TOKI WOKI. 

I’m still hav­ing a hard time believ­ing what I’m about to write, but hope­fully you will.

That was my intro, buddy.

A lit­tle bit of context

I lis­ten to music, I try as hard as I can to be eclec­tic but let me con­fess that: I’ve always loved Hip-Hop. Of course my Hip-Hop heroes have changed through the years, but there’s one that never left my inner podium… He’s Cana­dian, he’s weird (proof: he’s worn a platy­pus shirt, once), he’s prob­a­bly the most sub­tle writer I know (OK, with Yoni Wolf) and he’s evolving.

He’s Buck 65.

An ounce of Twitter

As in every web tale, it all starts with a Twit­ter sta­tus. Mine started with this one:

I kinda need a logo-thing made of the num­bers 65 and 20. Any­one wanna take a crack? Who knows what might happen?!

I read this and thought “Well yes, but I’m kind of busy you know. And what the hell could I do with those damn num­bers? Plus, lots of fans will answer that”.

Some friendly advice

A few days later as I was chat­ting with a good friend of mine (and dis­creetly sent him the link to that tweet) he reacted some­thing like: “You bitch-ass cunt, you could try some­thing and see! Stupid-ass jerk”. “Hum, well yeah, you know. Just sayin’…” I kind of replied.

So I fired Illus­tra­tor and tried a few things out. A “65”, a “20”, and 15 min­utes later I had something.

Not quite ready for prime-time, but the con­cept was there. A few iter­a­tions later I was kind of happy with this:

So I tweeted back.

Who knows what might happen

And got an answer, a pri­vate one. Say­ing he was lik­ing it… Oh boy.

A few days later I received another pri­vate mes­sage ask­ing me if I could add a “th” to the logo, let­ting me know the mys­te­ri­ous logo was in fact for his “20 years as a rap weirdo”. Which I (of course) did.

We then e-mailed back and forth and “sorted out the details”, he “blew [the logo] up with dyna­mite and shot it with a gun a few times” and that was it.

Oh boy

I made Buck 65’s 20th “year in the game” logo, which is up on his new web­site.

Call me a happy fan. Yup.

Yummy, we cooked pixels!

Went snow­board­ing this week-end… Hunger and alti­tude helped us develop a new culi­nary concept.

Drank some Bir­lou, lis­tened to Da Baby­lo­ni­anz, didn’t break any of my bones. Dope.

It’s an inter­est­ing thing to see how Google is work­ing on its Chrome OS, in an Open­Source fash­ion, let­ting every­one know where they are going and how all this will/may look like. As a UI nerd I find it absolutely lovely to be able to sneak a peek at what’s com­ing next, and have techy details on it, such as hexa­dec­i­mal val­ues and gra­di­ent stops…

Fire­fox also pro­vides sim­i­lar doc­u­ments on its Wiki, and Chro­matic Pixel tells you every­thing about it.

Speak­ing of UI design, here’s a nice arti­cle about craft­ing sub­tle and real­is­tic ones. You’ll find gems like this one in it, and how it is achieved…

Got sim­i­lar links to share? Do so!

Hey, did you notice I didn’t say any­thing about Flash and/or the iPad? Thank me.

It took time, but it’s finally here! This time every­thing is live, not pre-recorded track play­ing as back­ground, so it might be a lit­tle out-tempo at times… Still practicing!

Using Google Chrome? Using Meebo? Annoyed by the ad at the bot­tom and the blog win­dow when you log in?

I just wrote and pub­lished my first Chrome Exten­sion — Meebo Cleaner, to clean that up!

Pretty sim­ple code, noth­ing rev­o­lu­tion­ary here. Go get it and let me know what you think, or if you have suggestions/ideas…