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Chris Montoya details the tools int he top tray of his CSS toolkit, including browser resetting, percentage finagling (minus 0.4% on column totals, for example), and more good ones. Worth a look even if you fancy yourself a CSS brahmin.
Category: Asides Main Categories
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Smashing shows off 35 (through they claim “over 35) examples of well-executed large type in web design. I’m a big fan of large type and have not used it to the extent I’d like to, thought it is beginning to creep in to my work.
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Lessig on point as usual. The refrain: “Three easy cases that governments consistently get wrong.” The common thread: the influence of money on politics and media resulting in the destruction of public goods, i.e. corruption.
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Jeff Atwood has a great post revealing visually how SQL joins work. this is an area that even experienced DBAs have trouble with, so his well-executed venn diagrams are especially welcome. Good info, good info design.
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Fred Stutzman has begun exploring the URL-space of tinyurl. Investigating random tinyurls is only the beginning.
“We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.” — JFK
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Dn Saffer (of Adaptive Path fame) has begun a wiki to collect information abot gestural interface patterns. It is in its infancy, but already inspirational. ‘ve contributed, and plan to do more.
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MagSafe comes to the 3.5mm audio jack. This is sorely needed; a USB A version would be even better. The leverage one can put against one’s motherboard is staggering, especially with Belkin cables. Also, port covers for 17” MacBook Pro.
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Thibaut Sailly (a french industrial designer based in Montreal) details his process for concepting/designing an ur-simple GSM phone. A six-part series so far. I like his very spare site design as well.
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Livia Labate details how she encourages her coworkers (and herself) to collect and publish ideas rather than letting them fade quickly away. I’m going to make such a wall RIGHT NOW.
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Peter Merholz drives home the argument that it is not the design of a product that matters, it is the design of the whole experience using the product, surrounding the product. Definitely worth a read.
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David Armano quickly outlines his idea that the core work in experience design (and other disciplines) is synthesis, specifically the creation of artifacts that present a vision of a solution from the relatively raw inputs of researchand feedback.
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Sometimes I feel like I work at the place Seth is describing. Unlikely, but sometimes it feels that way.
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I don’t usually cover cooking stories, but this one satisfies a need (I have struggled needlessly with broiling for some time) and tickles my sense of simplicity. Broiling in a cast-iron skillet (preheated) sounds like a tasty time-saver.
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A simple progress bar implemented in CSS. Unfortunately it does not degrade nicely; the data does not come from the HTML. This could easily be remedied by altering the javacript to seek and update data in the page.
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This blog showcases pictures of unusual objects and asks: What is it? Each week there are new objects to puzzle over. Examining the rarer ones presents a fun mechanical-thinking challenge, and sometimes I gain insight into other problems I’m working on.
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Do not do this. While the effect is nice, this implementation adds a lot more markup than necessary to the page, duplicates content, misuses the fieldset tag, and interrupts reading.
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New hardware is commonly bundled with VERY BAD software. This is as true in the medical device industry as it is for consumer electronics companies such as Canon and HP. It doesn’t have to be this way.
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Lou Carbone usefully and interestingly holds forth on a sometimes forgotten component of customer experience: emotion. A great presentation; if you are in business AT ALL you should watch this.
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Allows basic Subversion use directly via the finder and overlay icons, much like TortoiseSVN on Windows XP. Beyond excellent, and about time. I remember spending much too long tweaking and massaging my custom overlay icons for TortoiseSVN, so I expect I’l
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I’m a sucker for good icons. Smashing has put together links to twenty or so sets of free ones, many of which deserve a look and others that might just be the conceptual springboard to something better.
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“Charlie” (Mr. Enterprise 2.0) reveals how he work son the web. It *looks* like it is all about tech (RSS, RIA, social networking) but it is really about openness (sharing project status and other incidental work products, bookmarks, profiles, etc.).
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jsUnit, and unit testing in general, is good stuff. And while jsUnit is poorly documented, anyone likely to want to do unit testing in JavaScript will probably be able to figure it out.
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Lorelle on WordPress collects a set of CommonCraft videos that explain current web trends (RSS, social bookmarking, wikis, social networking) in plain English. Apparently there are more CommonCraft videos of this kind on YouTube.
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The bright folks at Cooper describe the document they commonly produce to communicate what a product will look like and how it will behave.
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Hackety Hack! presents basic programming concepts in a a practical and accessible manner. It is aimed at children, but I suspect that adults will enjoy it as well; it has personality, but it isn’t forced.
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A somewhat cryptic but very insightful and revealing set of (somewhat raw) notes about how inline formatting works, helpfully shared by Eric Meyer. I’m not aware of an article that correctly refines these concepts.
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A manifesto captures the ideal state resulting from perfect application of thought. But kaizen eschews perfection in favor of progress. Paying closer attention to ANY of the nine points here can’t help but improve your corner of the business.
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I like manifestos (manifestoes? manifesti?). They are idealistic expressions, pointing out what needs to change. And they are usually surprisingly difficult to live by. But there should be something in David Armano’s manifesto that you can start doing tod
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A nifty bookmarklet that forces a refresh of the css linked to the page. Perfect for when you can’t or won’t change the outbound caching settings at the server.
The person(s) responsible for the design of the Acropolis included innumerable details that, while not strictly necessary to the success of the structure as a temple, combine to make it one of the most effective architectural experiences before or since. Josh Clark notes a few such details in his insightful post of May 22. Another reminder that “Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.” — Michelangelo Buonarroti
I’m going to my first Los Angeles User Experience Meetup tonight. Here’s hoping it is a good one! I don’t know what to expect.
Jim Coudal talks , among other things, about "being a company" rather than "working for a company," and how the Coudal Partners business model has shifted from strictly client work toward creating small business that are fun, involve learning a new field, and represent opportunities to do really good work (after a long intro).
Stephen Lucas analyzes English usage in the Declaration of independence . What an amazing document.
“It’s a good thing they’re dumb” used to be something county sheriffs said about would-be bank robbers. Bruce Shneier points out that this is also true of would-be terrorists in his brilliant article, Portrait of the modern terrorist as an idiot .
