Your New Favorite
One photo a day.
All photos by Katie Spence unless otherwise noted.
Email me: yournewfavorite at gmail
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Helsinki Design Lab
I am really happy to announce the launch of Helsinki Design Lab, a site XOXCO had the pleasure of partnering with Bryan Boyer of SITRA to build. HDL’s mission, in part:
We assist decision-makers to view challenges from a big-picture perspective, and provide guidance toward more complete solutions that consider all aspects of a problem. Our mission is to advance this way of working - we call it strategic design.
Helsinki Design Lab features three case studies that epitomize the field of strategic design and they’re currently accepting case study applications to be featured on the site and at the conference later this year.
Andy Pressman, of Rumors Studio, did some beautiful work on the visual design. And I’m really proud of our implementation of the details, including:
- Subtle animation effects in the case study and around the site highlight portions of the content.
- Case studies that “come to life” as they are created using the submission tool thanks to tons of fancy CSS and jQuery magic.
- Each time the page is loaded a randomized version of the logo appears!
- “Exquisite” PDFs are generated through a custom javascript-based pagination function.
- Behind the scenes, all of the editorial tools feature autosave!
A big thanks to Bryan, Andy and Ben for their hard work on this.
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Are you following Thomas Lennon on Twitter? His scary “sleep tight” toots are the best. As a bonus, he occasionally links to photos of his baby boy, who has already mastered the use of his eyebrows.
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Nurse: “Did you pee? ”Elderly Patient: “... ”Nurse: “Did you PEE? Have you PEED yet? ”Elderly Patient: “Yes, I had some at lunch. ”Nurse: “Not tea, PEE! Have you PEED yet?! ”Elderly Patient: “Hah, yes. I peed earlier.”
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Plots we would not do on 30 Rock? Let me put the Internet at ease: Liz and Jack will never be together. Not even if we go fifteen seasons. Okay, if we get to season fifteen, they’ll do it.
Whew.
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The New York Times discovers breakfast tacos
When I was still in school at UT I literally lived around the corner, just a few steps away from the Tamale House. Every weekend I would stumble over there to get the cure for my hangover: a potato, egg and cheese taco. Or two. These days I live within spitting distance of two Torchy’s Tacos locations. Their migas taco has everything you could ask for: eggs, pico, avocado.
When I lived in San Francisco, breakfast tacos (really tacos in general - it’s a burrito town if ever one existed) were one of the things I was truly homesick for. Luckily for past me, they were easy enough to replicate in the comfort of my own kitchen.
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Programming note
Though I signed up for an account with Fotomoto almost three months ago, I have finally added their code to my site. Now you can purchase prints of the photos I post here. If you’re reading this on your Tumblr dashboard, you’ll have to visit Your New Favorite directly to see the “buy print” link underneath each image.
If you’ve always wanted to plaster your walls with pictures of my dogs, today is your lucky day!
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That whole Iraq thing? Did not go well.
Bill O’Reilly to John Stewart.
The statement above gave me my first hearty laugh of the day.
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01/29/10 7:55 PM
Last week Ben and I flew to San Francisco to attend the funeral of his grandmother, Betty Johnson. She was known as Granny to her grand-kids and Bettina to her husband, Russ. The love seat pictured above was her throne for the past couple of years. The phrase most-used to describe her at her memorial was “sharp wit.” She and her twin sister, Barbara, attended UC Berkeley and graduated in three years. They took all of the same classes and shared their books. After graduating, she became a computer programmer at IBM. She married a fellow IBMer and had a couple of kids, Janet and Christopher. As a family, they traveled the world and lived in places like Germany and New Zealand and eventually settled in Walnut Creek, California.
I always enjoyed visits with Betty. She didn’t suffer fools gladly and I had to be on my game around her. Though seeing her roll her eyes at something or someone was actually a treat. She never liked having her picture taken but she was complimentary of the shots I took of her lovely garden. The same garden in which Ben and I were married.
Betty was a character and so loved by her family and friends. She won’t soon be forgotten.
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Programming note
I’m on the road and when I left Austin, I forgot to pack my card reader. Rest assured that I am shooting away, but I have no means to get the pictures from my camera to my laptop.
I hope I haven’t ruined your day with this news.
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