Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Thank Goodness that someone else has come out to say it. Jakob Nielson is not the guru he’s cracked up to be. Hank Williams has pointed out in a post at Why Does Everything Suck?[^1] that this particular bit of triteness is “unreadable.” And it is. Do you notice how there are no paragraph indentations? Do you notice how the leading is not adjusted to the height of the font? All the man does is try to dictate conventions and yet he literally dismisses print conventions that have been around for hundreds of years. Read more…
Monday, April 21, 2008
Speaking of robots and toys that American consumers buy, I recently pulled out an old Armatron from the garage and thought I’d see if new batteries would get the old boy to activate. No luck, but that warranted further investigation, and what I found, I was really surprised by. Read more…
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
I’ve been a designer for more than a decade and I only scored a 24 out of 34 on on the Rather Difficult Font Game. In my defense, I don’t stray too much from the 14 or so fonts that I really like (Hoefler Text, Helvetica, Trebuchet, Monaco, Gotham, Archer, Academy, Bauhaus, Futura, Eurostile, Impact, Optima, Rollergirls, Rosewood STD, and Lucinda) And only four of those were in the quiz! So Phbbbbt!1
Friday, February 22, 2008
One of the effects of design in media is its ability to underscore or derail a message. And that’s an important fact for a presidential candidate (or their campaign materials designer) to take into consideration. I mean, despite its at-first-glance solidity and structure, you wouldn’t want to end up using a font (Trajan) that for the most part these days, is totally associated with horror movies. Conscious or not, there’s an underlying aesthetic appeal built in the color and font and graphic choices of the candidates. In fact, I personally believe that the savviness of the campaign materials probably says a lot about a candidate’s lack of a tendency to micromanage. Bad design decisions are far more likely the fault of overly-fussy and uninformed clients then they are designers. So, who’s looking savvy for 2008 anyway?
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Sunday, January 6, 2008
There have been a lot of technology pundits discussing the demise of the desktop—primarily arguing that the desktop is going to get sucked in to the browser. And there has been a lot of conversation about switching from the desktop to “the cloud”—the idea of the network as the computer. In a funny comment in that Wired article I just linked to, Clay Shirky is quoted as saying that when Thomas Watson estimated that the world only needed five computers, his estimate was off by four. It rings true because it is a simple and funny observation, but this new view of the network as the computer is a binary view, problematic because as software engineers still tend to do, the solution takes the user into account second and not first. A user-first outlook for most software demands of it that it be a desktop-cloud hybrid—with good reason. And a desktop-cloud hybrid won’t suck the OS in the browser, it will suck the browser into all the apps that a user has. I want to point out two real successes in this regard first, and then look at gaps in the current software offerings out there.
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