LedeFolo

Lede (leed) is news jargon for the top story for any given instance and is not to be confused with lead (led) a soft, toxic metal used to space out lines on the presses (about fifty years ago). Folo (follow) is a follow-up story about something that happened previously. I could tell you what this has to do with my blog, but I shan't.

[ledefolo]

Stock Photo Fail – Chapter 1: Foam Finger

Seriously, stock photo people, this is what you give me when searching for a "Foam Finger?" I'm about 80% disappointed. Why do you make it so hard to be efficient? So very, very hard?

[ledefolo]

Good design can't fix broken business models.

Jeffrey Veen, Designing the Friendly Skies

[ledefolo]

What a fantastic intro video for the 2011 Society for News Design conference in St. Louis. Great music, pacing, humor, style. What more could an attendee want?

[ledefolo]

Emergency Illustration Archive (No. 73) — What my work may lack in quality, it makes up for in quantity and speed. Digging through my work archives I came across this gem created for a story about, I dunno, online galleries. The "artwork" on the far left is actually a cover I designed for a sports special section.

[ledefolo]

Why I Love My CMS (No. 228)

Like many publications out there, the newspaper for which I work uses a (mostly) proprietary suite of delightful software applications to systematically manage all of our content — a Content Management System (CMS), if you will.

One such benefit of using a (mostly) proprietary suite of delightful software is the fact that the programs were written by people who clearly hate humanity, especially humans who dare to purchase said software.

For instance, when printing, one is presented with this dialog box:

Now, what's the logical button to click? If you said "print" you'd be wrong, for that simply prints the error message. You must actually click done and then, on the next dialog box, click "print."

And don't get me started about using the same dialog box to both print a page or send it to the presses. That's just begging for some terrible terribleness to occur.

[ledefolo]

Hawaii Photo of the Day (No. 2) — How better to celebrate my trip a month ago to beautiful Maui than to present a photo a day until I run out of good photos (so a week, perhaps). This one was taken at Maui Tropical Plantation. Farming Tiki was clearly not amused.

[ledefolo]

Some genius designer put the tiny Auto Clean Cycle button right below the tiny Oven Light button. You can imagine how my nachos turned out.

Me, via Twitter

[ledefolo]

Hawaii Photo of the Day (No. 1) — How better to celebrate my trip a month ago to beautiful Maui than to present a photo a day until I run out of good photos (so a week, perhaps). This first one is from the parking area of Haleakala National Park. It's a bird of unknown (possibly mysterious) origin.

[ledefolo]

Quite possibly one of the funniest blogs in the known universe. Follow the fantastic, confusing and fundamentally flawed lives of Gary and Elaine and their traumatized children, as documented in the pages of catalogs from around the world.

[ledefolo]

I don't care a straw for your newspaper articles, my constituents don't know how to read, but they can't help seeing them damned pictures.

William "Boss" Tweed (1823-1878), U.S. politician known for controlling the Democratic Party political machine in New York in the mid-1800s.