Vostok Theme – Black

If you do the rounds of cities in the UK who struggle to compete with London as a magnet for “creatives”, they’ll all have a creative hub, space or whatever. I remain unconvinced that the Eames furniture, lime green carpets and post-it friendly walls with clever graphics achieve that. To me, it’s like suggesting creative people like living in an IKEA catalogue.

Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino on innovation hubs (and coffee)

This is an amazing and rather critic infography about Japan made by Kenichi Tanaka. Even though everything said is true, we still love Japan. Here’s the vid:

(via Miguel Sabel’s blog)

UPDATE: Michael Flarup has taken down the VV2 icons that were a ripoff and claims to have contacted Helveticons.ch in the hope of have the issue straightened out.

Some dude at iconpark.net is ripping off the excellent work of Maximilian Larsson on Helveticons. Check it out:

Click to see the whole comparison

This guy (who happens to be Michael Flarup @flarup) is on top of the Vostok’s Pyramid of Suckytude ^TM:

1. Appropiating the work of others (this totally sucks)
2. Just bitching (this sucks)
3. Just bullsitting (this kinda sucks)
4. Just theorizing (this doesn’t suck but doesn’t rock)
5. Doing, building (this doesn’t suck at all, it rocks)

Shame on you iconpark!!

Alissa Walker from Fast Company on architects’ websites:

The most un-usable architecture firm Web sites are often exactly like the buildings those architects design: Created to make a statement, rather than focus on everyday livability. Perhaps they have to solve one problem before they can tackle the other.

The article is rather shallow, but worth skimping to check out some info-architectural disasters.

A week ago we became partners at Riot Cinema Collective by acquiring a moderate percentage of the company. This makes us extremely happy and excited. It’s the consumation of a love story between Riot and Vostok that’s been around for a year now.

We admire Riot’s work and their fresh approach to anything that deals with moving images. We love them so much we wanted to share, to be influenced, to intersect with them.

Now we can proudly say “we make movies”.

Rouge Ameoba (Mac software workshop) has a great write-up about the usability of the my.SXSW iPhone App.

I was baffled by this particular interface controller:

At first it looks like a radio button, but it doesn’t make sense becuase there is no other choice. You might even fear tapping it, as there is no way to uncheck a radio button unless there is a second option. The perfect Catch-22 situation.

But if you tap it, it reveals it’s actually a checkbox which modifies its label! Just imagine being part of the support staff: I know it sounds stupid, but if you want to attend an event, tap on ‘No’..

Six Revisions has included our Vostok Theme among a compilation of 20 Beautiful Minimalist WordPress Themes. That is something we are proud of, for sure. But we are even more proud of knowing that more than 65.000 blogs already use it.

Vostok Theme was designed by me (Javier Cañada) and coded by Rubén Lozano quite long ago. I am still confident about most of the design decisions in it, especially those about features and layout. But as screen resolution has increased I feel like type size and column height should be revised.

I’m also considering making a “white version” with the same legibility goals. Or perhaps a Serif version. Do you think that would make sense?

This one is too good to let it go uncommented:

Seen at the always entertaining I love charts.

Hunter S. Tyler is the new guy at Vostok. We don’t care about him being a telecom engineer or about his German or his Chinese, we don’t care either about his short films. We wired him for this:

Well.. Being a telecommunications engineer as he is, he’ll obviously add more WARP’s to our programming and systems engines. He is already taking care of all the stuff related to thecosmonaut.org (Riot Cinema’s movie) and will soon start doing other übercool and experimental stuff that’s not been disclosed yet.

Welcome on board, Hunter S. Tyler!

A simple wallpaper image with our three window rocket:

Downolad the one that better fits your computer:

· Vostok Wallpaper 1280 x 800 (.png file)

· Vostok Wallpaper 2560 x 1600 (.png file)