Alex and the Web

Love of the random

alexg — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 14:05:33 +0000

I’ve recently realised my love affair with content providers that serve up the random. To me, the internet is about getting happily lost down strange alleyways, the joy of the child-like “oooh, what’s that?” and “ooh, what does that do?”. Not “featured”, not “you may also like”, not “your friends enjoyed…”. Random.

Random imagery – WeHeartIt:

Random feeds – Google Reader Play:

Beautifully random blog posts – Tumblr’s dashboard Radar:

To all those sites and apps that help me go random, get lost and get out of the echo chamber of my Twitter, Facebook and other RSS streams – thanks!

SMIL animation of silly SVG bears

alexg — Tue, 11 May 2010 13:43:43 +0000

In the – possibly imaginary – battle between SVG and

Pronounced “smile” and meaning Synchronised Multimedia Integration Language, SMIL is a fairly easy declarative language that works nicely in most modern browsers (although Firefox users will need FF3.7 beta).

Here is a demo of a bouncy bear head I knocked up recently for a presentation I did for Madgex. Nice to work for a company that supports you when you want to learn how to animate bear heads.

“Objectified” – how did I miss this?

alexg — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:16:03 +0000

From the makers of “Helvetica” came “Objectified”, an interesting-looking documentary about product design. I particularly like this quote from the trailer: “My job (as a designer) is about what’s going to happen not what has happened”.