Chris K
was kind enough to review the tweaks I had made to his original
Updated Today plugin
. He endorsed the removal of
pngfix.js
but complained that my use of
bloginfo()
caused the new plugin to fail on his WordPress install. He also revealed his intent to make certain features of the plugin available to […]
Bret Victor posted an excellent paper,
Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface
, over a year ago, but there are valuable lessons within that most of us have yet to learn. It is a good read, but don’t try to print it…
Iain Barker discusses a nice way to test content structures in
Measuring the Success Of a Classification System
today on
Boxes and Arrows
. It would be ideal to use such a technique on a
hierarchically-organized menu-driven embedded interface
.
Courtesy of
Weblog Tools Collection
comes
Chris K
’s
Updated Today plugin
, which displays a banner at the top left of your WordPress blog if a post exists in the loop with today’s date as its post date. It is a simple and effective idea, and coded without much fuss; it uses the
wp_head
and
wp_footer
[…]
Core77 forgets that reductivism
is the essence of minimalism.
Not minimal
.
Minimal
.
Cuyahoga County, Ohio to Diebold:
you suck
Three things I need to read in the next day or so:
D log: The design planning skill set
,
D log: 11 things you should have learned in “Economics and Design”
,
Jeffrey Veen: Chatting with Irene Au
.
Uncle Barry pointed me to this
BusinessWeek article about Microsoft Silverlight
and asked:
I wonder if you have any insights into this Adobe/ Microsoft rivalry that’s brewing here…
My take:
It is fitting that Microsoft is going after online video; the animation capabilities of Flash are nearly forgotten. But online video sites like
YouTube
successful are successful […]
Josh Porter has an
insightful article about simplicity
up at UIE.com. I find his tie-up, that simplicity isn’t embodied only in interfaces but in the decisions that surround them, to be especially relevant.
Excel 2007 makes some flashy charts. Charts that are maybe too flashy, and requiring of much clicking and prodding to simplify. But why cast stones when you can
pick up a hammer
?
The slides from Steven Anderson’s 2007 IA Summit presentation
amplify many of the things I have been thinking about lately as my team labors to coax an old-line company toward new-line thinking.
An article in the L.A. Times
highlights families who have not given their homes over. This makes sense to me; the children have to learn to live among adults somehow, yes?
Very few people seemed to notice Joshua Bell
playing for an hour in L’Enfant Plaza. (Thanks,
Erin
)
No, really.
In a magazine, a pullquote can pull a browsing reader into an article by highlighting a provocative comment or deft turn of phrase, or help steel a reader’s resolve to press on, teasing them with a little deferred gratification. That magazine-ey feel can be helpful on sites with long, multi-page articles that are otherwise […]
Some time ago I was asked to build a multi-day date-picking interface that was to accept dates selected from a calendar and display them in a list without making a round-trip to the server. Since this was for a web application with an international audience, I needed to handle different date formats (localization) and languages […]
Logo for a (now defunct) portal focused on crafting and operating incentive programs for sales, creative, and operational staff members in small and medium businesses.
Why it works
The simple idea of increased achievement is captured in the vertical bars extending from the word “goal.”
What I would like to change
This cut of Futura is a little fiddly […]
No video?
See it at BrightCove
.
Key points from the talk:
The design process, while iterative, is largely a destructive process, where many many ideas are generated and nearly all of them are eventually thrown out. Quality at the end depends greatly on having a large quantity of options to sift through at the beginning.
A sketch is […]
Inspirational:
Bennett Robot Works
. I used to make little robot guys out of discarded electronics parts (resistors, electrolytic capacitors, small PCBs and whatnot), but these are really excellent (and larger).
Logo for a Mac-centric IT consultancy in San Francisco, primarily serving advertising and graphic design firms as well as doing a little screen-on-screen work for Hollywood.
Why it works
News Gothic is authoritative but approachable in lowercase. The glyph is well-balanced and features an active red arrow springing out of the page. The red and black were […]