Archive for the ‘Design’ Category
Thursday, May 15th, 2008
Typesites has reviewed sixteen websites with interesting typography so far, and it’s come time to reevaluate what the site is now that its had some time to settle and evolve. Four months may not seem like a terribly long time, but since the idea behind the site was relatively fresh I had no idea how it would be received, or used. Thankfully, the site has proven quite popular, and I’d like to take the chance to thank everyone who has taken the time to stop by. I’m extremely grateful for all the wonderful emails, comments, and guest authors; without you the site wouldn’t be possible. Cliché, I know, but it’s true.
I’m working on some updates to the design, as what exists currently was a bit rushed and doesn’t quite accomplish the goals that it should. To make use of the opportunity, this is a good time to add additional features as well—reviews still being the focal point of the site. As Typesites exists by and large from its readers and guest authors I think it’s only appropriate to ask you what type of content you would like to see on there.
So I’ll keep this short and sweet. What do you love about Typesites? What do you dislike? How would you feel about a side-blog that spotlights web typography techniques? How else can the site be improved? The floor is yours…
Posted in Design, Personal, Typography | 22 Comments »
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008
I was extremely excited today to receive an email from Clearleft that I had been selected to be a beta tester for their new application, Silverback. Silverback is a user testing application for Macs only that makes use of the hardware available to create a pseudo-user testing environment on demand.
I ran a few tests on coworkers this morning using the application and was simply blown away by its ease of use and useful features. Within 60 seconds I had my first project setup, my first user profile created and was running a test of Clockwork’s products. The most exciting part came when I ended the first test and exported the Quicktime movie file that was created.
Opening up the movie I was greeted by a full scale representation of my desktop, along with a picture-in-picture view of the user in the lower right hand corner. The application recorded everything that the webcam could see for facial reactions as well as audio from my Macbook Pro’s built in microphone. The screencast of the entire desktop allowed for me to watch what the user was doing as well as reported any clicks with small overlaid circles.
This type of basic user testing functionality built into my laptop and organized neatly in one application simply blew me away. It’s a great substitute for anyone without a dedicated testing lab (which few small scale companies have available), and even if you do have one; it makes for an awesome portable test station, no extra cameras or one way mirrors needed.
I’ll be posting more about my beta experiences in the near future, but it would be suffice to say that Silverback will be a must have application for anyone working on creating websites or interfaces for web applications. Since it allows for full desktop usage I’m sure it would also be super useful for anyone testing desktop applications as well.
For the latest on Silverback, you can follow the Silverback Twitter Account.
Enjoy the screenshots! Click them to view a larger version on Flickr:
Posted in Design, Personal, Usability | 22 Comments »
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008
There are merely the illusion of trends. A trend is a term for whatever the stylists are copying en masse at the time. What are stylists? Stylists are people who are technically proficient with the tools of the trade to create design, but lack knowledge of the design process. Rather than applying the process they simply find something they find cool at the time and reproduce a spin-off of it.
When you create something along the lines of the Web 2.0 look, or a hand drawn look for example, you are assigning attributes to whatever the content happens to be that may or may not be appropriate. Design communicates a visual message to a viewer, and when you communicate the wrong thing, you are failing your client.
In fact, this type of ‘design’ devalues real design. Just look across the blogosphere, look at the bountiful amount of Web 2.0 style sites for companies which have no qualities that fit the stigma that comes with Web 2.0; it just looks pretty. Look at the dozens of illustrative, organic feeling designs that have popped up recently. Someone told me that super-sized text is a new trend (when the size of type is considered a trend, may the Swiss have mercy on our souls).
To put it in one sentence, I really love Wikipedia’s definition of design:
Designing normally requires a designer to consider the aesthetic, functional, and many other aspects of an object or a process, which usually requires considerable research, thought, modeling, interactive adjustment, and re-design.
Everybody’s Doing It!
No. No, they’re not. Think of the industry rockstars; none of their sites look like each others or any others for that matter. There are many knock-offs but they all pale in comparison to the original design. The reason why the remakes can never ascend to that level of design is because the design is no longer communicating. Each personal site design visually encapsulates the personas of many of these people:
None of the above three sites look the same, nor will you find any other prominent designer’s sites mimicking their style. Can you imagine, say, a law firm in Shaun Inman’s design? No. Even though the site is very clean and professional, it has a certain quality to it that is particular to Shaun. This is the core foundation of design, the very thing that separates the designer from bloke who figured out how to save as HTML from Microsoft Word. Creating anything with disregard to emotions, preconceptions, and message is not design.
If the people many of us look up to are coming up with great visual communications which succeed at communicating the proper ideas, shouldn’t we be following suit? If you do believe in trends, maybe the next one should be unique and communicative.
Posted in Design, Identity | 28 Comments »
Thursday, April 24th, 2008
As someone who is always reading three books at a time, I’ve read more than a fair few of books on aspects of the web design industry. Unfortunately I think quite a few of them are duds; while others are particularly good. So good in fact, that I lend them out frequently to friends. Recently, one of them asked me for a list of the ones that I thought were the best, and I thought I would share it here as well.
Designing the Obvious was the book that created my passion for user interface design. Many of the principles within the book drive my thoughts about the tandem of simplicity and user experience. As far as application interface design goes, there is no better book for theory. That said, the information in the book is applicable to all facets of interactive design. The title itself, is pretty self-explanatory (obviously!) and the book makes for a good read, rather than being overly technical.
A must-have for anyone working with front-end design on the internet, Krug’s book has aged particularly well. The examples are in most cases no longer on the internet, but the principles and ideologies are still very relevant. If you don’t own this book and you do any form of web design, you need to at the very least borrow this from the library; though you’ll probably want a copy as your bible. My copy is getting pretty dirty on the covers.
Brendan Dawes is a curious man. Analog In, Digital Out is a book about interaction – sort of. Dawes takes a look at how every day events can be information that can be harnessed to produce designs, and frequently challenges the way we see computers today. The examples in book even include snippets of code to reproduce what he has made. Reading this book opens a new way of abstract thinking. Someone is going to read this one day and create some sort of technological marvel.
This book introduced me to the world of typography. Over time I’ve found that nearly any book on typography repeats the history of type for the first half of the book, and while this one is no exception, it presents it in an interesting manner. The examples and explanations are more manageable than The Elements of Typographic Style and I would highly recommend this as a starting point for those interested in learning more about typography.
Posted in Design, Personal, Typography, Usability, Wordpress | 13 Comments »
Sunday, April 13th, 2008
This redesign was sparked by quite a few things. But what truly set it off was coming across a post on Greg Storey’s Airbag. To summarize, he writes about a moment of nostalgia of the pre-web 2.0 era; back when the visual differences between sites were vast and everyone worked to be unique in some way or another.
I absolutely loved reading the post (even though it is from 2006) and decided to push Astheria.com to be a little different from other blogs. Fortunately, this sat pretty well with me since I wanted to pull the articles out of the mess of lesser posts anyway. This makes things a little different on its own but I hope it will drastically improve the findability of what most people are going to care about. There are no longer sections for metadata or categories, and the archives are a bit radical. It’s still a blog, it still has a relatively conservative layout, but it’s a step in the right direction I think.
I have some interesting thoughts regarding the use of human computation and blogs that I didn’t have time to address in depth, and that’s something I’ll be working on behind the scenes for a while. Look for it in the future.
A Work in Progress
For now, I’m still working on tweaking and fixing for different browsers, but I’d love some feedback. It’s going to take a good bit of polish to bring this to the level of the previous design.
Posted in Design, Personal, This Site | 36 Comments »
Tuesday, March 18th, 2008
The official Wordpress blog posted up a nice sneak peek into the Wordpress 2.5 release, and intriguingly enough, most of it seems to be an interface update thanks to the fine folks from Happy Cog. Excitedly, I grabbed the release candidate and installed it on my laptop to play with. While the experience was primarily positive, there were some things that irked me. This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means, but the ones that I felt most passionate about are here.
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Posted in Design, Usability, Wordpress, article | 32 Comments »
Wednesday, March 5th, 2008
In response to a few comments on ‘My Last Portfolio Sucked, Yours Might Too’ I’ve done some more digging and have come up with a short list of portfolios that I feel cover the right bases. They may not be completely perfect, but if you’re looking for an example of the right direction, hopefully you’ll find it here.
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Posted in Design, Identity, Usability, article | 26 Comments »
Tuesday, February 12th, 2008
Last evening I was browsing a few portfolios after having a discussion with a friend who was redoing his own. I have to say it was a frustrating experience just looking through a few. In fact it was so frustrating, this post came as a result. After browsing 200 portfolios and keeping track of certain criteria I know I never want a job in human resources.
At any rate, I hope this will be useful to those of you looking to create or reevaluate your portfolio. Yes I’m an opinionated bloke, but I think you’ll see my reasoning as relatively common sense items that people just overlook.
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Posted in Design, Identity, Usability, article | 76 Comments »
Monday, February 11th, 2008
The original plan was to be biweekly because of the chaos and anarchy of having a guest author each week. But, the hell with that; I’ll be posting a review weekly. Timelines be damned.
On another note the site has done very well during it’s first week, and there’s already a new review up. Thank you to anyone who has commented, emailed, linked or whatever. It’s been fun.
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Posted in Design, Personal, This Site | 3 Comments »
Monday, February 4th, 2008
So what is it? Well, since I’m tired and cranky from fixing browser bugs all night, I’ll let a snippet of the about page do the talking:
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Posted in Design, Personal, Typography | 9 Comments »
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008
I’m sure you’ve read the articles recently posted on A List Apart. Although the issue isn’t exactly breaking news as this methodology has been rumored for a few months. Perhaps the moaning should have begun then as things are likely set in motion and are not likely to stop or change course.
That said, I’ve found myself wondering as I’ve read numerous blog posts about the subject and wondered why some things have yet to be pointed out. Feel free to call me out for being an unrealistic fool.
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Posted in Design, Uncategorized, Usability | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, January 16th, 2008
While reading Brendon Dawes’ Analog In, Digital Out, he speaks briefly in an early chapter about his inspiration—everyday things. While this is not exactly a novel idea that hasn’t been reiterated about design for many a year, he does make another statement that truly deserves some reiteration:
if you’re designing for the web, why look at loads of design portals that show loads of web sites that essentially all look the same? […] Surely they offer too narrow a view to be really inspirational.
Quite.
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Posted in Design, Identity | 11 Comments »
Tuesday, January 8th, 2008
I’m tempted to post the same generic crap that most others do in a situation such as this: “I’ve been busy.” But in truth that would be a bit of an understatement so instead I’ll list what’s waiting in the wings and a few things that bug me in the web world as of late. Chew what you will.
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Posted in Design, Personal, This Site | 5 Comments »
Thursday, November 1st, 2007
An exciting time indeed, just six days away will mark my first venture to a real sizable web conference. It’ll also be my first time on the east coast, and the jump in city size from Minneapolis to New York should provide a pretty good squelching feeling in my stomach.
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Posted in Design, Personal | 10 Comments »
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007
Every time you venture to a website that gives advice about websites, you’re bound to run into the line “content is king.” In truth, the value of your site is by and large that of your content. Aesthetics and marketing only go so far. People come to a site with a goal, and that goal is always content focused. Yet we seem to often sacrifice this in the name of design.
Our evangelism for semantic code is all in the name of usability, many of us spend time in design critiques or wireframe discussions about the usability of workflows, the proper words to describe a key menu element, or even going to bizarre lengths to keep out that one last wrapper div that we feel we could find a way around. But at the end of all this, we’re using image replacement on header text, and leaving content handling in the hands of the questionable practices of rich-text emulators. Nothing wrong with that, right? It’s a pretty standard practice on the web today.
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Posted in Design, Usability | 5 Comments »
Thursday, October 11th, 2007
Granted, you may be a most excellent designer in your field, whether that be newspaper layout, graphic design, or whatever. Odds are, however, you don’t have that same level of expertise in the world of web design. So why not? You have the essential skills in your mind, the capability, you’re capable! However, being capable is great when you’re designing your personal blog, your MySpace profile, and that site for your neighbor’s book club. However, clients tend not to see this and figure that since you know HTML, hey you can make them a website too.
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Posted in Design | 31 Comments »
Friday, September 28th, 2007
Rett Martin
1:21
I use bloglines to track my blogs. Before bloglines I used to always visit the individual sites and in doing that you take in the blog’s brand or identity, however when you read stuff through bloglines, you lose that and everything becomes bloglines-branded
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Posted in Design, Identity, Personal | 12 Comments »
Monday, September 24th, 2007
Blogs have become the most popular self-publishing platform available on the web. While the weblog has been in the mainstream for a moderate period of time there are some conflicting user conventions at play between different software.
The real issue here is that the format of a blog is different from that of a conventional website and has generated a new set of user conventions based on its format. These have had a deeper impact on the web than is visible at first glance, many of these conventions have carried over to news websites as well as other areas of the web and mostly are expected of any site where the content changes frequently with a headline with an accompanying article format.
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Posted in Design | 6 Comments »
Thursday, September 6th, 2007
From coffee shops, to shopping malls, to schools, to wherever, the new iPod Touch just brought the mobile web to a much larger audience. We all know iPod’s sell like hot cakes and now the drooling sensation we’ve all felt about the iPhone is no longer going to be held in check by the stiff contract and service fees from AT&T. So given the iPhone hype and iPod success rate, my guess is that this just might be a hit and sell like hotcakes.
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Posted in Apple, Design, Mobile Web | 10 Comments »
Friday, August 31st, 2007
Text alignment is always a tricky issue, especially on the web where we are at the mercy of text rendering, sizing, and window space all at the discretion of the viewer. However, all forms of alignment have their place on the web. But before we get to the decision making process, let’s have a closer look at our options.
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Posted in Design, Typography, article | 8 Comments »
Wednesday, August 15th, 2007
Design is broken up into a number of basic principles that apply to all design from type creation to painting to page layout, both on the web and in print. However, especially on the web, these rules tend to be forgotten and we just go with what feels “right.” This isn’t because designers are feeling too loose to abandon these rules, but rather, most people working on the web don’t even know they exist – if they do, they don’t understand how to use them.
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Posted in Design, article | 30 Comments »
Sunday, August 12th, 2007
Meanwhile sans-serif fonts run in fashion cycles between Arial and Verdana with a spurt of Helvetica, Trebuchet or Tahoma use coming and going. Most of the remaining web-safe fonts are either mainly useful in certain applications, such as Courier or are a sin to use in most of the design community (Comic Sans).
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Posted in Design, Typography | 15 Comments »
Friday, August 10th, 2007
I know few people read these things so I will keep it brief, and if I do begin to bore you please do take the time to drop your thoughts in the comments. Thanks for visiting!
The basic concept for this design is something I tend to express in frustration every time I come across a website and am forced to bump the text size up or wait for all of the imagery to load up so that I can enjoy the content. The web is all about content and the goals of users is (in the majority of cases) to view that content or submit some form of content. Anything that complicates that process is just… unnecessary. I feel I’ve accomplished my goal of putting the content front and center.
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Posted in Design, This Site, old | 21 Comments »
