Tag: design

Trial By Blog

Lending home pageAs I’ve mentioned before, we’re working with Zopa at the moment to do a redesign of their website. It’s a great company and a great project.

I was in a meeting last week when Dave from Zopa said “Oh, I’ve stuck some of the designs on the blog to see what people think“. My reactions were twofold and simultaneous:

  • Wow, that’s great. A client that’s so forward thinking they’re doing exactly the kind of thing we’d have asked them to do had we thought of it first. Brilliant.
  • Holy shit. What the crap are they doing! What if people don’t like the designs. That’s 8 weeks work down the toilet. Ohmygod what a catastrophe.

Suddenly I realised that all this so-called openness, honesty, transparency and dialogue is a whole different ballgame when there’s a big chunk of other people’s work at stake. This namby-pamby play-blogging I do is child’s play by comparison. I’ll never scoff at a client’s blog-fear again.

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The Stuff Designers Wish You Knew

If you’re in the business of design or working with designers you ought to read Seth’s post on how to live happily with a great designer.

I know the designers I work with would like you to read it ;-)

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We’re fucked

OK, not totally. But this is an interesting development. A startup that will take your designs and turn them into coded web pages by outsourcing it to cheap places around the world (returning your pages within 5 days). Prices from $150. If you don’t like it you don’t pay. TechCrunch: XHTMLized Turns Your Design into Code

In fact. I think we should start to use them. In fact. We’re saved! Saved from pricey freelancers that is ;-)

As a trend, alongside Spotrunner which does a similar thing with advertising. (Creates bargain basement looking ads and schedules and optimises media placements automatically). It’s interesting to see how some of the ‘low-end’ (and I’m not sure about using that term here) of both the interactive and advertising industries are being made automatable and outsourcable in new ways.

I suppose when you add in PayPal, Google Checkout, Shopify, eBay, etc. It’s just the next wave of technological enabling of small businesses and entrepreneurialism. And I suppose that it could just be compared to the fact that when Desk Top Publishing was made accessible, design shops didn’t die out. But I’m not sure it’s quite the same…

Web Dogma

It’s been a while since I’ve read Boxes and Arrows, it’s a very good collaborative blog about information architechture and related jiggery pokery. One thing caught my eye today:

Dogmas Are Meant to be Broken: An Interview with Eric Reiss

It’s a set of ‘rules’ for web design in the spirit of Lars Von Trier’s Dogma Manifesto.

My first thought was that it was going to be a load of luddite nonsense that would get in the way of innovation and advancement. But then I saw this and was encouraged:

The trick with doing a dogma for the web was to avoid the “rules syndrome” (For example, Links should be blue.) for best practices that were liable to change as technology changed. How do you do a set of rules or guidelines that would prove helpful despite the technological advances and would also be relevant as fashion changes?

Cool, I thought. Then I saw the manifesto and thought doublepluscool:

Web Dogma ‘06

  1. Anything that exists only to satisfy the internal politics of the site owner must be eliminated.
  2. Anything that exists only to satisfy the ego of the designer must be eliminated.
  3. Anything that is irrelevant within the context of the page must be eliminated.
  4. Any feature or technique that reduces the visitor’s ability to navigate freely must be reworked or eliminated.
  5. Any interactive object that forces the visitor to guess its meaning must be reworked or eliminated.
  6. No software, apart from the browser itself, must be required to get the site to work correctly.
  7. Content must be readable first, printable second, downloadable third.
  8. Usability must never be sacrificed for the sake of a style guide.
  9. No visitor must be forced to register or surrender personal data unless the site owner is unable to provide a service or complete a transaction without it.
  10. Break any of these rules sooner than do anything outright barbarous.

For a fuller explanation of each of the points visit: Dogmas Are Meant to be Broken: An Interview with Eric Reiss

New Flickr Layout

Eek! I guess it’s just because I’ve been using it a lot recently. But I just logged on to Flickr and the new design really freaked me out. I guess that’s what happens when something that you use all the time changes without warning. If someone moved the doors on my house a couple of feet in either direction I suppose I’d feel the same (even if it did make sense). Welcome to the New Flickr!

Sphere – Blog Search

Sphere: a useful new blog search engine. Seems to index things very fast. My posts from yesterday were already in there. It’s got a particularly nifty ‘custom date range’ function which shows time and volume of posts in a nice way.
Designed by Adaptive Path who’ve posted an account of how they arrived at the design they did.

Thanks to Leisa for the links, her appraisal of the design also makes for interesting reading.

Ugly Design Works

This is an interesting debate. I think I might not share it with some of my colleagues for fear of inciting a mini-riot Ugly Design Works… Most Web Designers Miss the Point. I do think there’s some truth in it though (eBay anyone?).

It reminds me of a quote from Tim Berners Lee about how “the Internet will always be a little bit broken” as reported by David Weinberger (I think I first heard it in his book Small Pieces Loosely Joined). In essence, because much of the web is made by real people it’s always going to have flaws. The argument then continues if you try to make a website too polished it feels like it’s trying to overpersuade people and they react against it.
The tricky bit for me is how you deal with corporate websites, yes they’re made by real people. But then so are TV commercials, and you don’t expect errors in those. Or, perhaps, if the rest of the TV environment was made up of public access channels you would?!?

And what about websites that need me to feel safe and secure? I’m not sure I want my bank website to feel as if it’s “a little bit broken”. Hmmm. I’ll have to ponder on that one. Feels like another chapter of my Emotional Architecture piece that I’m still promising to write.

Egglings

Egglings images

When I first saw these I thought they were great. A really lovely bit of ‘design’, but then I thought about it some more and started to think they’re really a bit freaky. The idea of a plant growing out of an egg made me feel a bit funny. But then I reaised that they’re not real eggs and I started to like them again. See what you think of Egglings.

Techno Faux-Pas

Whilst browsing in Micro Anvika today I was looking at the plethora of digital music players, ranging from the gorgeously designed to the truly horrible. When out of the corner of my eye I saw one particular piece of gadgetary. I thought to myself “f**k me, that is the most horrible piece of ‘bling’ design I have ever seen in my life”. I assumed that it was an MP3 player (as that’s where it was placed in the shop). But when I found out what it was I felt shamed. Find out what it is…
Continue reading Techno Faux-Pas

The Joy of Stats…

Whilst checking my lovely new easy-to-read stats package ‘Mint’, I noticed that an old friend and colleague had linked to me. A click later and hey-presto Kief Morris is alive and well. And he’s even said a nice thing or two about me and my wee blog! (But Kief, sorry mate, I ain’t no Design Director. Take a look around, does this site look like it’s been properly designed!) ;)

Thank you stats, thank you links, and thank goodness there’s only a few people visiting the site or I might never have spotted Kief passing through.