The Insane Benedictine University Recruiting Video
Rescued by Deadspin, re-posted by yours truly: an actual alum of Benedictine University in lovely (snark) Lisle, Illinois. Just in case it gets pulled there…
Update: The IP log reveals a lot of incoming traffic from ben.edu. Hi, there!
Font Your Face: Terrible Name, Great Drupal Module
It bears a truly unfortunate name, but this is a great Drupal module: Font Your Face (download). It’s stable and at the recommended release stage for both Drupal 6 and 7. Here’s a YouTube demo.
As a web designer and front-end developer, it’s possibly the most useful module I’ve come across in the past six months. Nearly any font is now available to web designers without using Javascript. It supports Google Fonts with no need to edit theme CSS documents or page templates. Caveat: it will stipulate the “font-family” characteristic in tandem with the module CSS, where the font-size, color, decoration, etc. still should be defined within a certain class.
Font Your Face supports Typekit (given a valid API), Font Squirrel (among others) and even accepts uploaded typefaces from your own library. Additionally, he UI/UX design is pretty great, especially if you’re a designer stuck using Windows rather than OS X.
Using OTF is a bit sketchy and forget PostScript fonts—works best with TrueType fonts—but it literally opens up thousands of possibilities for the web designer to style a site with its own unique typography. On the downside, it’s a bit scary to imagine less experienced web designers going insane with too many fonts. That “nightmare” awaits our eyes when this type of functionality becomes more common.
Hey, with great power comes great responsibility, no?
How the Rolling Stones and Microsoft Found Each Other
It’s hard to believe that it’s been nearly seventeen years since Microsoft rolled out Windows 95. For those of you who don’t recall the DOS-based Windows 3.1, it was a revolutionary change that actually, believe it or not, made Microsoft cool for a while. With Apple’s influence on the PC market virtually non-existent in the mid-1990s, Windows 95 was the new industry standard for operating systems. Even the START button was an innovation.
It’s also where technology and marketing come together. Famously, Microsoft used the Rolling Stones’ 1981 song “Start Me Up” as the anthem to introduce Windows 95 to the world in the summer of 1995. It was the cornerstone of a $300 million ad blitz.
How did this “collaboration” come about? This in-depth post at The Post History Dig explores the subject in depth. A teaser:
Nearly 15 year after the song’s initial popularity, Bill Gates hit upon the idea of using “Start Me Up” for the Windows 95 launch. Gates happened to meet Mick Jagger at some point and asked him how much it would cost to use the song in advertising. Reportedly, Jagger replied with some amount in the millions — $10 million by one account — a sum, in any case, that Jagger thought would be outrageously high. Microsoft’s “Start Me Up” campaign was aimed at key groups of Rolling Stones followers — from baby boomers to twenty- somethings… But Gates, undeterred, didn’t flinch and agreed to the amount.
It’s a great read, especially when one considers how much this influenced Apple’s product rollouts in the last decade. Gates influencing Jobs. Who’d have thought that?
The iconic 30-second advertisement for Windows 95:
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