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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 [...]
Stop the Death Star madness
Barclaycard just unveiled their new corporate identity.
Yep, another Death Star.
I leapt to these comparisons right away (as did, it appears, the Creative Review). I mean, c’mon, do we need more of the same? We get it. You’re global companies. You’re bright and forward-thinking. You connect people. Blah blah blah. How much did this lazy, 5-minute [...]
Reflection
During the radio silence of the last few weeks, I’ve turned my attention to other tasks. The largest has been to write two substantial UX articles, which should be published shortly. More details will follow. I’ve also written a few songs, recorded one - Pilcrow (demo, mp3), kickstarted an intensive exercise program and slowly coaxed [...]
Reconstruct
Quick personal post.
dConstruct was, of course, marvellous, but I shan’t review it. My partisan stance and lack of liberty to pay too much attention mean that others have done it more justice than I could: viz. Twitter search, the BBC article, and Matt Balara’s review (although I disagree with his verdict on Jeremy’s closing session).
I’m [...]
CDs for sale
I’ve decided to finally make the move to digital, so I’m selling all my CDs. Before I go down the eBay route, any of you lucky folks want to buy any? Full list here (pdf) - £3 each, £1 for EPs. First come, first served: leave a comment or hit me up at email [at] [...]
Planning and failing
I enjoyed Lloyd Davis’s post Stick your five-year plan, in which he argues the futility of long-term planning when it comes to one’s own life. I think in some respects he’s absolutely right. While it’s useful to have some structure, some framework to life, anything beyond a couple of years is likely to be wildly [...]
My new filing technique is unstoppable
It should come as no surprise that, as both an IA and a music snob, I keep my ID3 tags pretty much immaculate. Correct spellings, title case throughout, even proper diacritics, until they were ruined by the iTunes v7.7 update.
As part of my curatorial approach, I classify for optimal findability - which means, since I [...]