Recently a few people have been asking me about my blog. “What is it?” “Why do you do it?” “What is it for?” The funny thing is that most of these questions come to me via my Facebook page. This made me realize that there’s an ironic ignorance surrounding blogs by the general public. Ironic because Blogging is basically what everyone’s doing when they post information on their Facebook page.

When people ask me why we need rules for design I like to use the analogy of spoken languages. In order to communicate with people in other countries you need to learn their language and the rules pertaining to the local customs. We’re all familiar with the cliché of the tourist, unable to speak the [...]

By Daniel Brown
Sr. Evangelist, GridIron Software
“Social media” allow (if not encourage) us to be less social in the traditional sense. Instead, they provide us the “Cliff notes” of the lives of others. We each become our own P.R. teams, releasing an average of thrice-daily, carefully-worded, “press releases” related to the things we care most about [...]

By Daniel Brown
GridIron Software
Some information, you want to have as quickly as possible, other news is best heard when the timing is right.
When the final episode of “M*A*S*H” aired in 1983, 105 million people watched it at once (or, those with VCR’s presumably watched it less than 48 hours later.) The anticipation of that final [...]

Being of a ‘creative’ nature, I have a naturally chaotic mind, or so I’ve been told on good authority! My head is pretty much always ‘full of stuff’, work, friends, family, relationships, ideas, inspirations, mundane tasks, creative ideas, all of them ricochet around my brain like flies trying to escape from imprisonment.
And since I’ve progressed [...]

I should confess that I think failblog.org is probably the funniest thing on the internet. The theme of the site is taking a single word and making it say so much about what is probably a complex situation, whether it’s a still image, a screen shot, or a video clip. I strive for brevity (but [...]

by Daniel Brown
GridIron Software
If my estimates are correct, there are one quadrillion people now using Twitter and Facebook; (mysteriously, more human beings than the planet can support). Both Facebook status updates and Twitter “tweets” serve largely the same purpose – a quick message to others of one’s status (“got car washed”, “my sister had her [...]

Have we reverted to a world of blithering idiots, relying on one-liners and soundbites to express ourselves? My newspaper of choice in in the UK, The Guardian, published a really fabulous April Fool article relating to Twitter last week. They joked about reducing the world news to Tweets of 140 characters or less. Although it [...]

Despite a “hesistant” (to say the least) economy, Photohop World Boston was a great event. Not the least of which because I get to see old friends such as Ben Willmore, Colin Smith of PhotoshopCafe.com fame, the mighty John Nack whose phoenix-like resurrection from the ashes of Adobe’s LiveMotion product management team to become the [...]

I’ve been doing a bit of research into video formats for the web and wanted to get some feedback from viewers on what are perceived pros and cons associated with the different formats available.
I’ve always like Quicktime as it’s easy to encode and embed, plus, you can allow viewers to download the QT and view [...]