"A key element of risograph prints is the noise that you see all over them. They are covered with little dots of varying sizes."
A bit of noise can often go a long way to make a design wholesome (e. g. [1]), but in this case I honestly find it over the top. It's too much and too much in your face.
GitHub made a similar visualization a few years ago and also blogged about it: https://github.blog/engineering/engineering-principles/how-w...
But Shopify's looks like all-out nuclear exchanges, while GitHub's looks like the souls are being ripped from every living being on Earth by a malevolent invader.
I'd say GitHub's is more apt.
> Building the 2023 BFCM Globe was a journey in pushing the boundaries of what is possible with instancing and WebGL.
lol .. seems pretty dramatic. I didn't see anything in the article that looked remotely like it was pushing boundaries.
Still, nice read, and a pretty visualization to be sure!
The irony: all this mass consumption is not what makes "the globe" very happy.
All the waste from this mass consumption is what makes "the globe" unhappy.
How do we solve the "waste" problem?
Stop making "disposable" stuff that should be durable and reusable.
Stop making appliances out of plastic that break in 5 years, or with cheap components that the average person doesn't know how or have the ability to fix necessitating a electronic board replacement that costs 90% of a brand new unit.
Step 1. Recognize that you can't stop the waste if you don't stop the consumption.
Step 2. Stop the desire to consume by killing ads.
It's not even the ads. How do we fill the emptiness that makes us vulnerable, and creates a need to fill lives with distraction and numbness.
Heroin addicts I'v known, the ones that lived and the ones that didn't, taught me a whole lot more about our current state of technology than I'd ever bargained for.
I need more engineering blogs like this. Just seems like a fun project.
I want this but for news and events tracking using already published articles
Is there any open source like this?
You can start with this: https://github.com/vasturiano/globe.gl I've built a few visualizations with it. You'd have to extend it a bit to copy exactly what Shopfiy did, but all the basics are there. It's probably also not as optimized as the Shopify implementation.
I for one am glad you shared. Those fireworks are awesome.
Fair play, that is impressive. I am generally underwhelmed by Shopify, seeing them as another vulture capitalist way of leeching money out of small businesses the globe over, but props to this animation. Even the work gone into making the blog post is extremely impressive.
As someone who has worked in ecommerce for decades, Shopify is fantastic.
It's not the cheapest, nor is it the most expensive. It's not as powerful as some systems, but it's not weak. It's not the easiest system to work with, but it's also not the hardest.
What it is is right in the goldilocks zone, and it allows businesses to DO BUSINESS, not end up having to worry about or even think about many decisions.
Day-to-day I work across 4 ecommerce platforms and Shopify is the one that doesn't keep anyone awake at night and "just works". Sure there's a ton more stuff some of the other platforms we use can do, but we also have a LOT more meetings, dev tickets and headaches with those platforms.
For like 80%+ of 0 to $50m+ online businesses it is by far the best choice because it means the team can focus on connecting with potential customers and selling stuff and not have to allocate nearly as much time or headspace to the Storefront system.
If you don't like them leeching money from small businesses, you'll hate the army of overworked support staff (formerly "gurus") who are constantly on the precipice of being downsized and asked to turn over calls faster to keep costs down.
Long time Shopify customer here. Their fees are not bad at all. Have you tried selling on Amazon, Ebay or even Apples App Store?
They even have a warehouse partner that packs and ships for about the same cost as DIY.
>seeing them as another vulture capitalist way of leeching money out of small businesses the globe over
How so? Nobody forces small businesses to use Shopify, they use it because it's a good product.
It makes building and deploying a shop and integrating a payment processor a snap, rather than a massive project.
It’s a great choice for a vast number of small companies with other things to do.