Carsonified’s four-day Django gem has launched. It’s a little tool that lets you easily post a single tweet to multiple Twitter accounts. Although it’s not something I particularly need (I only use one Twitter account), it’s a nice example of how quickly a team can make something cool with Django, and it’s got a freaking wonderful illustrated design, to boot. Congrats, Carsonified! Visit site »
October 8th, 2008–October 10th, 2008 in London, England
Really, really great piece by Andy on what sort of skills one needs to be a good and employable web designer in the industry today. You’ll note that Andy’s list of skills focuses on understanding the foundations of design as a craft (as well as basic communication, interaction, and business skills needed by a professional in nearly any industry), and not on individual design packages such as Photoshop or Dreamweaver. To that point, this quote at the end is particularly interesting:
…you may find that there are plenty of job listings where the job requirements are described as, “must be expert with Photoshop and Illustrator…” or something long those lines. Ignore those job listings; they’re placed by inept and sick companies looking for decorators, not designers. Take a job with a company asking for a Photoshop expert and I promise you’ll never be allowed to engage in design.
Andy might be over-exaggerating a little bit, here — I wouldn’t say every listing that mentions Photoshop and Illustrator is absolutely a bad gig — but his point is very sound. Such a mention is definitely a red flag. If you’re being hired as a designer, your employer ought to be much more interested in your ability to design than your expertise with a particular software package. And if they are more interested in your expertise with a particular software package, it’s probably because they really want you to be a Photoshop jockey, not a designer. Visit site »
Firefox 3 gets big kudos for its incorporation of kerning and basic ligatures in the new version of the browser. However, these improvements are negated by the fact that it also enables discretionary ligatures by default, which is likely to destroy the look of pages rendered in certain typefaces. Visit site »
Matt, a great web designer and friend in Seattle, has finally launched his blog. After I met this guy at a Refresh Seattle shortly after he moved to town, we exchanged several e-mails that got into some rants and saves about the industry. I told him, “dude, you’ve gotta get a blog.” And he finally has. Trust me, you want to subscribe to this one. Plus, it’s got a nice design. Visit site »
Chad’s got a nice post showcasing several great examples of web typography. His selections are definitely good, but it’s worth pointing out that they’re almost exclusively examples of great display type on the web. Very little body type is showcased here. Visit site »
Adam has redesigned his personal site, and it’s gorgeous. Well done! Visit site »
James makes the case for choosing HTML over XHTML. He makes several good points, but overlooks what is, to me, the single biggest reason to use HTML: because HTML is clearly the future, not XHTML. Today, the choice is mostly arbitrary. In my opinion, neither markup language offers significant advantages or disadvantages compared to the other. But, it’s clear (at least to me) that HTML5 is where things are going, so stepping away from XHTML now may better prepare you for the future.
That having been said, I still keep using XHTML out of habit, even if I think HTML is the better choice. :) Visit site »
Jon has a nice piece on the paragraph and how to appropriately use it on the web. It’s an important topic and one I spend a decent amount of time on in my usual typography talk when I speak at events. Far too often, people think typography is all about picking typefaces; Jon effectively explains some of the more nuanced details in this article. Visit site »
Wow. This is awesome. Liz Danzico and Steven Heller have put together a MFA program with a faculty that includes the likes of Christopher Fahey, David Womack, Jason Santa Maria, Karen McGrane, Khoi Vinh, Paul Ford, Matt Owens, Rachel Abrams, Jeffrey Zeldman, and more. The program will launch in the Fall of 2009. Only one question: where were you guys in 1994?! Visit site »
In part three of Keith’s ongoing series of post about working with Blue Flavor, he talks in detail about how best to empower our designers and get their best work out of them. I think many potential clients do have a misguided perception of how the relationship between client and designer should work, and Keith aims to quell some of those misunderstandings. Really good stuff. Visit site »
Jeff Palmer’s attractive and inventive tumblelog design. I love it. Via Wilson. Visit site »
Yesterday, our friends at 37signals started an interesting discussion on their blog with a post entitled Why we skip Photoshop. But the post actually has very little to do with ...
My good buddy Boltron has a great little piece in the latest ALA about writing a style guide for interface design. Style guides are commonly used for more overarching brand guidelines, but much less commonly address interface design for digital products — which is a shame, because they’re really very appropriate for many organizations, especially larger ones who have several different teams doing this kind of work (like, oh, I dunno…the company Jina works for). Visit site »
Nice-looking Markdown editor for use in browser from (like, on this site’s comment, for example). Includes toolbar for easy Markdown entry, and live preview of the rendered Markdown output. Visit site »
Leah Culver announces a new open standard for getting the URL to embedded content via an API endpoint. Smart. Currently supported by Flickr, Viddler, Qik, Pownce, Revision3 and Hulu. Vimeo and Blip.tv are working on implementations, as well. Visit site »
Several months ago, I spoke at Refresh Seattle. Kenny Meyers came. We met and became friends. For months, he has bothered me to write a blog post on the topic I spoke about, rehashing my slides and presentation. For months, I ignored him. So, the bastard wrote the blog post himself.
And it’s good. Check it out. Visit site »
If you use Django and Omnigraffle and find yourself mocking up Django admin screens, this could be useful. Visit site »
Safari is probably the most reliable browser out there when it comes to rendering things as a standards-aware developer would expect, but there are those rare times when you need to target it specifically with some unique rules. For those cases, this article will point you in the right direction. Visit site »
Friend of Blue Flavor, Kenny Meyers, has a blog. Its first post is titled, “Peaxal.com is up. Fuck you.” It’s funny. Kenny’s a smart and witty young dude who’s also a talented writer — this is a blog to watch. Visit site »
The wonderful Paul Boag from Headscape interviewed me for the latest episode of Boagworld, almost certainly the best web design podcast on the planet. We talk about my “controversial” views ...
Sara’s got a short little how-to on using clipping and transparency in web design to create some screens over photos and other similar layout options. Good stuff! Visit site »
So it appears that, short of a set of stone tablets carried down from the hills of Mountain View, we do have a fairly clear answer. Using CSS image replacement in a responsible way, where the image truthfully represents the content it’s replacing, is safe to use. The simple act of hiding text from users is not enough to get your site banned from Google’s index.
I think most of us have always suspected non-shady use of image replacement would be fine by Google, but now we (mostly) know for sure. Thanks, Dave! Visit site »
Talk about scratching your own itch… Visit site »
In my experience, most in-house web teams basically employ two types of people: designers and developers. Sure, some people call them different things, and there are definitely exceptions, but generally ...
Maura is the latest Django geek to go all tumblelog-style with her latest blog design. It looks great! Check it out. Visit site »
Bryan’s post on getting bent over and screwed by a client, inspired by some of my tweets from this morning. Good stuff, and a nice discussion follows. Somehow, we need to teach folks how to be better clients. It’s not really their fault, but it’s becoming more and more obvious to me that a lot of people have no idea how to be a good client for a designer (and being a good client is in their best interest — it’s how they get our best work). Visit site »
WebKit now includes support for gradients specified in CSS. The syntax looks a bit confusing for us designerly types, but massive kudos to the WebKit team for continuing to embrace the “browser wars” mentality, offering exciting new toys for designers and developers to play with, while at the same time maintaing interoperability with other browsers. Now, if we could just get Opera, Mozilla, and Microsoft on board, we’d probably see some fast and furious innovation in the CSS arena. Visit site »
Phil Thompson has a nice writeup on the Blue Flavor redesign where he questions the decisions to leave the company name out of the logo treatment, as well as the lack of a mini-description of what it is we do on the homepage. These are very valid points, but I think he’s justifies these design decisions himself when he says:
There is also the possibility that the due to (some of) Blue Flavou’s [sic] staff’s industry profiles, their core clients could be very clued-up on what they do and therefore don’t need it spelled out.
This is definitely true. Probably 95% of our work comes from clients who already know who we are and what we do, and already have a good impression of us based on reputation. These clients tend to be the ones we like working for the best, too; they respect us from the start, so they’re more likely to give us more creative freedom. So, in the end, I don’t think these decisions will hurt us. But, Phil is totally in the right to question them, as the same decision definitely wouldn’t work for every agency. Visit site »
For the past several weeks we’ve been working on a redesign of BlueFlavor.com — and now it’s live. Keith and Kevin and mostly responsible for the design. Nick and Tom did some IA work, Tom and Kevin did the front-end development, and I did the back-end development.
Of particular interest is the awesome posters we’ve commissioned as an interesting new way to showcase some of our work. The artists we’ve used so far have been freaking great, and we’re looking forward to doing more.
For the curious, BlueFlavor.com is now powered by the same Django-based CMS that powers jeffcroft.com. Visit site »