Since it went live last week, I’ve received some questions about it and thought I’d take the time to answer them here. Feel free to ask more in the comments or share your thoughts as well, feedback is greatly appreciated.

“On which […] keywords did you search twitter?”

As of right now, there are eleven of them. Seems Twitter has a very strange limit for this, unless I’m mistaken. I’m working on creating a way to include more terms in the near future, however. For giggles, here are the current terms:

• Typography
• Typeface
• Serif
• Typographic
• Helvetica
• Verdana
• Ampersand
• Letterpress
• Caslon
• Palatino
• Futura

For the first few days it was live, Typetweets was one of the initial terms. Obviously this is hardly an extensive list, and if you have suggestions I’d love to hear them. There is a caveat that makes things a bit difficult however, if the term has any other uses, we end up pulling in tweets that don’t have anything to do with typography. For example, there is apparently a hotel or something named Clarendon that people like to discuss, a lot.

A term that I’m hesitant to include as well is font as it’s used so frequently, and by so many people, that it’s a bit of a double-edged sword. But I’m sure I’ll turn it on and off intermittently at times. Oh, the power…

“Will there be a filter function?”

Highly likely, there’s quite a few Helvetica haters out there who surely don’t want to read about people watching the Helvetica film.

“Do you mind sharing what’s under the hood?”

It’s a relatively simple thing in theory, but playing nice with Twitter’s servers complicates things a little. Essentially, this is what happens:

1. A cron job runs a PHP script every five minutes.
2. The PHP script sends a query out to Twitter, and gets the tweets back as data.
3. The data gets parsed through a decent bit of Regex to make it more useful.
4. The result is stored as a file on my server, so that when people view Typetweets, I’m not using any of Twitter’s servers to supply the data.
5. A bit of Javascript parses the data when you load the page and you enjoy reading.

“I’m ruined! How am I supposed to get any work done if there are 100 tweets to check out on typography?!”

That I cannot help you with unfortunately.

Nifty

I hope that answers a few people’s questions, but feel free to ask more. There’s no timeline for updates to Typetweets, but I already have a few upgrades figured out and just need to find time to add them, as well as some updates to the Typesites design. Reviews will also resume this week.

Over to you folks.

“I would say my biggest pet peeve related to the industry would be people focusing on technology instead of design, standards instead of users, and validation rather than innovation.” — Jeff Croft

Took the words out of my mouth.

Anyone else agree?

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.

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…

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:

New project created

Creating a new test session

Ready to start a session

Session finished

Exporting Video

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:

Cameron Moll’s site, Authentic Boredom; Classy, yet personable.

Elliot Jay Stock’s site; Edgy, a little bit of rebellion.

Shaun Inman’s site; Crisp, clean, minty.

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.

Designing the Obvious

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.

Don’t Make Me Think

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.

Analog In, Digital Out

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.

Thinking With Type

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.

The offender? A lightning bolt icon indicating the fax number and some poor ordering

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.

My revised order form

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.

The bowl of chili and sandwich, only 60 minutes later than I had hoped!

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!

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.