A further reminder that what you do IS your brand: The Other Problem With ‘Welcome: Portraits of America’ .
Category: Asides Main Categories
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Hugh MacLeod trims his weighty Hughtrain Manifesto down to a svelte 418 words. less is definitely more; this is a document that every marketer, designer, and exec (especially C-level) should take to heart.
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Alan Cooper separates developers into two camps (designers and builders) and skewers Agile while making the case (again) for software design driven by user research. It is worth a read even if the dividing and skewering offend your delicate sensibilities.
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The fine folks at Yahoo! have rolled their fourteen front-end optimization guidelines into an add-on for Firebug (itself an add-on for Firefox) that scores your site’s performance in cached and uncached scenarios. Very helpful.
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Steve Souders discusses Yahoo!’s 14 front-end optimization guidelines. Note that many of these are small changes that make a big difference, and that front-end optimization accounts for the bulk of slowness in the user experience.
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Stephen Heller riffs quickly (is that possible?) on white and whitespace and fashion and design. A healthy reminder to include plenty of white, even if it isn’t exactly white the color. Air. Space. Ease. Important.
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This checklist outlines an ordered design process for complex multivariate color displays that has been successfully used to revamp the air traffic control system, among other things (say that three times fast). Most valuable are the design principles exposed here.
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Web Designer Wall reveals ome Photoshop tricks that, while not closely-guarded secrets, can save those of us who spend time there many minutes each day. They key to navigating Photoshop quickly are key commands and key/mouse combos.
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There’s a nugget hidden in the third-to-last graf of this article: “there are no ‘verbs’ in the iPhone interface”. While this isn’t strictly true, it does nicely summarize the goal of direct, intuitive manipulation: no choosing to do, just doing.
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Peter Michaux points out a closure technique where a function redefines itself when it is first evaluated. Interesting thinking which could be easily applied to browser capability testing (preventing repeated re-testing of things already known).
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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.
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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.
