Wonderfully useful feature. Want. Visit site »
More great thoughts on markup and CSS coding practices, this time from my homey J.B., who I am (apparently) doing a world tour with this month. Visit site »
Wonderful design work by Wilson Miner on the new EveryBlock city homepages. Visit site »
Some really great infographic work here. Don’t miss the internal pages, too. Visit site »
Awesome. Via Bullshit, the funniest blog on the web. Visit site »
For those of you who think Shepard Fairey is a rip-off artist and consumerist whore, here’s hoping the great David Carson sits a little better with you. Visit site »
Matt has redesigned his personal site. It’s brown and pink, so you know I love it. Matt’s stuff is always full of great texture, good typography, and awesome little details. Check it out. Visit site »
Really nice design work on The Las Vegas Sun’s new weather page. And of course, I’d be remiss to not point out that it’s Ellington and Django-powered. ;) Visit site »
The Northtemple Journal of Design is a periodic design journal, published online and in print, on topics covering the entire field of design. Starting this month, we’ll publish articles twice a month online, written by members of our team of 29 designers, as well as guest authors and design experts. Every quarter we will collect the past quarter’s articles and publish them in a more permanent medium.
Sounds like a plan. Cameron wrote the first article, and it’s great. Visit site »
Some great typesetting rules here. Most of them don’t really apply to the web (that is to say, they should, but we simply don’t have the control to allow for them), but there are a few that do. I was particularly excited by the rules for emoticons, which I’ve always wondered about. I’d created this rule for myself; I’m glad to see someone else agrees:
A smiley may coincide with a closing bracket (given that it is preceded by an opening one :-).
(Note to Sara Flemming: your ass-backwards open-paren-colon smileys destroy all meaning these rules may have had (:). See!?
Via Dan Mall. Visit site »
The difference between “typeface” and “font” is one of those things where you know it doesn’t really matter when people use them interchangeably, but when you know the difference, it still grates on your nerves to hear them used incorrectly. By the way, if I haven’t said it before: Jon Tan’s site has some of the best web typography around. Check it out. Visit site »
From Jeremy Keith’s live blog of Jeffrey Zeldman’s talk at An Event Apart San Francisco:
It’s hard being a web designer. The unmotivated need not apply. You have to constantly educate yourself. There are plenty of tutorials out there on using web design tools like Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, and so on. But teaching Excel is not the same as teaching business. Knowing how to use Photoshop and Illustrator doesn’t make you a web designer.
Yes. Yes. YES! Visit site »
An absolutely gorgeous design by Bryan here. Great typography, great simplicity in the colors. I love it all. Also, how about that product name? Addicitionary, for a social dictionary? Perfect. I read it three different ways: “A dictionary,” “Add dictionary,” and “Addicition-ary” (which I assume is the way it’s pronounced). Clever.
Also, see Bryan’s retrospective on the design. Visit site »
A really nice piece on “concept” products, such as those we see all the time from car companies, Nokia, Microsoft, and the like:
It turns out that when capable designers are given real constraints for real products they can end up creating great results. In Apple’s case, groundbreaking products like the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone. Constraints have a wonderful way of focusing the mind on the fundamentals, whereas concept products can often have the opposite affect.
Design is all about constraints, and concept products inherently remove most of them. Apple seems to spend most of its time focusing on products I can build today (or in the near future), rather than on what might be possible 10 years from now. Visit site »
My good buddy JB drops a new personal site on us. As you’d expect, it’s full of great typography and illustrative flourishes. Awesome job, Jina. Happy birthday, and I’ll see you in Sydney! Visit site »
In response to the question, “is an interface designer a salesman?,” Khoi answers affirmatively, saying, “interface is marketing, and unavoidably so.” He goes on with a very intelligent and thought-provoking piece that includes the following:
If you think about marketing as a way of communicating the benefits of a designed product to users, then it’s clear to me at least that good interfaces do that. To make an interface ‘user friendly’ is to communicate the value of features or content to a user, and to do so in as expedient and succinct a fashion as possible. At a low level, expressing functionality as a tab, or providing a summarized view of complex information, or positioning like features in close proximity to one another — or any number of nuanced decisions that designers make — is very much about marketing that functionality to users.
I think sometimes designers get a little too full of themselves, thinking of their work as “art,” and forgetting that, in almost all cases, we’re doing jobs for commercial clients whose end game is to make money. Ultimately, all designers are salesmen, no matter how many levels of abstraction away from the actual transaction we sit.
As a sidenote, Khoi’s writing really shines in this piece. Visit site »
Probably nothing you don’t already know here, but they’re good reminders, nonetheless. Visit site »
Michael Heilemann says that pagination widgets should always point left for older stuff. I’m not sure I agree — but I totally se his point. It’s a tricky thing to solve with things like blogs, as they’re naturally in reverse chronological order. I know I’m not consistent about it; I tend to just do what feels right at the time.
To illustrate the problem, consider two scenarios: a blog has “next” and “previous” page links. I would say “next” should pointing to the right, so left is newer stuff. Now, a daily archive page shows all the content posted on one day, and has links to “next day” and “previous day”. I would say “next day” should be on the right, meaning left is older stuff. Clearly, this results in inconsistent interfaces (in one scenario, older stuff is to the right, and in the other, older stuff is to the left). What do you think? Should this be consistent? Visit site »
