Suprb is the alter ego of Andreas Pihlström, born and raised in Stockholm / Sweden. Specialised in typography, code, movable and static shapes since 1978.
2009 and 2008 has been two great years for me when it comes to fonts. Not only has my font 'Myld' been 2nd most sold font of 2008 at the YouWorkForThem online shop, also topping the top 10 best sellers at HypeForType along with my other font 'Wyld'. If you're unfamiliar with HypeForType: "It's a hotbed of typographic talent. A year long labour of love that's finally seen the light of day. The dream/passion/obsession of one Alex Haigh, a sucker for a bit of well crafted type. The vision was to create a type foundry showcasing the best in today's typographic talent, as well providing a platform for keen eyed creatives to find and buy truly unique, hand-crafted fonts to complement their work. We hope it's worked. Time (and type) will tell."
Every 3rd month, HypeForType invites a small selection of designers to contribute to HypeForType's exclusive font packs. I was invited to volume 1 but decided to contribute to volume 2 instead because I wanted to submit my latest creation: Capset. (Capset was originally custom-designed for the Nordic regions largest magazine CAP&Design - specialized for graphic designers.) Volume 2 of HypeForType's font pack includes faces from Non-Format, Research Studios, WMW Graphics, Richard Perez and me.
Back in 2006, I made this decorative, swirly font called Cloud. I decided to release it for free and anyone could just download it directly from Subtype. Three years later, me and Si Billam, ex tDR-designer, start babbling about designing fonts together. We both liked the old Cloud design and decided to re-work it a bit.
We're finally finished and both satisfied with the result. You can buy the font at YouWorkForThem for $29.99.
My dear friends over at Mediatemple have supported Dropular with extraordinary hosting plans for almost a year now, but with the enormous boost of visitors lately, we were forced to come up with a solution - fast. Dropular has become popular in less than a year. Increased from 4500 unique visitors / day (Feb '09 (the birth) — June '09) to the triple in just a few months. Not only the people visiting the site, there are thousands of feeds out there parsing images from Dropular. Then we have the API which is used on several projects made by people (including me — the iPhone App). This altogether causes shit load of heavy traffic. I felt I couldn't ask for more help by Mediatemple so I decided to search for a solution.
After some digging for a good and stable way to run Dropular (and to make a long story short), Dropular will move from Mediatemple to a Swedish superb web host founded by Rasmus Andersson (Creative & Art Director at Spotify) who will take care of the Dropular development from now on. Finally, I can concentrate on designing the UI, which has been very hard because of the few hours spent on development.
The new Dropular we're working on is completely rewritten and designed, and we are working hard to get the this version up and running on Feb 1st, 2010.
Updates will be posted both here and over at Twitter.
PS; your old pinched items will be untouched.
PS2; A BIG thank you goes to Mediatemple for all the help during 2009! Love you.
Decided to launch the early version of the micro-forum project I've been working on lately. I named it "Qonversation" which perhaps sounds and looks silly, but the Q stands for Quick. Qonversation = Quick + Converse / Conversation / Conversations. The launch has been great. People seems to enjoy the product but still a bit confused on what it is.
Micro-forum-chat-app is the easiest way to describe Qonversation. People compare it with Twitter because of its functionality. This is both correct and not. Instead of "following" people you think is interesting, you "follow" / "join" a topic / Qonversation. This way, you connect and find more (like-minded) people who shares the same interest(s) as you. Qonversation also suggests other topics that might interest you, based on your given "interests" as well as which topics you've joined.
The idea of Qonversation is not be become a big, new social network, but to experiment with the idea on how a chat/forum platform might look like.
If you're interested in joining the service, the new invitation URLs will be posted here, so keep an eye on this blog post.
The current URL is:http://qonversation.com/signup?code=supermariohttp://qonversation.com/signup?code=superexcited
This post will describe my experience with Apple and it’s iPhone Developer Team, while trying to get my Dropular app approved.
Dropular can best be described as an online media bookmarking tool. You can share your favorite images, videos and links found on the net. The site has about 400-600 posts plus 10000-15000 unique visitors a day. Similar sites are Buamai and Ffffound (both great resources).
Anyways, in April 2009, I decided to start learning Obj-C and downloaded the iPhone SDK and started to Google my way through tutorials, answers and samples. That resulted, a month later (May), in the first Dropular iPhone browser app ever made. When the product was finished, I uploaded it to Apple’s "iTunes Connect" for approval. Hours.. days.. weeks passed and finally I heard back from Apple — "Rejected". Their motivation was (quoted from their e-mail sent to me):
"...it contains inappropriate sexual content and is in violation of Section 3.3.14 from the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement which states: "Applications may be rejected if they contain content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, sounds, etc.) that in Apple's reasonable judgement may be found objectionable, for example, materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic, or defamatory."Please refer to the attached images for examples:"
The three images above are what they sent me. And, take a look at the 3rd image. I mean... come on...
Ok, the Dropular iPhone app got rejected, but meanwhile, my dear friend Michael Paul Young, who’s behind the wonderful site Buamai, was in the process of updating his iPhone app (also named Buamai). The main update was to add Dropular support to the app. That means, the very same content that was denied from Apple was going to be added to the Buamai app. I really did not think this update was going to get approved by Apple, but guess what — it was. I fired up the new, updated Buamai app on my iPhone, searched for “Breast” and voila, the same image popped up:
While browsing "Breast" on the Buamai app, these images also showed up, both grabbed from Dropular:
I wrote an e-mail to Apple and told them about the Buamai app update and how this app had the exact same functionality as my original Dropular app (Randomizer and Search). So basically, the Buamai app and it's Dropular support is the exact same thing as my app that got rejected. Funny huh?
I really thought Apple would get back to me fast, but no. Weeks passed and I thought about giving the whole thing the finger and trashing the app. Then all of the sudden, an e-mail from Apple showed up telling me:
"Hello, We have been trying to reach you. Please respond with a valid phone so that I can call you back. You may also call me at ***-***-*****. Thank You"
I replied that I was unable to call and asked why Apple wanted me to call. Silence… and two days later, the exact same auto-generated e-mail was sent to me. I never replied.
On August 24th 2009 (about 2 months later), the Ffffound team successfully got their app "iFound!" approved by Apple. I bought it, browsed around and found several images of female nipples and asses… example:
Now, I re-submitted a new version of the Dropular app, which now contains a silly blacklist of keywords people can’t search for. I’ve also sent Apple an e-mail asking them politely to approve the app. Also called Apple.
Apple told me the approvements were good. I also told them about the recently approved similar apps (Buamai and iFound!), but the person I talked to told me that he could not compare the Dropular app with other's (fair enough, eventhough I didn't quite agree) and that Apple will get back to me shortly.
In October 25th, 2009 ( two month later ), I've e-mailed Apple asking why it takes such long to get a rejection or approval and how much time it usually takes. The answer(s) I received was:
"Dear Andreas, Your application, Dropular, is requiring unexpected additional time for review. We apologize for the delay, and will update you with further status as soon as we are able. Thank you for your patience."
So, basically no rejection, no approval. But, all of the sudden, the very same auto-generated e-mail from Apple asking me to call was added to my dear inbox. By this time, I couldn't help but smile and thought the app was doomed. But, we called and the person we spoke to, told us to re-submit the app once again (why?!), not because it has been rejected, I just needed too. I logged in to my iTunes Connect account to re-submit the app when, to my surprise, I saw the little red lamp next to the app (red lamp = rejected app). The damn application was, once again, rejected but this time without noticing me!
I e-mailed Apple and asked why this has happened without my knowledge. No reply, but on October 31th, 2009, the Dropular App was approved.
Here is a video put together of how the app works:
The submission time all together took about 5 months, for a simple image viewer-app. Amazing. Oh well, thanks Apple for finally approving my crappy app.
I've been working on a site for a newly-started design studio named Academy based in Vancouver / Canada. The inquiry was to design and come up with an unique way how to showcase their work. After some brain storming, two keywords popped up; chaos and order. This is a prototype of displaying an "imperfect" (chaos) "grid" (order).
Looking forward to see the site getting filled with their work.
The idea / design / grid is slightly inspired by one of my previous Suprb portfolio sites that was launched late 2008.
