December 2011
6 posts
2 tags
“Design the top level of your navigation in isolation. Base it on your top 20...”
– [My emphasis]
Gerry McGovern on The vital importance of the first click and how to get it right.
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Mobile sites: beware flaky device detection
Morrisons, the UK supermarket chain, have a mobile site. So far, so good. Unfortunately their device detection is somewhat, ahem, flaky.
Here’s what it looks like on my HTC Desire S, a recent Android phone:
Let’s leave aside for a minute that that mock phone surround is pretty cheesy. The offending image, “iphone-surround.gif”, is being applied to the <body>...
2 tags
Rethinking the Mobile Web by Yiibu →
(View more presentations from Bryan Rieger on Slideshare)
As a follow-up to yesterday’s post on the Morrisons mobile site, here’s Bryan Rieger’s excellent presentation Rethinking the Mobile Web from 2010.
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Is Google's clean-and-simple aesthetic dull, or... →
I’m confused. The new Google Reader is “super stark, open and clean, but is it too dull?” yet the “Clean and Simple Homepage” - which could hardly be more dull - is “still a classic”. Make up your mind Mashable.
Much of this can be ascribed to users’ well documented hatred of change. As Jakob Nielsen wrote in 2009 “Users hate change [but] in...
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Simple is not a design treatment.
Simple is hard. Simple requires deep investigation, a thorough understanding of every aspect of a project, in line with the needs and expectations of the audience.
Simon Collinson, ‘Taming Complexity’, 24ways 2011
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Fluid Grids Are More Complicated Than That: Andy... →
When columns and elements within them change width, all too easily a visual hierarchy can be broken and along with it the relationship between element sizes and the outer window or viewport. This can happen quickly if you make just one set of fluid grid calculations and use those percentages across every screen width, from smartphones through tablets and up to large desktops.
The answer? Make...
June 2011
1 post
1 tag
May 2011
1 post
1 tag
Beware web designers bearing solutions
The Law of the Instrument can be seen in every web discussion forum, on sites such as Forrst and on Twitter. Ask for a CMS, blog or framework recommendation and you’ll see people immediately leap in to declare their hammer the best, without any knowledge of the requirements at hand – sometimes even when the requirements really rule out that tool from the outset Rachel Andrew | ‘If all you...
April 2011
2 posts
Two wise words on growth, making money, and...
37 Signals’ David Heinemeier Hansson on his distaste for the “swing for the fences”, go bust or have lavish success, approach
I’d rather just have nice, steady, predictable growth. I believe in the beauty of compound interest. We might not be growing 2000%, but if we can just keep our nice, solid growth for a couple of years, that’ll compound to have quite an impact.
David Heinemeier Hansson,...
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Mike Reed, on judging D&AD 2011 →
‘I wish I’d written this one.’ That’s what you listen for, of course: the ultimate creative’s compliment. That potent mixture of delight and envy – and the undercurrent of anxiety that, presented with the same brief, one wouldn’t have come up with anything like as powerful a solution. (Or perhaps that’s just me.)
March 2011
2 posts
1 tag
Designers fail 95% of the time
All designers fail 95% of the time. This is true for all creative work. And it is unusual in the professional world. The process by which we create is failure centric.
LukeW | An Event Apart: Why Designers Fail
We were talking just last night about design critique and feedback, and how easily it becomes a fraught experience for both parties. If can be just as difficult for the client to talk...
2 tags
Client services: it's not you, it's them
I find it’s really easy to get into the self-blame game sometimes. The thinking goes that if only you were somehow better, bigger, higher profile, working for larger clients, working for better clients etc… etc… the problems you face as a client services business would all be fixed.
So it’s great to read articles like the latest interview with Jim Coudal on the 37 Signals...
October 2010
5 posts
2 tags
Twitter and Short URLs: possibilities for a better...
Jacob Gube aka @sixrevisions graciously illuminated yesterday’s Twitter search mystery:
@sophiedennis Maybe because URL of the article has /content-strategy/ on it and it got retweeted a lot this weekend.
(source: http://twitter.com/#!/sixrevisions/status/28726280802)
I didn’t spot this because the full URL was not visible in the search results. All the tweets use a...
3 tags
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Brand Narrative: Every Company is a (Bad) Media...
Companies have always created media in the form, usually, of advertising as well as corporate literature, brochures and websites. The difference now is that companies, more and more of them, are creating their own media themselves, without specialized help or resources…
Instead of hiring smart, experienced specialists to tell their stories, they are relying on pretty much anyone within the...
2 tags
Twitter reaches people who are already significantly more engaged in online community activities (to give it the old-fashioned name) than the general Internet population:
US Twitter users in April 2010 were far more likely than general Internet users to post to forums (75% vs 25%), blog (72% vs 14%), comment on blogs (70% vs 23%) and post ratings / reviews (61% vs 20%). In other words, the 14...
1 tag
On "Folk"
[there is a] distinction between traditional music and the fairly useless catch-all term ‘folk’, which can be applied equally to singer-songwriters, acoustic rockers and solo Hebridean fiddlers, and is used gratuitously whenever the music industry wants to make a distinction between their brand of soap and the one that everyone else washes with.
Bellowhead’s Pete Flood on the point some of...
September 2010
2 posts
1 tag
Checking out @bellowhead Hedonism on we7 http://ow.ly/2MlNY. Pulls off the hardest #folk album trick of all: capturing the live energy.
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How Content Strategy Goes Wrong
Michael McWatters’ delightfully simple diagram shows how to get started with your web content strategy. Here’s my take on where web content strategies usually go wrong.
August 2009
5 posts
~@zeldman on what’s new in the forthcoming 3rd edition of his classic “Designing With Web Standards” http://www.zeldman.com/x/57
Catch-up: Facebook accounts for 24% of link sharing, Twitter for 10% http://bit.ly/vzhpT (Chart and report at Business Insider, 21 Jul 09)
Danny Sullivan on the usual lies, damn lies, and web stats tracking Twitter clickthrus with bit.ly and Google Analytics http://bit.ly/NDagC
Flipping @mashable’s “Teens Don’t Tweet” around, more over 55s tweet than teenagers - go target those silver surfers http://bit.ly/1GnYtK
catching up on the BlogHer report on women and social media http://bit.ly/fWQrk - lots of lovely hard data
July 2009
10 posts
.@andybudd hits it on the head in “the public sector web design dating game” http://snurl.com/ob268 - yes, we just put them in the bin too
~@wilsondan mocks _that_ report with “How 31 Year Olds Consume Media” http://is.gd/1Cem8 (via @rachelandrew, @keeran, @emmaboulton)
Solid analysis of the new search-and-trends centred Twitter homepage from @mashable http://bit.ly/11ROwl
RT @PhilMonk09 Nice little CSS cheat sheet in PDF http://bit.ly/MXfF8
UK.gov publishes it’s Template Twitter strategy for departments http://bit.ly/mZe4g
Likes what @Malarkey has done with Amazon Store, despite the terrible markup - http://bit.ly/CGA8V
More bad news for MySpace as it tanks on the metric - where do music/band websites get their traffic from? http://bit.ly/18Seso
Good comment from The Guardian on the Morgan Stanley “Teens Don’t Use Twitter” panic, with actual stats on teen usage http://bit.ly/1fCwlM
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and as ever, I also agree with @adactio’s typically succinct explication of (X)HTML1/2/4/5 terminology http://adactio.com/journal/1595/
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Jeffery Zeldman In Defense of [XHTML] Web...
Sanity, as ever, from Jeffrey Zeldman on the pointlessness of much of the (X)HTML 1.0/2.0/4/5 geek bun-fight:
“It has only been a few days but I am already sick of the “XHTML is bullshit, man!” crowd using the cessation of XHTML 2.0 activity to condescend to—or even childishly glory in the “folly” of—web developers who build with XHTML 1.0, a stable W3C recommendation for nearly ten years,...
June 2009
2 posts
1 tag
Are downloads really killing the music industry? or are we just spending our money on computer games instead? http://bit.ly/bQxbx
liking the look of @drewm’s @grabaperch - Contribute-like, but web-based (have I got that right, Drew?). Liking the £35 price tag even more
May 2009
6 posts
“Web-savvy bands will rule as record companies fall, says music industry experts” writes The Guardian http://bit.ly/z1JDl
2 tags
Case studies of small businesses using Twitter to drive sales, and doing it well http://bit.ly/16TDBq
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The Show of Hands Guide to Folk Music Marketing from Emma Hartley’s Telegraph blog http://tinyurl.com/pyswqg #folk #music
RT @WiredUK The industry that cried wolf. Why music is doing much better than you think: http://tinyurl.com/qzhflv
RT @ProperRecords Radiohead’s Manager: File Sharing Should Be Legal; It’s Great For Music (Techdirt): http://tinyurl.com/cny8or
Good typography geekout from @Malarkey on selecting right leading (line spacing) at http://bit.ly/juw9e
April 2009
2 posts
RT @DIY_Musicians A social media strategy outline for #bands from Hypebot http://ow.ly/44Ji
MusicIndustryShock! people who download music for free are 10x more likely to pay for songs than those who don’t http://tinyurl.com/d24bvx
March 2009
2 posts
1 tag
Hang on. Something’s not right here. New layout working perfectly in IE6.
February 2009
1 post
When cloud computing goes bad
“Cloud computing” is all the rage these days. Journalists and tech watchers eagerly tout the brave new world where all our digital bits and bytes live, not on our own computers, but on other people’s computers. Other people like Google, Flickr or, indeed, Tumblr.com.
These (largely) free services will take care of our entire digital lives. Photos of our families and loved ones....
December 2008
1 post
1 tag
“Photoshop, like a mistress at a brothel, parades a vast array of ropey, yet...”
– Drew McLellan on Easing The Path from Design to Development at 24 Ways.org
September 2008
1 post
… if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. One LOLcat for your amusement.
August 2008
1 post
2 tags
“If I had a wish list for making a project or web site work really well over...”
– Four Essential Skills for Information Architects: An Interview with Donna (Maurer) Spencer