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Pair Design Pays Dividends
An interesting application of the popular “pari programming” methodology to design. I’m not convinced, though. I that, even with style guides, best practices, and quality people, every designer still has their own ways of doing things, and having to accommodate someone else’s is going to slow you down. At work, I always find I move slower when dealing with designs and code done by Wilson or Nathan, even though all three of us are quality designers, working within web standards, and doing things the “right way.”
Pair design is an interesting concept and could be good for mentoring, but I’m not really convinced it’s the most agile or efficient method out there. I get the most done when I’m working by myself.
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Thanks, Canon.
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Thanks, Canon.
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PBS FRONTLINE: Rob Curley
There’s a whole host of journalism-related interviews as part of Frontline’s “News War” series. I haven’t read most of them (yet), but I did read this one, and thought it was mostly great. Rob Curley, who formerly lead the team that I am now a part of in Lawrence, certainly “gets is” more than most in the industry, with regard to the Internet.
One thing that Rob and I definitely agree on is that there’s no such thing as overkill. No amount of information is too much information. But, as a designer, I consider it my job to present that information in such a fashion that makes it all very easy to parse and deal with. My impression of most of the sites done under Rob’s direction is that they’ve just sort of spewed gobs and gobs of info all over the screen, without presenting it in a way that serves both the casual and the hardcore viewer.
For example: I will be redesigning KUSports.com in the coming months. It’s a hardcore site for diehard Jayhawk fans. It’s the bible, and everything you could possibly want to know about KU sports — past, present, or future — is there. I don’t want to take away information — in fact, I want to add information. But, I want it to feel like there’s less. I want to use whitespace and good typography to open up the page, without providing less content. The thinking that everything needs to be on the homepage (which is par for the course in journalism) is all wrong. Everything needs to be easily accessed from the homepage. Everything does not need to be on the homepage.
There’s no such thing as overkill, but there is such thing as information overload. The place where ridiculous overkill reigns and information overload is unheard of? That place is called design.
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LJWorld: Primary Election Results
Local elections may not be glamorous, but they matter a lot to communities like this one, and they deserve a good online treatment from the local media. I think Nathan Borror did it justice tonight. Nice Flash work — and the basic layout may just be another mini-preview of where we’re going, stylistically, with the LJWorld.com redesign that will launch soon.
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BuzzFeed + Ze Frank + Juiceboxxx SXSW Party
March 10, 2007 Starting at 10pm at Molotov Lounge 719 W. 6th St, at the corner of 6th and West. A party with Ze and free drinks? Yeah, I’m there.
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Pretty code.
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Pretty code.
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James Cameron may have found tomb of Jesus — plus his son and wife.
The burial site of Jesus has been found and suggests he had a wife and son, according to highly sensitive claims in a documentary by “Titanic” director James Cameron and Israel-born Simcha Jacobovici. If this is accurate (and it’s really hard to tell at this point), it basically puts forth a real-life Da Vinci Code situation, challenging the basic tenants of Christianity as we know it. Interesting stuff.
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Mall on ALA: Semantic Flash: Slippery When Wet
Nice piece by Daniel Mall on using Flash to automate image effects (and other things, too!) in otherwise-HTML pages. I’m so happy to see more and more interplay of Flash and web standards. Us standards-aware designers really need to stop shunning Flash — it’s great technology that does some pretty amazing things for us, many of which we could never do otherwise.
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Ethan on ALA: Where Our Standards Went Wrong
A great article by Ethan Marcotte on how we need to redefine the message we use in web standards evangelism. He touches on two things that baffle my mind. First, I don’t understand why anyone would ever validate someone else’s code and then speak publicly about the errors they find. If you do that, you’re being an asshole. Period. Validation is a process for you to do on your code, so as to help you avoid the timesink that is working with broken code later — using invalid code will especially kill you when you go to add DOM scripting or CSS to the page. Don’t validate other people’s code. It’s assholish. Second, he mentions how some CMSes are still spewing tag-soup all over our web. I find this, frankly, absurd. If your CMS that doesn’t allow you 100%, full control over its output via a template system of some sort, you’ve got to find a way off of that thing. Any CMS that doesn’t give you full control of the output is not worth anyone’s time.
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swfIR: swf Image Replacement
Dan Mall, Mark Huot, and Jon Aldinger from Happy Cog give you swfIR, a handy way of easily applying effects to images in your markup, including drop shadows, rounded corners, and rotation. I’ve been using a beta version for a week or so, and it’s very slick. Although all the effects work well, I’m especially fond of the rotation, as I know of absolutely no other way to rotate an image inline. This would be another nice example of Flash and web standards playing nice, side-by-side. Well done, guys.
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Volkswagen recalls nearly 800,000 cars - CNN.com
Around 800,000 Volkswagen vehicles have been recalled Monday because of faulty brake lights. My 2005 Jetta GLI’s brake lights got stuck permanently on several months ago. I guess this explains it. Wow, 800,000 cars is a lot. Bad, bad news for VW, PR-wise.
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Flash Video: Sorenson vs. On2
Really nice little Flash app comparing different video encoding solutions.
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Joyent redesign
Beautiful new site from the TextDrive team (Bryan Bell at the wheel?).
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Godbit: Pro CSS Techniques Review
Nathan Smith wrote a very positive review of Pro CSS Techniques over at Godbit.com. Thanks so much, Nathan!
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Rockets, Cars and Gardens: Visualizing waterfall, agile and stage gate
A really brilliant piece of different models for software development. Great stuff. Thanks, Wilson.
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Stuck In Customs: HDR 2.0
I just ordered a new camera, and HDR is definitely something I want to try. This newer take on the technique from flickr’s Stuck In Customs looks pretty badass.
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Hivelogic Podcast: Jina Bolton
Dan seems to be making a habit of interviewing people I know; this time he’s on the air with J-Bolt, one of my favorite web designers. Jina shares my passion for typography, has written for a new Sitepoint book, and is generally one of the freshest faces amongst the current crop of up-and-comers. There aren’t too many people out there that are both traditionally trained in graphic design, and self-taught in the right way to do things online (standards, etc.). Most of us either come from one background or the other. We need more people who really understand both sides of the coin.
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Two new Django sites, both with source available
Back in June of 2006, I created LOST-theories.com, one of my first Django-powered sites. Because it seemed like it might be useful for people who were trying to learn Django, I released the source code for the site — not so much for people to take and use directly, but so people would be able to see how a Django site was built, from the ground up. I had no idea it would be so popular. I still get e-mails every week from people thanking me for giving them a complete example.
But I always felt a little sketchy about it. I’m not a great programmer by any means, and I was even worse then. If I were re-doing LOST-theories.com today, a lot of the code would be different. I’ve thought about taking the code offline for that reason. But, I’ve left it, because it seems like people really, really needed some full-site examples of Django code.
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Lawrence Journal-World: Kathy’s long journey
Lots of people in journalism say you can’t art direct stories online. Well, dammit — we’re gonna try. Here’s one of our first shots at it. It might just be a sneak preview of the new LJWorld.com design, too (but don’t tell anyone I told you that). Photos by Bill Snead, design by Nathan Borror.
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PyCon 2007: Web frameworks panel
James Bennett is live-blogging the web frameworks panel from PyCon. So far, it’s quite good.
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R.I.P, Kirk Rundstrom
Kirk Rundstrom, of Split Lip Rayfield fame, has passed. I was at Kirk’s last Lawrence show in February and it was beyond great. An amazing musician and a great person with a spirit and zest for life that most of us can only dream of. You will be missed, Kirk.
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Adult movie posters of the 60s and 70s
A funny collection. Porn seems like it was so innocent back then. Seems mostly save for my work, at least — but be careful.
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Would Apple Mix DRM and Non-DRM Music at the iTunes Store?
Gruber has a nice article on how Apple might deal with the UI complexity of selling both DRM’d and non-DRM’d music on iTunes. He suggests a similar solution I’ve been touting — just don’t mention it by default. Some songs will be DRM protected and some won’t. People who really care about DRM (which isn’t most people) could turn on a preference to show the license or click something to get details — but most people don’t care, so don’t confuse everyone with it.
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Helvetica: Screenings
A whole batch of screenings have been announced for the film, and there’s one in KC. If I can’t make it to the premiere at SXSW, I’m there.
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Launched.
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Launched.
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Beatboxing flautist rocks Mario
The only thing that could be better than a beatboxing flautist is a beatboxing flautist playing the Super Mario Bros. theme. Awesome.
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What does Marsellus Wallace look like?
If you recognize the line above, are a typography nerd, or both, you must watch the video. Awesome.
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More minor refresh (entry page)
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More minor refresh (entry page)
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Minor refresh coming soon…
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Minor refresh coming soon…
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CheeseRater: Rate Python packages
Jacob did this fun little web app for his PyCon presentation. I threw together a 30-minute design for him in Photoshop, and he munged it into HTML and CSS. It’s a Django app with full source code available — great for learning Django!
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Peek inside artist’s sketchbooks
Peek inside 70 Moleskines by international artists, designers, architects, illustrators, and writers. Really nice stuff here. Thanks, Veerle.
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I've reclaimed the office Unreal Tournament 2004 trophy.
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I've reclaimed the office Unreal Tournament 2004 trophy.
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Slife and Slifeshare
Holy shit. Onlife becomes Slife, adds a web service, and a REST API. I see a lot of additions to my lifestream in the near future. Awesome.
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Muffin Research Labs at FOWA
Stuart Colville has probably the best notes I’ve seen from the Future of Web Apps conference going on right now in London. Great stuff. Thanks for doing this, Stuart!
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Jeff Croft
I’m a digital product designer and developer in Seattle, WA. I currently work with Simply Measured, and recently co-founded Lendle, a Kindle book sharing service.
Some of my past clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Copious, The New York Review of Books, Django, The Lawrence Journal-World, and the University of Washington.
I’ve authored two books on web and interactive design and spoken at dozens of conferences around the world.
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