Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category
Saturday, August 9th, 2008
Content on the web has become overtly monotonous in format. Top X Lists, X Reasons Why Y is Z, and so on. On rare occasion you come across something useful amongst the plethora of these lists but more often than not you finish reading and realized you’ve learned nothing.
We know why these articles receive Diggs, Stumbles, or what-have-you. The content is typically easy to digest almost mindlessly, the headlines are proven phrases which spark interest – marketing lingo for the news world. They bring in traffic, traffic leads to advertising, advertising leads to monetary returns. Or perhaps people really love watching the little numbers go up in their stats regardless of whether they’re producing something of value.
These posts are easy to write, simply gathering information or regurgitating the thoughts of others, and my aversion to writing pieces such as these is – at least in my mind – a large reason why things have been so silent here.
Rant over.
I believe it’s been just nearly three months since I’ve written here, eclipsing a previous dry spout back in November. It’s not that I don’t have things to say, or that I’m too busy or that I’m burnt out on writing articles. Hardly.
Well, maybe a little. Things are definitely busy.
This is essentially a post to break the streak of silence, because after going so long without writing one feels indebted to show up with some miraculous, enlightening piece. This isn’t one of them, but it is writing.
I’m planning on posting shorter blurbs here in the posts section, saving the occasional article for the articles section as I should have been doing the last three months. So it may be a slight change of pace from what I’ve published here in the past, but I’d really love to share more inspirational things, or articles that left me pondering things at night, and therefore posting more frequently. Sacrificing length and depth on the common post for an increase in frequency. So expect some new content, even if it only arrives in bits and pieces, shortly.
Posted in Personal, This Site | 13 Comments »
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 »
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 »
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
When the clock starts rolling around noon and stomachs start rumbling, lunch is on the mind. Delivery orders are placed, and you wait. Well, due to some poor design decisions on the lunch form I waited a long time. Worse yet, I was left disgruntled at the end of the situation, all because of poor form design; I ended up faxing the order form to their phone number.
The problem is pretty simple, but twofold. First, why a lightning bolt for a fax machine icon? Granted, there’s no hard rule about what to use as a fax icon, but this one is pretty suspicious. What’s worse is the layout of the next sentence. Notice that Fax is under the phone icon, and call is under the confusing fax icon. Mix in a bit of a rush and just glancing at the sheet while it’s in a fax tray and you have a recipe for disaster.
If you look even closer you can see the word Fax again underneath itself, and again under the phone icon.
The problem is easily solved, and one could say that putting the phone number in the far right helps increase it’s prominence due to it’s proximity to the edge of the page. A second benefit is that it reinforces the process they want you to follow: fax first, then call.
While the food was late, it was still tasty. I’ve eaten at Potbelly enough to be a repeat customer, so this wasn’t enough to put me off. But think of all the new customers that may never reach the point of repeat customer if they suffer a similar folly? Just another example of why good design pays off.
Anyone else had a similar experience with offline forms? Personally I find it interesting that such mistakes are probably still made in the online world. To be honest, until you’re a victim of such a situation or have someone tell you about it, I’m not sure it’s one of the issues you could catch easily!
Edit: By request I’ve uploaded the full .pdf of the menu for readers. For educational use only!
Posted in Personal, Usability | 8 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 »
Monday, March 31st, 2008
Design changes that is.
The problem for me is with the way things are set up now. I feel compelled to only write articles, and any time that I write something shorter and less important, it pushes the ones that are more important further down the page. So I need to do some reformatting to keep those important articles at the top, while allowing myself the freedom to post more often by not feeling the need to write a full article. The good news is, changing this means I’ll be posting more frequently.
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Posted in Personal, This Site | 10 Comments »
Wednesday, February 27th, 2008
This past evening, I’m sure some of you may be aware, that Twitter went on the fritz. Randomly logging people into different accounts, including permissions. As you may have guessed, chaos ensued. But the real problem here isn’t necessarily identity theft or some other more serious problem, though you could say it was identity theft, just not based on bank accounts or other monetary sources, but reputation.
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Posted in Identity, Personal | 7 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 »
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 »
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 »
Thursday, September 13th, 2007
What a day. As some of you may have noticed, Astheria.com went offline sometime about two days ago. Figuring it was normal downtime I fired off an email to the host to make sure and checked to see if it was back up on occasion. Problem was, I found the email returned to me with an unable to send message – the DNS servers were down too.
I’ve always been a tad ignorant of the perils of online hosting and the security that your data will always be there. After deciding I wasn’t going to put myself on their timeline I switched the domain’s nameservers over to my Media Temple account (something that should’ve been done long ago) and started putting the pieces back together.
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Posted in Personal, This Site, old | 6 Comments »
Monday, August 27th, 2007
Recently I’ve decided to swear off Windows for good. Which is difficult, because like many, I’ve been raised on Microsoft operating systems (and still fondly remember the days of DOS). Yet I have committed to the Mac way of life and have found that my routine for web development has changed significantly. This is probably due more in large part to my decision to go with a laptop over the traditional desktop I’ve been so used to.
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Posted in Apple, Personal | 15 Comments »
The offender? A lightning bolt icon indicating the fax number and some poor ordering
My revised order form
The bowl of chili and sandwich, only 60 minutes later than I had hoped!