Archive June 2008
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The New 10 Commandments 30.06.08
4. Thou shalt not overuse glassy reflections.
One of 10 brillant ‘commandments’ written by the guru’s over at Business Week. This is probably equally important as the BBC’s 15 Web Principles! I’m guilty of more than one, that’s for sure! Read the 10 here.
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Kwicks! 30.06.08
Following a chat I just had, I thought I’d write a bit of a techie post about JavaScript animation. If we had to display a large body of information on a homepage a year or two ago, the design would have looked fairly messy – but since this whole JavaScript ‘movement’, we can use carousels and accordions to present information within a fairly constrained area (like Coda did, originally). Read more -
I Don’t Understand 30.06.08
Sorry for all the quotes recently, I’ve been completely stacked out with an information architecture document I’m working on. Which ties me quite nicely to this quote;
If you’re interested in information architecture, or just find yourself thust into its scary world (like me), you might find Boxes and Arrows or Jesse James Garrett’s site useful. -
BBC’s 15 Web Principles 26.06.08
I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while (years in fact), but never got around to it. But seeing as the BBC has recently undergone a radical new redesign (above), and was featured in this months Web Designer Magazine – I thought now was as good a time as any. Read more -
Wednesday Quotes 25.06.08
Creativity is the capacity to evaluate, organize, deconstruct, interpret and synthesize chaos. The result? Assigning a systemically simple well-packaged new proposal to a problem.
~ via this PDFPrint designers make the worst web designers
~ Sara (cited from ’some guy’) -
Jason Santa Maria 24.06.08
Not only is this damn right… it’s from the portfolio of Jason Santa Maria.Jason has in his portfolio, amongst other things, the branding and web design of WordPress, A List Apart and AIGA (to name but a few). This guy is most certainly one of the all time greats! Worth a visit.
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The Girl Effect 24.06.08
Wow! Check out GirlEffect.org for the full picture. Good storyboarding and Flash really do have a place on the net. Not entirely sure about the concept though, can this idea really work?
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Resources I Use 23.06.08
There are a few things on sites that don’t really require much design, like pagination, for example. Things that just work, without you having to re-invent the wheel. For those things – it’s always good to have a little bit of a guide. The same goes (to an extent) for comment designs and standardised icons.
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Why Sony Failed 19.06.08
I don’t usually think that critiquing others’ work is a good path to go down – but in this case I’ll make an exception. I recently visited this page on Sony Ericsson.com to do a bit of research – on my arrival I found this:
There’s nothing much wrong with this aesthetically, in fact – it’s fairly nice to look at, but there’s a thing or two we can learn from a development point of view. Read more -
New Blog! 19.06.08
I’m currently in the process of building my new blog – so if you can see loads of mistakes etc on this current design, bear with me. I hope to have it launched by the end of June 08. Wish me luck! -
Firefox 3 18.06.08
Firefox 3 has been released (available for download here)! Why should you bother downloading it? I’ll tell you a few good reasons why I downloaded it, plain and simple.
Up until recently I’d been using Camino, a slick-looking browser which works pretty similar to Firefox 2. Actually, it works a little bit better – in the way that it looks nice and puts favicons next to my bookmarks (yes, that IS a big deal). I occasionally had to use Firefox v.2 for development stuff (using Firebug), but wouldn’t use it as my default browser, as it is ugly as hell.Then came Firefox 3 beta. It was fairly similar to version 2 if you’ve been using that, except it looks different, and had a whole host of unique and fixed features (below). So Camino went in the bin, Firefox 2 got put aside, and Firefox 3 got set to primary browser – and here’s why… Read more
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Being a Better Web Designer 17.06.08
I’ve just read a blog post by 37signals – which pretty much sums up my feelings on web design and web designers. They seem to have opened a can of worms though (139 comments and counting), but I’ve got to say that I wholeheartedly agree, especially with the following:
If you’re a designer working with the web who still doesn’t do your own implementation, I strongly recommend that you pick up the skills to do so.
When I started out as a designer I worked mainly within print and branding – whilst doing so I visited printers, read the books, ordered the samples, read up on the history etc. Then, when things began to get more web focused, I moved my attention to learning the dynamics of the web. Sure I used the internet, but had no idea how it worked.
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