Archive for January, 2012

Cod Roe Pasta Sauce – A Modest Proposal

Around the world, fish roe is consumed as a delicious delicacy and a fantastic source of Omega 3.  This commercial for Japanese cod roe pasta sauce is a bizarre and mildly terrifying homage to this tradition.

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How to Customize the @LaunchRock widget – A Behind The Scenes Look at Our Site

 

When we launched the new version of the SecondMenu site, we got in contact with the team at LaunchRock to let them know our experience using their service. LaunchRock generates a “Launching Soon” page for startups complete with invite form, analytics, and viral marketing capabilities. The site is super easy to use and gives you that great “huge image plus sign-up form” landing page that I’m sure you’ve seen around. Instead of going that route, we decided that we wanted a hand-crafted site and so we chose to use the service a little differently than usual. As you can see, LaunchRock is still helping us on our site, but their invite widget has been styled to fit with the look and feel of the site.

We were invited to write a guest post on LaunchRock’s blog about our experience integrating their widget and we of course said yes. So, here’s our post which provides a step-by-step guide on how you can use HTML, CSS, and a little bit of savvy, to rock your own LaunchRock widget: Customize The LaunchRock Widget To Seamlessly Match Your Site

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Appetite for art: over one hundred years of menu graphics

The menu is often the first thing we interact with at a restaurant. We’re either quickly perusing it in window as we pass by a restaurant,  or we’re given it immediately when sit we down. It turns out that menus were not always common, and like everything else have an evolution.

Until restaurants became commonplace in the late 1800s, printed menus for meals were rare commodities reserved for special occasions.  As restaurants proliferated, the menu became more than just a culinary listing. The design of the menu became an integral part of eating out and as such menus became a marketing tool and a favored keepsake.

The history of menu design has now been collected in gorgeous detail in Steven Heller’s book Menu Design in America: 1850-1985.  There are tons of great images in here and though some menus are a bit outlandish, they all have a certain charm that will definitely inspire us to create digital menus that are equally emotive and fresh.

See also : Sex, Figs, Italics: A Visual History of Menus

 

 

 

 

 

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