Posts Tagged ‘resources’

Lately, I’ve found myself giving a sub­stan­tial amount of design feed­back to non-designers. While I always main­tain that you ought to leave design to pro­fes­sionals, some­times this just isn’t fea­sible for one reason or another. So, in the inter­ests of public ser­vice (pret­ti­ness making the world a better place, and whatnot), I’d like to offer up some sug­ges­tions that should improve your design across the board.

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When I was working on my new design for this web­site, I spent a lot of time eval­u­ating my options for image dis­play, as it’s one of the most vital ele­ments of the site. I had very spe­cific require­ments for what I wanted, both in terms of the look & feel of the gal­leries, and the ease of imple­men­ta­tion. I spent for­ever looking through all sorts of Word­Press plu­gins, hacks, and stand­alone solu­tions, and even­tu­ally set­tled (grudg­ingly) on a Flash-based option: WP-Simpleviewer, based on the Sim­ple­Viewer plugin.

Of course, after spending for­ever (I stopped counting some­where along the line) spent making it work pre­cisely (and pixel-perfectly) to my liking, it’s now broken. Every single image in my port­folio is now dis­playing with jagged images. Cue panic! It was fine last time I checked! What on earth hap­pened? I still have no idea, and I hate to think how long it may have been broken before I noticed. (Note to self: keep an eye on these things, alright? Sheesh. My con­tact form plugin had also deac­ti­vated itself without my noticing some­where along the line. Not good.)

So I’m ditching the Sim­ple­Viewer. (I am guessing that much of my weekend will be spent tweaking and imple­menting the change, so things are going to look ter­rible between now and then.) I found an alter­na­tive that I think will be better, and sim­pler in the long run, although of course it does mean that I need to go through every port­folio post and upload new gal­leries: Gal­lifrey, based on Gal­ler­iffic. (If you’re nerd-chic and/or British enough, you’ll rec­og­nize this as The Doctor‘s home planet, which rather delights me as I’ve just started falling in love with all things Tardis-related.) It works with Word­Press’ built-in gallery func­tions, is super-customizable, and will even finally allow me to imple­ment my triple-bordered image dis­play that I wanted ini­tially for this site. Sim­ple­viewer, you were fan­tastic, but it’s time for us to part ways.

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I don’t believe in showing up early for a party (after all, it’s impor­tant to make an entrance). In a busi­ness con­text, this prob­ably isn’t the best thing in the world, and in an internet con­text, it’s even less so. For instance, I just recently started making use of Twitter. I hon­estly didn’t get what the big idea was. Then I started using it.

It’s amazing. News sto­ries break on Twitter before the news­pa­pers even have an idea what’s going on. You can see real-time photos of Stephen Fry stuck in an ele­vator. If you com­plain about a product, its man­u­fac­turers will help you out. But most fas­ci­nating are the con­ver­sa­tions: it’s like what I imagine The Crysalids was like. Someone makes a com­ment about the colour of the sky, and people respond; threads of con­ver­sa­tion begin spi­dering off in dif­ferent tan­gents. Anyone can jump in at any point and drop out just as easily, and nobody dom­i­nates because every response is lim­ited to 140 char­ac­ters. It’s the dig­ital rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the col­lec­tive uncon­scious­ness. And it’s searchable!

Social media, I’m sure you’ve heard, is changing our world. If you’re late to the party, like me, it’s time to get involved! Rather than give you a bunch of infor­ma­tion that may or may not be true, I’m going to point the way to some resources from more cred­ible experts than I.

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I’ve been doing some work with email newslet­ters of late. It is, of course, a bit of a chal­lenge, given how email is even less reli­able at prop­erly inter­preting standards-compliant CSS code and the like. (Seri­ously, one of these days, all these com­pa­nies will get together and start imple­menting code con­sis­tently, across the board, and web designers across the world will sud­denly find that what used to take ten hours now only takes one. Com­pa­nies like the fab­u­lous BrowserCam will go out of busi­ness. Why is so much of our economy built on busy-work? Screw the unem­ploy­ment rate, I want effi­ciency!)

Anyway. Two things I’ve learned:

• Gmail doesn’t care about your CSS text-formatting. That’s right, that means you’ll need to use <FONT> tags. Gross. I haven’t used those in at least five years!
• Out­look 2007 will make things look ugliest. Appar­ently, this is because it uses the MS Word ren­dering engine. Now, seri­ously? Why? If you’ve ever tried to design any­thing in Word, well, you know how impos­sible it is. They do, how­ever, pro­vide this handy little “val­idator” to check to see how/if your code is going to work, which is nice for those of us who get the shakes just opening Out­look. And it’ll plug into Dreamweaver!

On a vaguely related, but mostly unre­lated, note: remember to vote, kids! This is the first year in a while I haven’t been directly involved in doing design work for a cam­paign, and as a result I’m less jazzed about the elec­tion than I usu­ally am, but it’s starting to get to me as the day goes on. Go! Vote! (Or at least spoil your ballot (though it’s illegal to do so). Or vote Lib­er­tarian, if you can! Effi­ciency 2008! Down with Busy-Work! Alright, now I’m excited.)

I usu­ally use Scrip­ta­l­i­cious for my AJAX needs, but I’m working on a set of AJAX-ified forms on a web­site that’s already using jQuery, so I figure hey, it can’t be that hard to change over! Twenty min­utes later, cue the loud cursing and growling. I mean, the whole thing seems far more pow­erful, but every time I’ve wanted to start imple­menting it, I’ve been turned off by how com­plex it seems to do simple things. (Like slide down a div window, which I hope to have accom­plished before I turn 30. On a side note, I’ve been feeling old because I turned 25 today, until my little sister sent me a mes­sage saying that I’m “plenty young, for a pres­i­dent!” Which I sup­pose is tech­ni­cally true, so I don’t feel quite so washed up anymore.)

Anyway, back to my jQuery-induced headache: this very helpful thing to the rescue! If I can stop being dis­tracted by the gor­geous site design, I might be able to figure this stuff out, after all, without having to spend all day teaching my brain new methods of pro­gram­ming. I do so love pro­gram­ming tuto­rials written for designers. Thank you, pretty colourful website!

Well, it’s been a long, long, long time in the making, but I’ve finally updated my port­folio a teeny little bit (not too much to be over­whelming, of course!) There’s this por­trait of my gor­geous little sister:

and a “new” web­site (that was com­pleted months ago). I really don’t like updating my own website!

But I’m deter­mined that it’s about time to do it, espe­cially given that I’m about to move again, and that means that my address as listed on the web­site will be even more wrong than it is cur­rently. (Sure, in theory it only takes two min­utes to change it, but that’s not how I work…if I’m going to spend two min­utes, I’m going to be there three hours trying to fix all the little things.) At any rate, all the little things have really added up, and it’s time for some major-ish rear­ranging. (more…)

I gave a pre­sen­ta­tion to my BBC group last week, giving some tips and guide­lines for how to make a web­site more effec­tive. It’s aimed towards the non-technical person, though imple­men­ta­tion of much of the advice would likely require a designer or developer’s help. How­ever, I thought it might be a useful resource, espe­cially if you’re in the process of cre­ating a new web­site, or revamping an old one.

Do note that I’ve not been fero­ciously good at fol­lowing all of these guide­lines myself—but it’s cer­tainly given me some better ideas about where I ought to be taking my web­site! (more…)

So, let’s say you’re having a problem with your email, or if you’ve found a bug in your web­site. Your first instinct, nat­u­rally, is to fire off an email to your trusty web-person. But wait! Before you hit send, make sure you’ve included as much detail as possible—what you were trying to do when the error hap­pened, what sort of error mes­sage (if any) you got, what soft­ware you were using at the time, etc. This will help your trusty web-person track down the problem far, far more quickly.

An excel­lent way of sup­ple­menting this infor­ma­tion is by sending along a screen­shot. I’ll often request this of clients when I can’t repli­cate a reported bug—if you’ve sent one to begin with, I can be that much more effective.

Here’s how you do it.
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Con­fused by CMYK, RGB, and the like? Got a plethora of logo for­mats and no idea which to use? Read on for some quick tips about how to get the most out of your colour. (more…)

A quick intro­duc­tion to the two major types of file for­mats you’re likely to run across, and what to use when. (more…)