March 08, 2005
Interface design tips that may be new to you
Here are some oldies but goodies from the archives that may be new to you.
The Yellow Fade Technique: highlight changes without getting in someone's way.
Epicenter Design: start from the inside out.
Context and Perspective: help people relate to objects they can't touch.
and of course Ryan's well traveled Introduction to Using Patterns in Web Design article.
March 07, 2005
Cast of Shadows Update
Kevin Guilfoile, former officemate and Coudalite, gets an ace review from the NY Times for his new book.
"Cast of Shadows" draws on a loving acquaintance with the contours of clone lit -- and the best mass-market page turners -- to create a smirk-free and always surprising medical thriller, complete with elegant prose and well-developed characters. What's most appealing here, and most promising for Guilfoile's future as a novelist, is that he wields the bylaws of his chosen genre to undercut its central premise. As always, some ill-conceived fiddling with genes has set the plot in motion, but science, in the end, is not the villain.
He'll be on tour this month promoting the book so go say hey. You can find out more about the book at the book site.
March 04, 2005
Building of Basecamp 5 on April 22 in Chicago, IL
If you missed one of our sold out Building of Basecamp workshops in Chicago, San Francisco, or Seattle, now's your chance to attend the next Building of Basecamp workshop in Chicago on April 22nd. Attendance is limited to 40 people, and every workshop we've thrown has sold out in just a few weeks, so don't miss this one. Our next workshop after this one will likely be in Copenhagen, Denmark.
We'll be adding some new material to this workshop covering our experience building Ta-da and our next product codenamed "Honey" (which will hopefully be out by then).
We really hope to see you in Chicago on April 22nd!
Book: The Zen of CSS Design
The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web by Dave Shea and Molly Holzschlag (published by New Riders who also put out our book) uses examples from the CSS Zen Garden as "the foundation for discussions on how to create beautiful, progressive CSS-based Web sites."
Digital Web's glowing review says, "Its crammed with useful how-to info and wraps it all up in explanations of why you would want to do it this way."
Anyone have a favorite CSS Zen Garden design worth checking out?
March 03, 2005
It's a big world after all
Steve Fossett is about to land and successfully end his historic non-stop solo flight around the world. AMAZING.
Air travel has become such a part of life and globalization for such a long time that it's amazing to think it's taken until 2005 for a person to fly non-stop-solo around the world. You'd think that by 2005 everything that could have been done in a plane had been done, but Fossett's adventure proves otherwise. First a balloon, now a plane, Fossett is quite an adventurer.
March 02, 2005
A variety of product recommendations
Here are some things I've been finding valuable as of late:
The $10 bill. Everyone else usually has 20s. Be the champ and keep 10s in your pocket.
Flysketch (Mac OS X) is a really useful little tool that lets you quicky annotate screenshots with boxes, highlighter, text, etc, and then shoot that shot directly to an email.
Christopher Alexander's books and ideas.
The Mono Gemiini Teapot (small) is a gem with beautiful form and perfect for 2.5 cups. It's currently on sale for $95 (normally $140).
Dalwhinnie 15 yr Scotch (thanks to Mr. Spils at 43things).
Vyper laptop sleeve by Booq. Clean, simple, protective, thin laptop sleeve with minimalist style. Keeps my Powerbook snug and safe and takes up barely any additional space. Really highly recommended.
SpamSieve (Mac OS X) is the best spam filter I've ever used. Unreal accuracy and it keeps getting better. So far it's 99% accurate over 8000 messages. Really great.
The Fisher Space Pen is small, compact, solid, metal, comfortable, and the ink is fed by gas pressure permitting the pen to write in any position. With a shelf life of 100 years, the onus is on you not to lose it.
Shure E3c headphones. Amazing, small, lightweight.
Tea Timer (Mac OS X) is a quick little dock-based countdown timer that slaps you with the chimes of Big Ben when the time is up.
Roland V-Drums let me bang away without the neighbors getting pissed.
Blood oranges make the sweetest juice.
Make: Magazine. Great idea, great execution. A pleasure to stroll through and be inspired.
SurveyMonkey makes it fast and easy to set up online surveys. Really nice and simple web-app.
The Cost of Cool
Too many entertainment/lifestyle sites continue to shoot themselves in the foot (feet?) by chasing cool. For example, the other night I had to decide whether to catch the opening band at a show I was attending. So I decided to search for MP3s at The Double's web site.
I went to the band's site. Flash. Sigh. Loading. Sigh. Then I get to the audio section. Here's the kicker: When I try to click on an audio link, the page starts scrolling. You have to chase the link around the screen in order to click on it. Come on man, I'm trying to listen to your music and it's actually running away from me! Ridiculous.
If you're a band, restaurant, nightclub, or whatever, then go right ahead and make your band, restaurant, or nightclub cool. But when it comes to your website, what's cool is giving people the info they want without making 'em jump through hoops.
"Getting Real" design tip: Just say no to Lorem Ipsum
This is the second post in the Getting Real series. The first post suggested you don't write a functional spec. This post takes on a lighter subject -- the unfortunate use of lorem ipsum dolor filler copy when designing web-based applications.
Lorem ipsum dolor has long been known as the designer's best friend. We think it should be your enemy. Using lorem ipsum dolor reduces text-based content to a visual design element (a "shape" of text) instead of valuable information someone is going to have to enter and/or read.
We recommend that when you build out interfaces you use real and relevant words not "lorem ipsum" representative text. If your site or application requires data input, enter real and relevant words and type the text, don't just paste it in from another source. If it's a name, type a real name. If it's a city, type a real city. If it's a password, and it's repeated twice, type it twice.
The goal here is to get as close to the real customer experience as possible. Don't abstract yourself from the real experience. Every layer removed pushes you further and further away from the actual customer experience.
While building your interface, you may find it easier to just run down the forms and fill the fields with garbage ("asdsadklja" "123usadfjasld" "snaxn2q9e7") in order to plow through them quickly. That's not real. That's not what your customers are being asked to do. Why take a shortcut and not feel the pain of filling out a long form? If you just enter garbage in rapid fire fashion how will you ever know what it really feels like to fill out that form?
Bottom line: Do as your customers do and you'll understand them better. When you understand them better, and feel what they feel, you'll build a better interface.
March 01, 2005
Wists, thumbnail-based bookmarks
David Galbraith explains his new Wists thumbnail bookmarking service.
Pretty interesting concept. You click a bookmarklet in your browser toolbar, then the page is stripped of text and only the images remain. Click an image, then assign some tags, and save. Wists then creates a thumbnail for that page (based on the image you selected) and stores it in your Wists account. So, instead of remembering web pages by title, you can remember them with a representative image. Neat idea with a pretty smooth experience. Here's a sample list I put together.
Has some cool implications for shopping wish lists. You could easily make a graphical list of 10 pieces of furniture you want. Or 7 books. Or whatever. Then you can email that list to someone who owes you some money. See the potential?