Blog by Seeing

See how to learn, learn how to see.

[blogbyseeing]

The first in a series of limited edition shirts have arrived for my friends at KeepSafe.

They want to wear KeepSafe clothing all the time, but standard startup shirts are boring and straight forward. So they commissioned me to design them a new wardrobe of shirts and apparel that look rad but don't advertise.

KeepSafe Lager celebrates their German heritage and love of beer.

[blogbyseeing]

Detroit – A Google Company. As I travel through Michigan and my childhood home, I'm inspired by this short article, dreaming about the future of the Motor City.

[blogbyseeing]

Facebook's Image Cropping is an inconsistant 'Wild West'

I'll give you the short story up front. After researching existing blog posts, doing my own research and talking with the Facebook Photos team, my conclusion is there is no system. It's inconsistent at best, and the photos team even admits "Sadly, cropping is a bit of the wild west at the moment." Let's dive in and see why.

The Old Desktop Newsfeed

Everything looks fine. Image is coming in at a perfect square, scaled at just above 50%.

The New Desktop Newsfeed 

When sharing directly from our app, the image is scaled even smaller at 394 x 394 px, and is strangely isolated.

Uploading that same image directly from my desktop yielded different results. It was displayed almost edge-to-edge at 526 x 394 px and cropped off the bottom.

To test again, I uploaded an "organic" image, aka an image without text that's not a screen cap. This time it displayed fully edge-to-edge at 552 x 414 px with cropping centered near the middle and meta data overlaid.

The New Desktop Timeline

This one's fun, too. My tests show Facebook either crops aligned to the top of the image, just above the middle, or the middle. It seems to choose the alignement at random. The size is 504 x 378 px.

iPad

The iPad displays our shared photos consistently with the crop centered at the middle. However the Timeline and the Newsfeed have a slightly different ratio, illustrated above. The Timeline displays at 351 x 235 px and the Newsfeed displays 625 x 468 px.

iPhone

Thank you iPhone! Fully edge-to-edge, no cropping or weirdness! The Newsfeed and Timeline display exactly the same at 309 x 309 px (618 x 618 px @2x).

Optimal Ratio

The best size for a Facebook image is 552 x 414 pixels. Anything above this size at a ratio of 3x4 will do equally well.

Remember that the new Desktop Timeline puts meta data over the first 66 px of your image, and lightbox puts a black bar over the last 35 px.

Conclusion

I'm still not clear on the mechanism behind image cropping on the new Newsfeed or Timeline on desktop. Why is app sharing different than desktop uploading? How does Facebook determine an organic photo vs. a synthetic photo?

Answers to these questions will make it easy for my users to share beautiful content with their friends on Facebook.

The Photos Team needs to release their own guide or standardize their practices. Designing content bound for Facebook should be easy and awesome, not mysterious and confusing.

[blogbyseeing]

I'm loving the new Vessel branding from @hattery, but I wonder if the designers watched a little too much Oblivion before hand...

vessel.io

[blogbyseeing]

"We're building a minimum radical product."

Mang

[blogbyseeing]

A Theory of Conscious Evolution

From the department of Woo Woo & Weirdness, I bring you this theory I've been mulling over.

Animals (and humans) evolve generation to generation, where each generation represents a unit of evolution. Normally, genes carry traits that produce a physical characteristic or a behavior. Of course there are environmental pressures that change behavior, too. But these changes typically occur on birth via mutation and are tested by the environment for adaptedness. The creatures with the most adapted traits or behaviors win more resources and mates, and ultimately pass on their genes. I’m simplifying, but you get the idea.

Humans have the capacity to observe and assess our own behaviors. We self identify, self reflect, and endeavor to self improve. Instead of changing behavior subtly from one generation to the next, we can dramatically shift many times within one life. This allows us to intentionally discover better adapted behaviors. Our highly social nature and rich communication skills allow us to pass those adaptations on both vertically to our offspring and horizontally to our community.

This sharing of adaptive strategies multiplies the speed of our evolution. Whereas an animal’s life may represent one unit of evolution, ours may contain many units. And whereas the outcome of a successful adaptation would normally be procreation and therefor propagation, we can share what works right away.

So behavior adaptation equates to evolution, and since humans can self evaluate to change behavior beyond the scope of genetic pressure, we are consciously evolving. Instead of genes being the medium of evolution, our minds become that medium. And we can do this evolutionary process much faster than other creatures.

But why would we evolve on purpose? What environmental pressures would we be responding to? Certainly to the physical environment, as creatures have always done. But we are responding to something else as well: our capacity to self reflect. This ability has introduced a new element to the evolutionary environment. Normally, adaptations respond to environmental pressures, which have always been external. But humans also are aware of an internal, perhaps meta, environment - what some would call the human condition. This environment comes with it’s own set of challenges and resources that must be addressed.

A few benefits of adapting better to this environment immediately come to mind. By looking inward, we can become aware of genetic tendencies that made sense in other contexts, and learn to move beyond them. We can master our emotions, free ourselves from the charge of craving and aversion. We can learn to take advantage of the mysterious grey matter in our brains. And we can directly observe that thing which animates us, which is observing this interior and exterior space: that which is conscious.

Where will this take us?

Millions of years ago, the globally connected society of humans would not have seemed impossible. Even the notion of humans seemed improbable in the time of single celled life. Yet here we are. Our species has adapted to a tremendous number of environmental conditionals to develop surprising and ingenious behaviors and traits. And as this connectedness increases, so too does our awareness that we can and must address the pressures of our internal environment. As life progressed across the evolutionary landscape of the physical in remarkable and unforeseeable ways, so too can life now progress and evolve across the landscape of the non-physical.

I suspect we will see a globally connected species with a flourishing and mastery of the human condition as unexpected and marvelous as life’s emergence as humans.

[changemakrs]

If a TED Conference drank a pack of Red Bull and started doing extreme sports, it would only begin to resemble the awesomeness that is MaiTai.

Bringing together extraordinary entrepreneurs, innovators and athletes, MaiTai Global celebrates the shared experiences of collaboration and kite...

[blogbyseeing]

I Am the Information

I am connected to the Internet of the Universe, but instead of consuming information, I am the information. This evening, during meditation, I had an experience I can only describe as total presence. My awareness moved from head-based to heart-based. When that happened I stopped thinking about what I saw – and just saw it. When I stood, I just stood. When I sat, I just sat. Even now, the experience persists. When I focus on my chest, the colors get brighter, things get more still, and my analytical mind fades to the background. Whereas the analytical wants to contract around a concept, I feel a quality of knowing that lets go into experience, and fills up with understanding. What I learned this evening is that I cannot understand the mystery, but I can live the mystery. If I let go, I become it.

“There is another world, but it is in this one.” ― W.B. Yeats

[changemakrs]

Remember to make a dent. Visit Steve’s page on Changemakrs.

[blogbyseeing]

A vintage pin-up photo shoot for my childhood best friend Kaela.

To send a special gift to her man at sea, and to have some fun, we decided to do this shoot. Her vibe is inspired by the pin-up era, and the past in general, so the style of the shoot was a no brainer. We came up with two characters: a Mexican picnic girl and a sexy librarian. Of course, she had the fixings for both.

We spent the evening driving around Ann Arbor listening to salsa music, embarrassing ourselves and watching the sunset.

All photos were taken with my iPhone 4S and edited in Photoshop CS4. Locations were Island Park and the University of Michigan Law Library in Ann Arbor, MI. Hair and make up by Rachel Hazelbaker.

[affinitysuperblog]

Hey guys, I made this little iPhone wallpaper today. This phrase always brings me dispassion by reminding me that I don’t know what will come. No matter what we believe will happen, the truth is that one day we’ll see. – Brooks

Download it here: http://bit.ly/QLaL6k

[blogbyseeing]

This is what happens when I have nothing to do.

[blogbyseeing]

Hot off the press.

[affinitysuperblog]

We’re gearing up for this weekend’s launch at the Buenos Aires Yogathon, so I designed a table banner, and these fun features came out of it. – Brooks

[blogbyseeing]

An illustration I did for my friend Ansil who is moving away next week.

[flewthecoop-blog-blog]

Visit Original Link

[blogbyseeing]

Get stoked!!

[affinitysuperblog]

The first episode of the Affinity Vlog!  I’m Brooks Hassig, and this little bloggy thing is going to be a fun way to hear stories from the spiritual path, discuss knowledge, and get stoked. Since this is the first one, I’m just introducing myself to my one-world family and talkin about what to expect. Thanks for checking it out!

[blogbyseeing]

This is a new thing that I'm doing!

[seeingacameravomit]

Video Test // Doris

January 5, 2012 4:55 P.M.

[blogbyseeing]

Another one from Carmen. A video portrait? Heck yeah. This makes me think of holograms and the future, but is delightfully low tech. All her effects here are done analogue, in camera.