Herr
Herrmann

My favorite websites of 2020

I’ve finally found the motivation to compile a list of my favorite websites! These following pages are very cool™ because they either look super nice, offer great content or do both. And they don’t feature the current trends that make the web worse: Offensive advertising, affiliate-based opinion making, obsessive user tracking. Let’s get started.

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Awesome Multiplayer Games, the site

Do you like playing games with other people? If so, you might often wonder what to play while looking at huge lists of games in your library or some game shop.

I wanted to make this easier and learn some new technology on the side (in this case backend development with NestJS), so I built a little webapp for finding awesome multiplayer games: multiplayer.page!

It’s also easy to add your own entries if you have a GitHub account – you’ll find all information here: https://github.com/herrherrmann/awesome-multiplayer-games – In fact, quite some people stumbled over this repo already and added new games which is fantastic!

In this sense: Game on and long live open source. ?

A re-design (again): Silver Ratio

About two years after the last re-design I decided to give it another go and optimize my site’s design again. This time I paid special attention to the selection of fonts in order to achieve consistent and readable typography. You’ll also notice that most of the decorating elements are gone in order to “let the letters speak” for themselves.

Before (Tea Time) and now (Silver Ratio).

Because it’s not exactly the golden ratio, I named this theme “Silver Ratio”. Its code is available on GitHub.

P.S.: In hindsight I realized that my layout and font choices (and maybe the whole idea of the re-design) was greatly inspired by the blog of Jan Heuermann! Thanks for that, Jan.

Some thoughts on “Maintaining Creativity”

I recently read “Maintaining Creativity / Psychology for Designers” by Frank Berzbach (currently not yet available in English but in German and some other languages) and it helped me think about and discover many insights about the topics creativity, productivity and different work environments. I want to share my main insights here.

As the title suggests, the book is mainly targeting designers who work in (or for) agencies and most of the examples align with that. However, in my opinion this knowledge can easily be applied to any job that revolves around working in an office environment and interacting with other people (i.e. software developers, project managers and many others). I recognized many of the situations described in the book during my time as a web developer at startups and also during my short periods as a freelancer and working remotely (the book also features a chapter about “properly working alone”).

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Dreaming of the perfect Ableton controller

12 March 2017

Disclaimer: This post is not interesting to you if you’re not that much into computer-based music production and/or MIDI controllers.

I recently acquired a new audio interface. It’s beautiful and I love it. It’s as if someone went around and asked people what they are expecting from a good audio interface. Then that someone went home (i.e. to his/her company) and built it. The amount of available audio interfaces on the market is incredible, and it shows how different people’s needs and manufacturers’ responses are. In my case, I was lucky enough to either have a very common setup that is being covered by this audio interface (and probably some others) or someone was eager enough to push for those exact requirements (could be a customer, product manager or someone else).

Regarding MIDI controllers, I think we’re on a similar level. Especially when it comes to small portable devices, there’s a big variety to choose from. Regarding Ableton Live controllers, the selection is understandably smaller. Right now there’s Ableton’s own Push, Akai’s APC 40 and Novation’s Launchpad that kind of started it all back in 2009.* Then you have smaller versions of those that sometimes even work well with iPads and are arguably more targeted towards (casual?) musicians on the go. I tried out many of those Ableton Live controllers and since I always found some flaws that bugged me out, I’m wondering whether someone will ever build the perfect Ableton controller for my needs (just like what happened in regard to the audio interface)?

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