RSS feedArchive for October, 2008
Why is technology so dull?
The concept of personality has us hooked; just look at Cosmo quizzes and the thousands of online personality tests. And rightly so: it’s something that has profound effects on our friendships, love lives (that old “she’s got a nice personality” chestnut) and careers. For instance, Bruce Tognazzini claims that designers must have an ‘N’ in [...]
Printing press workshop
A slightly shortened week, since Clearleft took Monday off for a day of printing press revelry at Ditchling Museum. Ditchling was, for many years, the home of sculptor, typographer and unspeakable pervert Eric Gill, and a large proportion of the museum is therefore dedicated to his work.
The first half of the day was dedicated to [...]
The survival of web apps
I’ve had a busy time of late, in particular thanks to a couple of days in Switzerland and Austria, followed by the Future Of Web Apps (FOWA) conference in the Docklands. FOWA’s a little large for my tastes, but it’s undeniably well organised. Three sessions stood out (the uniformly excellent Gavin Bell, Benjamin Huh’s history [...]
My name in print
The latest issue of .net magazine is out today, and it’s an important one for me because I wrote the cover article “The ultimate ways to test your site”. It’s my first printed article, and obviously I’m proud to do my bit to spread the word about user experience. It’s also pretty darn hefty and [...]
Thoughts on the Microsoft Surface
I’ve mentioned my doubts about large-scale gestural interfaces before, but wanted to reserve judgement until I’d tried one out properly. One of the more interesting exhibits at last week’s FOWA was a Microsoft Surface.
Pic by Christiano
The demonstrator, playing to its strengths, had plenty of fun merrily flinging photos around (a cute idea, albeit apparently nicked [...]
The MAYA principle
One of the benefits of following smart people on Twitter is that I regularly pick up on techniques and principles I’ve not heard of. I don’t remember who first mentioned the MAYA Principle, but I investigated and found a powerful idea I think is worth sharing.
MAYA, Most Advanced Yet Acceptable, is a heuristic coined by [...]
Escalation
More and more, I find myself less interested in what web designers have to say.
That’s not to say that there aren’t some very clever people out there - hell, I’m lucky enough to work with some of them. However, I’m worried that as a community we are blinded by our self-importance. Proudly we don the [...]
Beauty in web design
Just found out that the video of my talk at Reboot in Copenhagen has been posted to the conference site:
Slides themselves are on Slideshare, albeit with some minor font inconsistencies. It’s also worth checking out Andy’s session on the user experience curve, and I particularly enjoyed Eric Reiss talking about e-service. Be great to hear [...]
The interrobang
A quick hurrah for my favourite typographic glyph, the interrobang.
Introduced by Martin K Speckter in 1962, it was an attempt to condense the overactive punctuation of incredulous sentences such as “You drank how much?!”. Although it never really caught on, it still has some support in modern Unicode and can be used in HTML: ‽
Although [...]
What if the design gods forsake us?
In some design Utopia, everything would be tested. An unseen army of usability specialists would verify everything and free our minds from worrying about unforeseen outcomes. Our users would be empowered, our messages would hit home, our harps would be perfectly tuned, and our gins and tonic perfectly mixed (lime, not lemon, thank you).
Until that [...]