How do I feel about blogging in English?

5 month ago I wrote for the first time about my plan to start blogging in English. A month later I tried it during my time in London. So, how do I feel about this decision today? I have to admit that I was about to end the whole experiment in September. I missed writing in German and I recognized that my articles became shorter. I had to think a lot more before I started writing than I was used to. I’d even prepared an article to explain my decision to switch back to German. My cursor was just centimeters away from the “Publish”-button but I didn’t do it. I saved it as a draft and a few days later I came up with the text about DDB’s #firstworldproblemes meme campaign. The reactions were overwhelming and the article was mentioned on Time.com, Guardian.co.uk and several blogs. It did feel like they wanted to show me how nice it could be to have an international audience. It would have never happened if I had published the draft earlier that week.

So, what to expect?

I’m absolutely sure now that the decision was right and over the past 4 months I could notice an improvement in my English skills. I hope you have too. I will try to publish longer articles and write more own stuff. I think there is still a lot of potential left and that’s exactly the reason to stay hungry. And I don’t want to miss talking to a bigger and more international audience. It’s a great opportunity to get feedback and visitors from all over the world.
On the other hand I don’t want to lie, sometimes I really miss writing in German. So, why should I limit myself to use only one language? Just for the purpose of consistency? Frontand.de is “just” a blog and as long as I have fun, everything should be fine. I will start writing some articles in German. When the time is right.

What about you?

Did you enjoy my change to English or would you like to see more German posts in the future? Are the articles too short? Are you missing anything? I definitely would appreciate your feedback.

cya.

Recommendations of the week #3

Time is running. Again it’s time for the weekly recommendations, starting with a funny and bizarre video effect:

The technique behind it is very simple:

The first line of the video is realtime, the second line is late of 1/60s, the third is late of 2/60s, etc.

And here is the rest:

John O’Nolan wrote about a concept of a lite version of wordpress to put focus back on blogging.
Could kids do our jobs in ad agencies?
A short article about the psychology of progress.
JAM with Chrome is a really impressive web app which allows you to play music in the browser as a team. There are 19 different instruments. Great use of HTML5.
Ellen from elmastudio.de published a nice new podcast with tips for developing wordpress themes. (German)

If you want to follow all my article recommendations through the week, have a look at my QUOTEfm profile.

Recommendations of the week #2

This week passed by very quickly and I’m really sorry for not posting any new articles. Now it’s time for my weekly recommendations:

On Reddit Peter Moore, the longest held hostage in Iraq (2,5 years), answered a lot of question about his captivity. Shocking and interesting.
An unbelievable machine out of Lego.
I really like the new design of ableton.com created by Edenspiekermann.

Additionally some recommendations I shared on QuoteFM:

19 Things To Stop Doing In Your 20s

»Constantly checking your life against a prewritten narrative or story of how things “should” be is a bought-into way of life. It’s sort of like renting your identity. It isn’t you. You are more nuanced than the narrative you try to fit yourself into, more complex than the story that “should” be happening.«

Niclas Hellberg recommended this article from thoughtcatalog.com

An alternate universe

»The Surface is partially for Microsoft’s world of denial: the world in which this store contains no elephants and Microsoft invented the silver store with the glass front and the glowing logo and blue shirts and white lanyards and these table layouts and the modern tablet and its magnetic power cable. In that world, this is a groundbreaking new tablet that you can finally use at work and leave your big creaky plastic Dell laptop behind when you go to the conference room to have a conference call on the starfish phone with all of the wires and dysfunctional communication.«

Niclas Hellberg recommended this article from marco.org

If I Can’t Google You You’re Not A Real Designer

»Granted, my totally inflammatory headline more to freelance designers, but even so as a designer you should maintain some sort of blog or Tumblr to express opinions and ideas. I honestly can’t imagine a designer who doesn’t have strong opinions.«

Niclas Hellberg recommended this article from thefoxisblack.com

Have a good weekend.

Recommendations of the week #1

In 2010 I started a little, weekly series in which I shared interesting links, articles or videos I had found during the week. I called it “Wochenend-Lektüre“. I don’t know why I stopped it after 10 episodes and so I want to restart it today with the name “Recommendations of the week”.

Here we go.

Jill Greenberg opened her new exhibition Horse.
On Quora this question popped up: “What are the best stories about people randomly meeting Steve Jobs?”. Tim Smith wrote a really humorous and lovely answer about him meeting the Jobs: “I saw him in his most personal element – family and friends – around a broken down car in Palo Alto one night, just by chance. I was lucky – and I was delighted.”.
JWT created a pretty interesting list of 100 things to watch in 2012.
Lightt is an app with a really interesting approach to record life. I’m not sure about calling it an Instagram killer.
During Monday night’s presidential debate Ann Coulter called Obama “a retard” on Twitter . This is a great response by John Franklin Stephens, a man with Down syndrome.
Loren Brichter, the developer of Tweetie, published his new app Letterpress, a word game for iOS. It’s really fun and very addictive.
A nice interview with Erik Spiekermann on Design Matters.
Who works with ‘Creative Coders’? Tim Stutts put together a list of companies.

If you want to follow all my text recommendations have a look at my quote.fm profile.

If you stumble upon interesting stuff during your week, just drop me a line.

Polygon landscapes by Timothy Reynolds

I first saw some of Timothy Reynolds’ polygon worlds on Dribbble and I immediately fell in love with this 3D low-poly style. That was about 2 months ago and in the meantime his work was featured on several big websites like The Verge, AdWeek, Design Milk, boingboing, TNW or The Fox Is Black. Nevertheless, I want to show his 3D low-poly worlds here, too.

See more 3D worlds

Youtube’s design is changing again

In June Google started to roll out a new design for their video platform Youtube. I wrote about it here. It is very similar to the latest redesign of Google+.

Today I recognised some more changes. They’re not that big but I would say it’s enough to talk about.
So, what’s new? Besides the new look of the left sidebar the entire site (including video detail pages) is left-justified now. I would love to know the reason behind this decision. Furthermore, the left sidebar which is showing subscriptions and activities will be present on every page now. Those two changes will mostly affect the presentation of videos.

I think not everybody is seeing all the changes yet. So, here are two screenshots of the new design:

Youtube’s new activity stream.

The detail page which is presenting the videos.

And a screenshot of the old design:

The design which was presented in June this year.

What if money was no object?

An amazing lecture from the late Alan Watts. Just beautiful. In a bit more then half a year I (hopefully) will finish my studies and I’m still not sure what to do after it. What would I love to do when if money was no object?

Don’t make up and drive

After I criticized advertising last week I want to highlight one of my favorite ads today. I stumbled upon this piece of work last month and I think it’s one of the best awareness campaigns I have seen so far. Funny enough it’s also made by DDB.

The problem: In the UK half a million car crashes a year are caused by women doing their make up while driving.

The idea: To generate awareness for this topic DDB arranged a cooperation between Volkswagen and Nikkie. She is one of the most famous girls on youtube, known for her make up tutorials and beauty tips.

The result:

This campaign is not great because of its execution (slow motion effects have been used a lot in accident awareness campaigns). In this case the timing of the effect is just brilliant and also the setting is perfect to target the specific audience. Great work.

I also recommend to watch the whole case movie and read the comments on youtube: “fuck i fell off my chair”, “I love it! Best awareness video ever!”, …

Amazon’s Kindle Paperwhite available in Germany

Earlier today I checked the prices on ebay for Amazon’s Kindle Paperwhite, the awesome eReader presented in September. I didn’t order one because I hoped the prices for imports will drop in the coming weeks.

In summer I was about to buy a normal Kindle because I wanted one for our travel to Sydney. But after I read about an upcoming Amazon event and the rumors about new Kindles, I postponed my plans. When the day of the presentation came I was really enthusiastic about the new Paperwhite. It was exactly what I was hoping for. The bad news: The sale should start in October and delivery would be possible in the US only. That’s why I checked the prices on ebay nearly every day.

Today Amazon was surprising me a lot with its announcement that the Kindle Paperwhite (129 Euro) and the Kindle Paperwhite 3G (189 Euro) are ready for pre-order in Germany! Shipping will start on the 22nd of November (first come, first served). I already ordered mine.

Stormy Bondi

On sunday at Bondi Beach, Icebergs pool.

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