Don Havey

My new favorite blog is lifeiscarbon. It’s full of content as sexy as its name implies. Remind me to write a post on the brilliance of that phrase. Life is carbon.

Vote for my tshirt design at uneetee: Survival of the Prettiest.

I’m afraid you have to register for the site in order to vote, but it’s a good place to find nice shirts, anyways.

Much obliged!

N x N is a custom portfolio generator (in progress).

The question that motivated the project was: making a portfolio is a theoretically simply task… why do I always hate making one? The answer is: hidden, arduous tasks. Thumbnail cropping, ordering, creating a layout that compliments the projects…. These seem like small jobs but end up making the “quick portfolio” perpetually illusive.

The solution, as I see it, is this: Look to the grid (it will never fail you).

N x N is primarily a dead-simple framework for uploading and displaying images and projects. No fancy tools, just a familiar, form-based, step-by-step process that results in an equally simple, elegant portfolio. Of course, the layouts and general presentation can be customized, but not to the same level that an application such as WordPress can. I think this is a good thing. Standardized results.

The target audience is craftspeople (e.g. Etsians), design school students, and groups of individuals who need to quickly compile a joint design portfolio.

Estimated completion date is mid-April, depending on how some other projects shape up.

Curiobot is a project created by myself and Angel. Introductions necessary!

Angel is my girlfriend. Has been for a long time. She is very good at making things by hand, and we team up on projects occasionally. I designed the Curiobot website, she manages the content. End of introductions.

The thought behind Curiobot was to create an image gallery of the strangest and most interesting products available online. The type of objects that almost could not exist without the internet’s niche-market-expanding power. It’s an ongoing fascination of mine: the physical objects that the internet generates through encouragement.

I’ll borrow a bit out of Curiobot’s concept statement:

Curiobot aims to be a hybrid website. Not in the environmentally-conscious sense of the word (although we like that too)… more like in the Frankensteinian sense of the word:

We want to be half museum and half garage sale. Half library and half amusement park. Not a blog: they’re too personal and text-based. Not a shopping site: their navigation schemes are static, sales-driven, and bland. We’d rather be explorable… and entertaining, and inspiring, and helpful. We want to make you say “What the hell is that?”, “I wish I had thought of that”, and “Oh my God, I finally found one!” all in the same day. We want to extend the blog mentality to encompass the universal languages of imagery and cool-stuff-for-sale commerce.

[...]

Our unbiased approach to aggregating products is different from general product search sites. There is no external motivation here besides wanting the best of the best and the strangest of the strange. We actually seek out the things that the big search and retail sites do not want. The products that only one person in ten thousand actually buy. The big sites think that this is a bad thing. We know, however, that although only one person in ten thousand buys it, nine out of ten people might still think a product is amazing… they just don’t know where it would fit in their apartment. Think of this site as your fantasy storage closet.

We generate a small amount of revenue through click-through traffic to merchant sites when applicable, but products are admitted to the database regardless of their retailer. We hope that our site will eventually benefit smaller sites and individuals, who are making their own unique imprint on the internet product market, by pulling their products into a more easily accessible realm.

At the moment, we’re moderating all of the products that are added, but at some point in the future, we’d like to let Curiobot loose into the world of mass-contribution websites. Who wouldn’t? I mean, we’re really good at finding unusual stuff on the internet, but we think our talents would pale in comparison to those of a billion people combined.

At its worst, Curiobot is a site that encourages wasteful I-didn’t-know-I-needed-that buying habits and widens the market for obscure and useless goods. At its best, however, it helps dissolve the distinction between useless and useful, and celebrates our need for both.

There you have it. Not too much else to say about the content. I’ll leave you with a few of my favorite items in the gallery: Plush Giant Squid, Lamplamp, Daisy Pen Vase, Stick-On Sunroof, Parent-Child Dance Shoes, Rolling Clock, IV-Drip Plant Pot.