Creatiplicity, Episode Six : Chris Bowler, Shawn Blanc, and myself sat down for 35 minutes to chat about work-life balance and family life, distractions, freelancing, Authentic Jobs, my letterpress posters, and the formerly glorious CoolHomepages.com. Check for the podcast on the iTunes subscription page soonly. … Read the rest here
Another wee cycling update. It’s now been 6 months since I claimed that I wasn’t interested in being sporty, owning a Road-only bike (I wanted to ride something ‘chap’ and retro), and that I would never touch Lycra with a bargepole, let alone my body. All that’s changed – I’m now riding a proper road bike (that I’m trying to make as modern as possible), in lycra and wearing SPD shoes. What a difference it all makes though! After a lot of discussion on Twitter on normal shorts vs bib shorts, I got a pair of the former from Shutt Velo Rapide . which are really comfy and no comparison to when I was trying to ride in jeans. I’m realising the advantage of bibs though, as I get do get a cold patch on my back. … Read the rest here
On Competing with Circles : Dhanji R. Prasanna, former Google+ engineer: Now, I’m not saying that Circles is the one killer feature to bring down facebook — not at all. What I am saying, however, is that [Google+ and facebook] are not playing on an even field. Like Microsoft and online Office, it is incredibly difficult for facebook to make fundamental changes to their product suite to answer competitive threats. It is for this reason I feel that Google+ has a genuine shot at dethroning facebook. Read the full article for an interesting look at the development of the Circles concept and Facebook’s “unwillingness” (Dhanji’s words) to change substantially enough to combat it… Read the rest here
Now available: the results from the A List Apart Survey for People Who Make Web Sites, 2010 . This is the fourth industry snapshot we’ve compiled, and the story that’s emerged over that time is proving to be pretty consistent. You can get a high-level view from the Introduction , and then dive deeper into the results in the following chapters. And, as is traditional, the Addendum contains links to the full (anonymized) data set in three formats for your own analytical investigations. We’d love to see what you come up with! Something that surprised me quite a bit was that in 2010 we got about half the number of respondents we’ve gotten in past years—not quite seventeen thousand participated in 2010 instead of just over thirty thousand as we saw in previous years. I’m not quite sure what to make of that… Read the rest here
It’s all too often the case that as soon as a project is finished, I’m on to the next one in the queue, without any time to stop. I’m sure others know this feeling – there’s no time to reflect and blog about the work you’re doing. So here starts the catch up… Back in April, a project I was involved in was finally launched, the new Identity and website for Five Details , previously known as ExtendMac, whose “Flow”: FTP client won a Runner up prize in the prestigous Apple Design Awards in 2008. Brian Amerige, who created Flow was getting ready to release a new iOS app called Seamless to coincide with the relaunch, and Hicksdesign were bought on board to create a new identity and website. After a few different explorations, we settled on the simple logo of the 2 ‘D’ shapes that together form a ‘5’ in the negative space: The logo has white and orange variants, working on either a white or dark background, as well as ‘layered’ version, for use in backgrounds: Brian and I discussed suitable type treatments, and I felt that LFT Etica was the right fit for this project… Read the rest here
One of the most common things I’m asked is how people can break into the field of user experience design. I’d love to be able to give a simple answer—like studying a particular course at University or starting as a UX apprentice and working your way up a series of clearly defined roles—but sadly that’s not the case. There are Masters degrees out there, but the good ones are few and far between. With current courses failing to meet demand, there’s no way the education system will be able to cope in the next two to three years once User Experience practice has becomes the norm. Even if you’re lucky enough to attend a good course, unless you had some level of prior experience, you’ll find it hard landing that first job… Read the rest here
There’s an interesting debate happening in the world of mobile design at the moment. In one camp we have the “nativists” who believe that the best mobile experiences are tailored to a particular device. These are the people focused on creating platform specific mobile apps and mobile websites. Then we have the “universalists” who believe in the “one web”, a place where all content and services can be delivered to multiple devices through the same URL. This division is causing me a bit of a quandary. … Read the rest here
MotionCAPTCHA : Here’s an interesting take on CAPTCHA: MotionCAPTCHA is a jQuery CAPTCHA plugin, based on the HTML5 Canvas Harmony procedural drawing tool by Mr Doob and the $1 Unistroke Gesture Regonizer algorithm , requiring users to sketch the shape they see in the canvas in order to submit a form. At the moment, it’s just a proof-of-concept — it only uses client-side gesture recognition, and doesn’t really have IE support — but the next releases will feature progressive enhancement and the ability to use this in production environments as a serious CAPTCHA alternative. I’m not a fan of CAPTCHA in general, but this is an idea at least worth entertaining. … Read the rest here
Back in November 2010, David Cameron announced plans to turn the Olympic Village in East London into a technology hub to rival Silicon Valley. These type of Grand Plans are great at generating headlines and creating a legacy for all those involved, but how likely are they to succeed? Are we going to inherit a shiny new creative centre in the aftermath of the 2012 Olympics, or will it become just another mediocre science park like the ones clinging to the sides of the M4? It would seem that successive governments have tried to align themselves with the dream of Silicon Valley, with little success. Back in the late 70s and early 80s I grew up in a town called Bracknell which was supposed to be Europe’s answer to Silicon Valley… Read the rest here
Flux CSS3 Slider : Hardware-accelerated image transitions using CSS3, which, as described in the readme on GitHub , “improves performance on less powerful devices such as mobiles and tablets.” Indeed, this functions quite well on both my iPad and iPhone. … Read the rest here
Bento Book : Core77: The Bento Book is a system of devices that work together… kind of like Voltron. The phone, tablet, hard drive, and battery dock into the base of the laptop to essentially form half of it. The phone becomes the track pad, the tablet becomes a touch screen keyboard/input area, somewhat like a Nintendo DS. Content can be surfed on the tablet, and then say you want to modify that content, or interact with it more deeply, you dock the tablet into the screen to continue working with it in a more focussed way. Then you can pop the phone out to take it all on the road… Read the rest here
Hiring: Lead Web Designer at Apartment Therapy : I have to admit I’m feeling a little special right about now seeing these guys post a listing on Authentic Jobs. I’ve been quietly following Apartment Therapy for several months, along with its sister site Unpluggd . What’s really exciting for me is that, while the content they post is fantastic, I’ve always felt the formatting and layout could use a little fine-tuning. Looks like that’ll be part of the job: The first job will be to join in our redesign process with our art director, Thomas Porostocky, and work through a complete redesign for launch in September. After that, you will be working on everything: site pages, email templates, cross browser compliance, media kits, and ad driven event campaigns… Read the rest here
The rise of smart devices like the iPhone and iPad has led to an application goldrush, with companies racing to stake their claims. In the early days we saw a few lucky pioneers strike gold with novelty apps. There were also a handful of independent developers and well-known brands that invested in user experience and captured the high end of the market. However, as with most goldrushes, the obvious targets were depleted very quickly. Digital prospectors are arriving to find a very different market, one rife with competition and few obvious deposits to mine. Furthermore, our appetite for apps seems to be dwindling as we fall back on a few must-have staples. … Read the rest here
Over the weekend, Aaron Gustafson and I created a tool for anyone who wants to resolve a series of CSS transforms into a matrix() value representing the same end state. Behold: The Matrix Resolutions . (You knew that was coming, right?) It should work fine in various browsers, though due to the gratuitous use of keyframe animations on the html element’s multiple background images it looks best in WebKit browsers. The way it works is you input a series of transform functions, such as translateX(22px) rotate(33deg) scale(1.13) . The end-state and its matrix() equivalent should update whenever you hit the space bar or the return key, or else explicitly elect to take the red pill. … Read the rest here
I just shipped off the last of my drafts for CSS Pocket Reference, 4th Edition to my editor. In the process of writing the entries, I set up an ad-hoc test suite and made determinations about what to document and what to cut. That’s what you do with a book, particularly a book that’s meant to fit into a pocket. My general guide was to cut anything that isn’t supported in any rendering engine, though in a few cases I decided to cut properties that were supported by a lone browser but had no apparent prospects of being supported by anyone else, ever. For fun, and also to give fans of this or that property a chance to petition for re-inclusion, here are the properties and modules I cut… Read the rest here
Tron Legacy: The Making of UI/Visual Effects : Josh Nimoy: In addition to visual effects, I was asked to record myself using a unix terminal doing technologically feasible things. I took extra care in babysitting the elements through to final composite to ensure that the content would not be artistically altered beyond that feasibility. I take representing digital culture in film very seriously in lieu of having grown up in a world of very badly researched user interface greeble…. In Tron, the hacker was not supposed to be snooping around on a network; he was supposed to kill a process. So we went with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep… Read the rest here
A few evenings ago I watched a really interesting TED talk by Barry Schwartz on practical wisdom . Although his examples were rooted in education and law, I couldn’t help but feel that practical wisdom was also the core of good design. After all, what is design except the ability to improvise novel solutions to new problems based on your knowledge of a set of rules and your ability to apply them with flexibility? The talk also made me think about my own personal feelings towards project management. I believe that project management processes are often used as a series of inflexible rules (or sticks) intended to ensure average teams reach a minimum level of performance. However this will have the opposite effect on good people, constricting them and eventually demotivating them. … Read the rest here
Is a Macbook Air up to the job of being a primary working machine? It has for me… Since 1995, I’ve always used a Mac laptop as my primary (and only) work machine. When at the office, I plug it into a large screen with keyboard and mouse, and then at home or travelling I’ve got absolutely everything I need with me. Having seen the new generation Macbook Air in the flesh/aluminium, and how small and light it is compared to my unibody MacBook Pro, I wondered if it could be the way forward. The fact that I now cycle to work gave me more impetus to get something that wouldn’t be so heavy on my back. … Read the rest here
I’ve been coming to SXSW for 7 years and I’ve seen it change from a small and intimate event to the tech sector’s equivalent of Glastonbury. Back then bloggers were king and CSS2.1 was the hot technology of the day. Today the conference has gone from 2,500 people to an astonishing 25,000. Blogging is considered old hat, and the new tech superstars are the start-up founders, the professional publishers and the best selling authors. … Read the rest here
Apple’s Role in the Earthquake : An email from an Apple Japan employee and friend of Kevin Rose: 7 hours and 118 aftershocks later, the store was still open. Why? Because with the phone and train lines down, taxis stopped, and millions of people stuck in the Tokyo shopping district scared, with no access to television, hundreds of people were swarming into Apple stores to watch the news on USTREAM and contact their families via Twitter, Facebook, and email…. You know how in disaster movies, people on the street gather around electronic shops that have TVs in the display windows so they can stay informed with what is going on? In this digital age, that’s what the Tokyo Apple stores became. … Read the rest here