How did you come to be at QBN? Tell us the story, no matter how dull.
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- fooler4
I think I searched for how to make a lens flare effect in photoshop or some kind of free PS filters and stumbled across NewsToday.
I was blown away by the community and the talent and have been here ever since.
- jonny_quest_lives5
@scarabin "QBN CERTIFED APPAREL"
- The Americans call it Swiss Design...jonny_quest_lives
- Lol. Awesomescarabin
- I still got mineYakuZoku
- I have a few of these. Got them at that event Krop put together at the Getty. Met a few cool peeps there. :)sea_sea
- It stays.Chimp
- Worked with Jason and Folkert at Agency.com and they got me on newstoday and I have never left - still my home screenriteshpatel
- scarabin3
i found pictures from that night! the event that put newstoday on my radar. it was at the knitting factory. i met Cam Deleon, a painter who did TOOL albums. probably found out about the event through his myspace.
- flol@#1Nairn
- Tara McPherson poster?PhanLo
- One of 300 https://www.dking-ga…scarabin
- ^ Quite cool seeing her early style unpolished.PhanLo
- cannonball19783
Was pointed to it while in college in 2001. It was Newstoday, and there was a gray site and also a brown site if I remember correctly? K10k, Surfstation, etc were all regular visits along with this one.
Newstooodaaaay! My roommate always sung it after I went to the site, with different variations. Boozetoday, Boobstoday, etc.
- utopian1
That is like remembering what outfit that you wore at your 21st birthday party.
- scarabin8
I had just come back from ‘Nam and was on my way to visit an old friend, when i was stopped and harassed by the local sherriff. He and his goons wrestled me back to the station, where one of them attempted to shave me with a safety razor ‘cause he didn’t like my hair. I lost it, unleashing my fury, fueled by the horrors i saw during my service, and the anger i felt for these simpleton fucks. Before I knew it it was a full-on manhunt. I ducked into a nearby forest where i used my hard-earned survival skills to pick them off one-by-one using various traps and strategies learned from the Vietnamese people. I narrowly escaped with my life, but at what cost?
- spl33nidoru8
QBN, K10K, PixelSurgeon, Design is Kinky....
Despite a much contested (by me at least) redesign in the '10s, QBN prevailed
- I’ve never visited any of thosenb
- Gotta say, the Newstoday welcoming chime was a distinguishing feature that made it specialspl33nidoru
- @nb Those are classic. Same with threeohContinuity
- These websites had a block somewhere on front page linking to the others.
There was a sense of community, and finding one ultimately led you to the others.spl33nidoru - Surfstation, dreamless....drgs
- yayhooray, threeoh...koma_
- shapesalad4
Back in the early internet days of 2002 ish, it was the done thing to put on your portfolio website, not just an About Page, Work, Contact page - but also a 'Links' page. Here you'd 'shout out' to your mates or favourite illustrators/designers and other such sites.
I'd spend many an evening getting lost in a rabbit hole of going through link pages to other link pages, stumbling across awesome portfolios and cool sites (back when there was no standard boring UI/UX rules and everyone went crazy with Flash).
And at some point someone must have linked to NewsToday. It was bookmarked and found to be *the* hub for the creative community. I remember promoting my portfolio website on there in that channel where you could post links to your stuff.
Then it change to QBN, and that white background has caused far too many late nights by keeping me awake with it's too bright white. When dark mode?
And my usual work routine is - when at that point where you know the next steps are going to be hard and you need to steel yourself to put something together - ah, just take a break and type 'qbn' in the browser. I never bookmarked and always type 'q' 'b' 'n', like a relfex.
Most the time I think, what a load of gutter trash and odd taste you lot have.. but sometimes the site is useful, or even inspiring.
- Heavybackpack was a good site for a while, but lacked the community of qbn.shapesalad
- oey_oey1
I went to the Art School's Library I was attending and there was this guy checking Newstoday next to me and this happened several times.
And one day I did a collab for a magazine from Lisbon and the web designer of this magazine was also checking Newstoday. I was like hm...it looks good...a lot of stuff for my eyes but definitely good.
So I started to check regularly till I met kodap and he was the person who I got the click from that made me sign up.
This is my third or fourth account.
- Are you still in contact with Kodap?Nairn
- When I go to Portugal I see him when I visit the town he lives. Maybe I saw him 5 times in the last 5 years. That guy helped me a lot.oey_oey
- If he know my website is still not ready after 10 years he'll kill me.oey_oey
- He was/is a good bloke. Part of a group of users I still somewhat miss.Nairn
- As a person, he's really calm, reliable, helpful, simple and a really great guy that happens to be extremely talented.oey_oey
- uan3
I was on a mission to discover this new thing called cyber space and probably typed 'design' in altavista.digital.com (search didn't even have an own domain then) and newstoday.com came up.
or maybe someone on irc (I used to hang out in the undernet) told me about this forum on the www.
I liked it because it was well designed with the functionality in the 4 columns and had all this amazing content from designers who liked computers from all around the world. also the public voice was something new to me, I could ask stuff and get answers here.
a big chunk of my knowledge about computers and design came out of this site. there were not a lot of coder / designers around me irl at that time. I think I learned Illustrator from lifeinvector, asked a lot of AS2 questions and later AE questions here and always got better answers than my teachers had in design school.
- Weren’t lifeinvector and transfatty an item at one stage?mort_
- might be the case, they prob. dated or posted something about it in public voice.uan
- I also recall one night somebody was desperate or hungry and transfatty ordered a pizza for that person. that virtual community story blew my mind.uan
- Ha, sweet. What a gent!mort_
- Nairn7
It was 20-odd years ago, like I can remember.
- Well, fuckt, what does it say about me that I can remember, then?
I need a life, is what.Continuity
- Well, fuckt, what does it say about me that I can remember, then?
- thumb_screws2
Around 2002/03 either a co-worker got me on to it or it was linked to via Design is Kinky? Looong time ago. Lurked for years but think I signed up while I while I was living in London so I could contribute to what you listening to and FMT threads. I used to get amped for the FMT threads, exposed me to so much music I would never of come across through my usual circles.
- nb12
My favorite thing about reading all these posts is now remembering how back in the early ‘00s it was really common to learn about a website by just seeing the site on someone else’s screen and asking them what it was.
The good ol’ days
- exador13
must've been around 2001-2002? something like that.
i'd been a massive fan of k10k, Zeldman, pixelsurgeon, and on and on etc...you know all the rest of those sites....
i think my path was k10k - Holodeck73 - newstodayand if i recall correctly, one of the first things i did on NT was get in an arguement with transfatty lol....
anyhow, I've been here a long, long time. I announced the birth of my daughter here back in the day, and she's about to turn 19 this summer...
like it was mentioned before...
came for the design, stayed for 'teh drama' ;)
- Longcopylover1
Don't remember.
But probably via ffffound.com
- i_monk2
I used to check its predecessor h73 or whatever it was called, and then one day it was called Newstoday so I joined. 2000, 2001?
- Beeswax5
Very dull.
Random design related site search I guess.Why I stayed?
Because of everything that's not design related I think.
- cannonball19786
I killed a man by accident. I was on my way to get cigs from the bar real quick and cross some train tracks in the foggy dusk when a hobo jumped out from the other side of the berm.
“Qooooobs” he rasped, wiggling his fingers through his fingerless gloves at me.
I told him I didn't want to be bothered but he chased after me, hauling a strangely flat hobo satchel on his back. I ran down the tracks for a bit hoping I could lose him but when I crossed he tackled around my legs and we both fell down the gravel.
A short struggle ensued. As the bell for an approaching train began to ring I hit him over the head with a brick and he flew limp to one side.
No response. No pulse. No wallet or ID, but the strange satchel contained a binder with the word “portfolio” stenciled across. Within the leaflets, strange printouts of unrelated paper stock, drawings, logos.
Everything bore a strange and unnecessary style to it where all the lines ran at 45 degree angles. The last leaflet bore a stack of what seemed like business card-shaped compact disks. On the back of this satchel, a sticker with the letters Q B and N.
Suddenly, a hand shot up, grabbed me by the collar, to which I responded by beating the mans skull into a soupy pulp with my brick as the train flew by in a deafening blizzard of clattering steel.
I have since been looking for clues as to who this man was. A uni student? A young designer. I sometimes interview youngsters for a fake, nonexistent job hoping I might see his mushed up face someday whereupon I might redeem myself.