huh, not much of an epiphany, eh?

But what I had in my head, visually, was a strong and technically set word Code and then sort of beautifully, maybe italicized Artists. To me this was the embodiment of both words.

I later of course refined the idea to use a monospaced font for Code and started playing with various brackets after Patricija reminded me of this subtlety.

All that was left now, was the color scheme. I already knew I wanted to use a shade of black for Code and some bright, a little crazy maybe, artistic color for Artists. I was looking through some of the color palettes that Illustrator comes fitted with and after giving up on Impressionism and Baroque I stubmled upon Pop Art.

But I wasn't satisfied with this. I wanted maybe something more stylized, so I tried playing with Futura as the Code font and got into this square, circle thingie :-D

It sucked. I wasn't impressed and I'm sure McKayla wasn't as well.

So I first went for a change of color, when I explored the Pop Art palette as a joke. I actually quite like this iteration. It's solid.

And the georges serifs of the Justus type don't hurt. Couple of problems here though:

no idea how to do a logo/icon

T-Mobile wants magenta just for themselves (seriously, read about it)

So I finally add the (round) brackets and start playing with them. I wasn't satisfied.

Then I put curly brackets in the game and a semicolon and things started to look right. I also switched the magenta to a more not T-Mobileish.

I settled on the latter, but you already know that from the beginning of the post. Mostly because I had better options to do the icon.

I'm happy with it now and as a bonus, typographic logos such as this one can be always written anywhere like code { artists }, which doubles the fun.

Be sure to let me know what you think and visit our brand-spanking-new site http://codeartists.com.

[breakthebeatorg]

Time + Kiwi = Timekiwi

I recently completed the work on our latest endeavour: a multi-platform timeline called TimeKiwi.

It's features are that you can create a beautiful timeline of things that are happening around you, based on the data pulled from various social networks and blogging platforms.

If you haven't tried it out yet, I recommend you do and while doing it, do provide feedback for which we'll be eternally grateful.

One of the tasks before me was making a simple logo for the service, that we could start the branding process. I went through several iterations of shapes, outlines and colours until arriving at my final destination.

Here are the first drafts in which I was experimenting with the positioning and picked the typography: Futura Light.

Some time later I added an outline as the 'peal' of the kiwi and improved on the positioning.

This was the colour scheme I used in the end, it features a bit of greens, nice grays and some brick rednecks.

On the way to the final product I learned how to make animated GIFs in Photoshop and made a custom kiwi spinner image.

To make up for the occasional error or two there had to be an image of a sad kiwi.

The services we're offering are being partitioned by the different sorts of kiwifruit out there. Currently we support the regular green kiwi and the sweet yellow kiwi.

That's it. I had to play around with colours for quite some time and I also had some help. Usually you're on a path to success when you see you're reducing the number of shapes, colours and other attributes. Simplicity is key.

This is the final result. TimeKiwi welcomes you!

[breakthebeatorg]

Warm colours

[breakthebeatorg]

New personal MOO cards

So apparently my Klout score is high enough to get some perks this way.

I don't give a rats ass about Axe shower gels and perfumes, but I like MOO cards. I've used them for our current startup DoubleRecall and the mini cards are superb. The quality of print and paper is top notch and everybody upon receiving them says, "Hey, nice cards!".

Here's what I came up with for my personal cards, reflecting my minimalistic personality, design preferences and my online presence majx.org:

[breakthebeatorg]

DoubleRecall biz cards design

The time has come to get some english US centric biz cards for our company. The hardest part was settling which provider we're going to use. We were all waiting for some time to try out MOO.com, which is unavailable in good old Slovenia. They have a reputation of good quality, fair prices and ease of deployment.

The pricing could be discussed, but quality and ease of deployment was great.

I love not being forced to deal with people, telephone calls and/or email threads just to set up a print. Being a technical person, this is just so much faster.

The design was taken from the original corporate identity I crafted back in november 2010. I just had to modify the designs a bit, since we wanted also the mini cards for some of us.

I love our logo (weird because I made it). I think it has a strong visual character, especially in combination with our signature devil red.

That was basically the driving force behind the decision to make one side of the cards completely red with a prominent devil D.

[breakthebeatorg]

For the first time in 20 years, there are less homes with TVs

Now look at this. A brave new world.

Gizmodo says "Nielsen says that TV ownership in homes has dropped for the first time in 20 years. This year, 96.7 percent of American households have a television set versus 98.9 percent last year. Two possible reasons (and both very believable!): one is that low-income homes may have struggled with the switch to digital sets and the other is that kids who grew up with computers are getting their TV from the Internet as opposed to buying a TV when they move out." Check out the original article

[breakthebeatorg]

How to turn off slices in Photoshop

Every now and then you're going to get a web site from a designer, nicely packaged layers inside a Photoshop file. And every now and then this file will be pre-sliced for you, so that when you want to export it with the "Save for Web & Devices" it will always save it to a folder of images. So damn irritating. The solution? Simple, once you discover it: View -> Clear slices.

Ahh, much better.

[breakthebeatorg]

Skyscraper powered by wind turbines

Just finished, the London's Strata SE1 building sores 154m into the sky. On the first glance it looks just like any other tall building, until you see three huge holes at the top. These are wind turbines, that in turn generate almost 8% of the buildings total electricity.

The building marks the beginning of a huge redevelopment plan to revive this London's borough, that has been staggering for years.

Engineering awesomeness, ladies and gentlemen. More info.

[breakthebeatorg]

Give us minimal software

Made for all the Adobe AIR apps and other nasty memory hogs out there.

Type is different weights of Avenir Next LT Pro. Photoshop + Illustrator.

[breakthebeatorg]

Testing the Apple Magic Mouse

I just got my hands on the new Apple's Magic mouse, featuring a multitouch surface with gestures support.

Sleekness is apparent:

Canon 40D, Canon EF85mm 1.8 USM, 1/200s, f/1.8, ISO 160

So far it's behaving good and I'm not feeling it being slow, like some people have mentioned. People with bigger hands might feel that it doesn't have the proper ergonomics, but it fits in my palms very smoothly. It takes some time, though, to get used to it's low height.

I was expecting that because it's actually a trackpad on "wheels", the clicking is gone, and that you just tap to click. Well, I was wrong. The clicking is still here, loud and crisp, just that the whole surface moves down to click, sort of like on the new unibody MacBooks.

Scrolling provides a really good experience, and it's performed with just one finger moving on the surface. It works like on the multitouch trackpads, where you can seamlessly scroll in any direction (including diagonally).

I'm thinking of getting one mainly because it works over Bluetooth, so I'm left with one unused USB port. The fact that it looks awesome doesn't hurt either.

Gesture support currently falls a little short, as currently only back/forward navigation is supported via two-finger swipes. It would be useful, to at least offer all of the gestures supported on trackpad. I'm missing the pinch-zoom the most.

Luckily this issue is easily fixed via a software upgrade, so no worries there also.

Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL XTi, Canon EF85mm 1.8 USM, 1/250s, f/1.8, ISO 320