JACK ZERBY

Siphon Filter was the best game ever…

Hi everyone I found some really great insider tips for building a startup these are pretty good tips when it comes to building a startup when building a startup here are some great startup tips…

http://floatleft.com/notebook/responsive-web-design-is-not-a-war

Which is a better experience? Which gives the user a quicker understanding of what’s happening?

The New Goodsie Store builder is almost here…

http://medium.com/design-startups/503f75428f7f

+1

Gotta get the bread and milk!

Villa Vals, a holiday retreat dug in to the alpine slopes of Vals in Switzerland.

Millionaires Parking Supercars In Their Living Room

Been having a ton of fun writing for my newsletter.

If learning marketing/design from old-school 70’s and 80’s copywriting legends with sweet beards gets you excited, then for heaven’s sakes brah sign-up.

http://list.jackzerby.com

Hipster Thanksgiving

This is all kinds of awesome.

When the time is just right, and the family is snuggled by the fire, I’m gonna fire this jambo up…

PSY rocks it out to 80,000 fans…

layervault:

When LayerVault 2 launched earlier this spring, we believed that we were taking a risk by pursuing an entirely flat interface.

Well-loved products on the web share a similar design aesthetic, with roughly the same kinds of bevels, inset shadows, and drop shadows. For designers, achieving this level of “lickable” interface is a point of pride. For us, and for a minority of UI designers out there, it feels wrong.

We certainly didn’t invent the flat style but arriving at it was a violent process. We tore through hundreds of revisions (we have the LayerVault timelines to prove it) to potential interfaces before arriving at the answer that now makes us say “of course.” The desk at LayerVault’s original headquarters (my Manhattan apartment) still has the battle scars from objects being slammed down in anger. At one point, while working on a mockup, a MacBook was slammed shut so hard it was nearly unhinged.

Read More

This is exactly how I’ve felt all my life as a designer. Each time a new wave of bubbly, beveled, glossed, gradiated, designs would appear on the web, I would sometimes feel insecure and want to go with the trend, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

I’d like to shake Glenn Frey’s hand for making this smooth jam…

Teddy Pendergrass - Love TKO

This is a jam, thank me later…

I can’t wait to tell my son: “You’re complaining about a $600 iPad? I bought this Gateway 550mhz Monster for $2500 when I was your age.”

The Stitz Work Stool by Wilkhahn

Just heard a Francis and the Lights song at an outlet mall in upstate NY… #randomlyawesome

Things have been a bit quiet from us recently haven’t they? If we were kids playing upstairs, our mum would probably be knocking nervously on our door right now.

Well, don’t worry - we’re not having a dangerously long afternoon nap. We’ve just been quietly working really hard behind the scenes over the last few months, fixing some bugs, moving things over to MOO, and generally making sure Flavors is working smoothly.

Now comes the fun stuff, and we have lots of exciting plans for the rest of this year (and beyond!). For starters, we’re going to make it even easier to create and edit pages by redesigning and rearranging some of the page layout and design tools. We’re also going to help you get started with your Flavors page by adding some cool background images to choose from if you don’t have your own already.

We’d love to hear what you think, so please stay in touch via our help pages. In the meantime, we’ll keep working hard to make Flavors an even better place for you to share your photos, music and blogs.

And if you’re interested in getting more involved in shaping the future of Flavors, we’re planning some fun groups sessions where we’ll get together (yes, in real life!) to discuss how you’ve been using Flavors, and talk about any clever ideas you may have. If that sounds like something you’d be interested in, and you can make it along to our offices in London (for now - next stop, the world!) then please do get in touch at hello@flavors.me

We’ve probably said it before, but it bears repeating - it’s a genuine joy for us to see all the beautiful pages being created on Flavors. We can’t wait to see more and more of what you can do.

Thanks!

The Flavors team at MOO

Yes — we’re a printer! (It’s just like the internet, only slower.) However, like you, we’re also passionate about great design — which is why we’re delighted to announce our acquisition of Flavors.me. But don’t worry — we’re not going to get all weird and start bossing you about. Just think of us as your mom’s new husband. The kind that buys you a car, obviously — not the kind that makes you call him dad (nobody likes that guy.)

We’re huge fans of Flavors — it demonstrates beautifully how the web has opened up great design tools for everyone. It also benefits from thousands of cool, beautiful customers (okay, maybe we do sort of want you to love us like we’re your real dad.) So we’re putting all our efforts into making it even easier for you to create an awesome-looking Flavors page.

We’re excited to start working together, so do drop by MOO.COM at some point and have a look around. And if you have any questions, please visit the Flavors help page — we’d love to hear from you.

Looking forward to a future of even more great design with you!

Richard Moross
CEO MOO.com

We’re happy to announce that we’ve added Bandsintown to our ever-growing collection of services for musicians and music fans.

Bandsintown gives you personalized recommendations and reminders based on your Facebook Likes, Last.fm listening history and more. Fans can use it to track their favorite acts’ upcoming shows, and artists can use it to keep fans in the loop about events.

Check out how singer-songwriter Farai Futi uses Bandsintown plus Flavors to display his tour dates alongside his bio, news, tracks, videos and more:

The Flavors team is passionate about music. A few of us are even moonlighting musicians. We love to discover great new artists in the Flavors community, and to serve musicians as best we can with new features. Today we’re pleased to announce a new integration with industry-leading tour date service Songkick that caters more directly to artists, as well as the addition of Mixcloud, which helps connect listeners to DJ sets and more.

Songkick

You’ll now find a new service called Songkick for Artists under Content > Add in the design panel, along with our previous Songkick integration, designed for fans. Songkick for Artists allows musicians to display their past and upcoming tour dates on their Flavors site, keeping fans connected to their latest gigs quickly, easily, and in style, thanks to our versatile layouts.

If you haven’t signed up for Songkick already, now is a particularly great time to join. With the launch of Songkick’s new Tourbox service, artists now have a central tool to manage and share their tour information across multiple services, including Soundcloud, Spotify, YouTube and more. Sign up at tourbox.songkick.com to get started!

Mixcloud

With Mixcloud on Flavors, you can share the radio shows, DJ mixes and podcasts you’re listening to, along with your Favorites and your own Cloudcasts. Cool bonus: because, like us, Mixcloud is dedicated to supporting artists, playback of copyrighted songs is reported so the correct licensing royalties can be attributed to the artists.

Join Mixcloud today to start listening and sharing.

We know how important it is to keep the content on your Flavors site fresh, and have always done our best to offer frequent service updates for the Flavors community. We’re happy to announce that, as of late last week, Premium Flavors users got a super-boost to their service update times.

As a new perk of the Premium account level, users who have upgraded their accounts will have their latest tweets, blog posts, Flickr photos, Facebook status updates and more updated on their Flavors site twice as fast.

We hope our Premium users will enjoy seeing quicker updates. If you haven’t gone Premium yet, log in today and click on the Upgrade icon in the navigation bar to unlock speedier updates. You’ll also get access to other great features like premium layouts, custom pages, and the option to use a custom domain for just $20 per year (less than $2 per month!).

This week we’ve added a new service, Dribbble. Dribbble lets designers share screenshots of the projects they’re working on, whether that’s an app, a typeface, an icon or illustration. When you join Dribbble you can get feedback from the community and, even better, get hired by recruiters who have signed up as Scouts.

Sign up on Dribbble to get started. To add Dribbble to your Flavors site, go to Content > Add in the Design Panel.

Lily Tse uses Dribble + Flavors to share interface designs alongside her LinkedIn profile, Instagram photos, tweets, blog posts and more.

Ellliot Ross shares digital marketing designs along with his DJ mixes, LinkedIn profile, tweets, Foursquare check-ins and more.

Join them by sharing your Dribbble shots on Flavors today!

Last November, we rolled out a new feature on Flavors called Streams as part of a major release that included other great updates, such as a customizable mobile layout for premium users. Streams brought together your updates, check-ins, songs and more in a single timeline, and allowed you to track and follow other Flavors users, as well.

Unfortunately, since its release, this feature has had a negative impact on service update performance across Flavors sites, beyond the level we had anticipated. Our priority is giving you a powerful, highly customizable, yet easy-to-use platform for creating an online presence. Flavors sites are, of course, less useful when update frequency is low. That’s why we’ve made the tough decision to remove Streams entirely today, as well as the option to follow other Flavors users.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause the Flavors community, and hope you understand our reasoning for the change. Giving you the tools to make a beautiful, useful site on your own is what the team here at HiiDef does best. It’s our goal to keep your site’s updates steady and reliable, and we believe that removing Streams in favor of other improvements is the way forward for Flavors.

If you have any questions on these changes, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at support@flavors.me, in the forums at help.flavors.me or via @flavorsme on Twitter.

We love to see Flavors being used as a home for creative fundraising efforts. Last year, Ruben Henriquez created a portfolio on Flavors and set up a Goodsie-powered store to help support his dream of becoming a professional photographer, garnering the attention of Huffington Post for his entrepreneurial drive.

Other projects that call Flavors home became fully funded with the help of Kickstarter, like the Rabbit Island artist residency program and documentary film The Throwaways.

Here are a couple more endeavors on Flavors with active campaigns ending soon! Your donations will help make them happen, and earn you some neat goodies in return.

Brooklyn-based band Spanish Prisoners, featured on NPR’s “Five Best Bandcamp Albums of 2011,” want to make it to South by Southwest this year. Help make their “vantasy” happen. Just 33 hours left to pitch in!

Zoneplex, a sci-fi board game by designer and musician Shelby Cinca, who also uses Flavors as a hub for his band The Cassettes, electronic music project Triobelisk and related iPad game Tri-Tri-Triobelisk. Check out the kooky video for the game and head to the Kickstarter page to support this intriguing space adventure. Just three days left!

Do you have an idea that could use some support? Flavors is a great way to display information about your project and fundraising campaign alongside social media updates from Twitter, Facebook and more.

Photography is a foundational element of the Flavors experience. Our fullscreen media galleries and customizable grid displays were designed to showcase high-resolution images in stunning visual fashion. And so, we are pleased to be announcing support for 500px, a photography community powered by creative people from all over the world that lets you share and discover inspiring photographs.

If you’re a photographer, 500px is your connection to a whole world of people passionate about images. It’s the place for you to upload your work and create a beautiful portfolio, interact with a talented and dedicated community, vote on photos, and have your work reviewed in return.

To celebrate the 500px and Flavors integration, we will each be giving away 10 premium account upgrades! To win, tweet a link of your Flavors site connected with 500px to @flavorsme.

Have you ever wondered who’s checking out your Flavors site?

Premium Flavors users can add Lijit analytics in the external statistics area to gather even more details about their visitors and site performance, including data on pageviews, referring sites and searches, and geography — valuable information that can help you shape your Flavors site to better take advantage of incoming traffic.

These details and more can be accessed via the Lijit analytics dashboard.

Upgrade today to access stats, premium layouts, the option to use a custom domain name (i.e. mysite.com), a contact form, custom content, a favicon and more! For a limited time, new premium users will receive a second free upgrade to share.

Today we are pleased to announce the release of a major update to Flavors, including the introduction of an innovative new way to share and view content from more than 30 services around the web: Social Streams.

Social Streams

With Social Streams, users can now easily follow their favorite Flavors sites and experience photos, videos, blog posts, check-ins and more in one consistent and beautiful viewing experience.

We’ve even updated our music player for an elegant listening experience, whether via HypeMachine, Tumblr, SoundCloud, 8tracks or Bandcamp.

Only want to see photos from work friends? Simply filter the view to display content from selected sources (i.e. Flickr, Instagram and Picasa) and users (i.e. your awesome colleagues). The Social Stream reloads to display only the content you’ve selected.

If you’d like to turn off an update type from a specific site (perhaps your uncle’s hourly tweets), services can be controlled on a site-by-site basis. Go to the Following menu and disable specific services within a site’s settings to hide those updates in your Social Stream view.

Community

Our Directory has a new name: Community. No longer just a space to showcase Flavors sites, it’s also a hub for discovering and following sites in the Social Stream. Hover over the site you like, and click on the “+” to follow their updates. You can also click on the follow button in a Flavors site’s footer.

New Layouts and Display Options

We’ve revamped our layout system to make way for new layouts and features, such as gorgeous gallery and full-screen display options that make high-resolution images and video shine. Premium users can now choose from 17 beautiful layouts — twice our previous offering.

The new Display menu in the Design Panel provides granular control over the number of content columns that display for each service, creating a richer, more customized look.

Logos and Portraits

Logo support was a much-requested feature, and has now arrived. Logos can now be used in addition to or instead of background images to easily brand your site. We’ve added a Portrait option, too, which displays beside your updates in the Social Stream.

Mobile Optimization

Overall mobile performance has improved in the new version. What’s more, Premium Flavors users can enable our sleek new mobile layout, which includes font and background customizations for a smoother experience on iPhones and Androids.

Fonts For Everyone

Free accounts no longer have a restricted selection of fonts — in fact, we’ve added more. We now offer 222 fonts to all users, free or Premium, and we’ve made them available for content, too.

New Services: Songkick and Goodsie

Flavors now supports tour date service Songkick, so you can share the shows you’ve seen and scheduled, and Goodsie, an easy-to-use hosted e-commerce platform, built by the team behind Flavors.

Goodsie integration allows you to share your shop’s inventory, directing visitors to the storefront for checkout. Goodsie is free for the first 30 days and just $15 per month afterward. Give it a try!

More

A redesigned navigation bar, shadow effects, Google+ and LinkedIn sharing options, premium support for Lijit stats, link target options and even more are all part of the update.

Get Started!

To experience the new Flavors and get started with Social Streams, sign up at flavors.me or log in to your account.

Existing users will be prompted to update to the new version in order to log in and edit their site. Note that your layout may be modified in the new version, so some design tweaks may be needed to maintain your old look.

If you have any questions or issues, please don’t hesitate to contact our support team at support @ flavors.me

Steve Jobs had an incredible influence on creatives and businesspeople, including the HiiDef team. Here, we reflect on his work and his drive, which was both relentless and contagious, inspiring us and others to produce well-considered products while always keeping an eye on what’s next.

Not too long ago, Michael Dell suggested Apple shut down and return what little money it had left to shareholders. Steve Jobs proceeded to engineer the greatest re-emergence in business history, culminating with Apple being crowned the most valuable company on the planet. Steve Jobs was the truest of visionaries and innovators, an inspiration to us all.

- Jonathan Marcus, HiiDef Co-Founder & CEO

For those of us battling every day to establish ourselves as entrepreneurs, Mr. Jobs was an inspiration because he was steadfast in his beliefs and vision. Mr. Jobs knew what he wanted to achieve, and worked tirelessly to make it happen.

His values of form, beauty and simplicity being just as important as function has always guided my own work. Making software that performs a task is one thing, but making software that works seamlessly and is easily understandable is a true art.

I will always credit Steve Jobs for instilling those values in me with his products.

- Sean Jackson, HiiDef Developer & Designer

I remember my first trip to the Genius Bar fondly. I found it amazing that such a large company, with such diverse and complex products, could offer such personalized one-on-one support. By elevating customer support team members to “genius” status, Jobs highlighted the value and importance of user experience and customer service, inspiring me to provide personalized attention to users, ensuring they have an overall positive experience.

Jobs said it best: “It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

- Tatiana Peisach, HiiDef Customer Support

Steve made the world respect design.

- Jack Zerby, HiiDef Co-Founder & Lead Designer

You’ve probably caught actor and comedian Kirk Zipfel in primetime television spots, sporting a meat poncho in a commercial for Degree or donning a pair of women’s skinny jeans in a spot for Miller Lite. His work also extends beyond 30-second slots, ranging from songwriting to creating and starring in an original web series and performing standup in California. Here he took some time to talk with us about his career and his Flavors site.

Flavors: Have you always been a performer? And which came first for you, music or jokes?

Kirk Zipfel: I’ve been acting since I was a kid, doing theater, improv and sketch, but only got into standup in my twenties. The music had always been something I just did for fun. Standup was a work thing, a path towards a goal on TV. I never thought of myself as a songwriter, mostly because I believed my “real” songs sucked. I thought, “Any serious song has already been done 1000 times over, and probably better than I can do it. Just look at Nick Drake, and he pulled the plug 40 years ago!” But what if I wrote comedy songs that were funny and well performed? That put me in a more distinct category, which is what you want as a performer; something everyone else can’t do. 

F: Who influences your comedy style?

K: When comedy broke away from the one-liners and rim shots of the 60’s and became something much more personal and self-referential was when it became great. Guys like (what a surprise) Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor led the way, followed by the precision silliness of Steve Martin (banjo master), the perfect deadpan of Stephen Wright, the primal rage of Bill Hicks, and on to the unfiltered honesty of Louis CK. Love them or not, Tenacious D single-handedly created the melodically-complex demon acoustic comedy rock genre. Those are all pretty safe choices from any “best of comedy” blog. These days some of my favorite comedians are Theo Von, Anthony Jeselnik and the thrash/Mormon rage of Tartar Control.

F: We loved your role in the Miller Lite commercial. How long did it take you to get into those skinny jeans?

K: They were women’s size 27s. I did the pliers-zipper thing on my back just to get them on. I don’t want to brag, but my ass looked fierce in them, until it turned blue from low circulation. 

F: What are your plans for the coming year? Can we be on the lookout for you in other TV spots?

K: The Degree spot with Bear Grylls is now running again for football season. Commercials are a fickle provider. Hard to say what you’ll be doing more than a week in advance. 

F: Where can people see you perform?

K: I’ll be at the Irvine Improv on the 27th, and doing a 30-minute set at the fantastic Room 5 in Hollywood on Oct. 27th. Check out my Flavors page at kirkzipfel.com to see what’s happening.

F: What made you chose Flavors to showcase your work?

K: I’m not one to pay someone for something I can do myself (also known as cheapness), hence the 1984 IROC (minus the transmission) decomposing in my driveway. I chose Flavors because of the extreme ease of use. I had been looking for an easy-to-manage platform and within an hour I was up and shining on the intermetsk.

Our customer support team will be off on Monday for Labor Day. Enjoy the long weekend, Americans! While we’re out, have fun browsing the Directory. Here are a few favorites that we’ve recently featured on Twitter:

Oliver Blank, composer

Aline Calixto, samba singer

DaVinci, hip hop artist

Devereau Chumrau, actress

Shanee Pink, musician

Startup Weekend Shanghai - English Edition

The LA’s Best Coffee iPhone, iPad and Android app is featured in LA Weekly. Check out their Flavors-powered site to learn more and grab the app.

Java addicts outside of the Los Angeles area can get their fix, too, thanks to other apps by Blue Crow Media: San Francisco’s Best Coffee, New York’s Best Coffee and London’s Best Coffee, all with sites powered by Flavors.

If we just greeted you in your language, you can help us translate Flavors!

We’re looking for volunteers who can lend a hand with Dutch, Italian, Norwegian, Russian and Swedish translations, to add to our ever-growing list of supported languages.

Email support @ flavors.me with your details if you’re interested. We’ll send you a special thanks for your time when you’re done!

Customer support will be closed on Monday, July 4, in honor of U.S. Independence Day. In the meantime, enjoy these photos from around the Flavors community:

Matt Dunn

Hoon Park

Ryan Ressler

Theresa dela Cruz

Bryce Seifert

Charls Jiménez

Sara Swezy

Rebecca Koenig

Happy Fourth!

A long-requested option for the Flickr service is here! Now you can narrow down displayed photos to specific sets under Content > Manage (click the pencil icon and select “Photos” if it isn’t already checked, then select sets).

This also allows visitors to navigate to specific sets from a handy dropdown.

Enjoying Flickr sets? Let us know at @flavorsme or help.flavors.me!

LA-based band Dengue Fever, which artfully combines Cambodian pop with psychedelic rock, was recently featured on PBS Arts’ “SOUND TRACKS Presents: Quick Hits.” Watch them perform “Gendjer Gendjer” for PBS below and check out their Flavors-powered site, denguefevermusic.com.

Watch the full episode. See more Sound Tracks.

“Flavors ♥ Music” featuring “Mirror” by Kordan