Posts Tagged ‘Web Design’
Typekit is a service designed to meet the changing typeface needs of the modern web and, in their words, “is the easiest way to get real fonts on your website.” In short, Typekit allows you to use a wide range of hosted typefaces on your site for a reasonable price. Select typefaces based on your needs, determine your selectors, and attach a little javascript to the <head> of your document and you’re set.
I’ve eschewed its use on my personal site for a while, but recently decided to give the trial account another run–you’ll notice the Typekit badge docked to the bottom of the page, indicating that I’m freeloading the system until I decide whether or not to utilize the service on a paying basis–in order to determine its usefulness for me. What are my needs here?
I would certainly like to use a typeface that can be seen uniformly by all users, and this definitely provides the necessary functionality, but I will have to be careful in the choices I make; there are a wide array of font families to choose from, and you’re apt to go wild when first given access to such variety. It is a variety the likes of which have never been seen before on this here web. At the moment I’ve chosen Droid Serif made by Google Android, in all 4 weights and styles for the body copy.
I’m using both Typekit and Cufon to include non-standard typefaces, but would like to eliminate one of the two at some point, and I would prefer to eliminate Cufon because of text selection and licensing issues. I look forward to testing the Typekit service further.
Is it the start of a new year that often gets you thinking about what made you so disappointed with your efforts last year, or is it simple pessimism? Because I’ve found myself not only reinventing my branding and website in an effort to clean out the cob webs of creativity, but writing many posts relating to said motivation, writing, and goals for the year. Not that this is necessarily an unusual or unwanted thing; it serves to get me moving and motivated for the year. It helps give me a renewed sense of purpose in my design efforts, though I still have procrastination issues.1
Believe me, most tasks I undertake are neither difficult, nor do they warrant such a reaction,2 but I find myself a little terrified of starting something that could become overwhelming. In order to move past that nasty procrastination stage, and arrive at an appropriately acceptable result, I employ a couple of simple strategies that makes the given task a little less daunting.
Find a mitigating factor. In the case of getting projects started at work, I often need to find something that helps to lessen the impact of a larger task. In most circumstances that means finding a solution that makes the project easier to finish by speeding up the menial tasks; often I’ll see if there is a way to use php to my advantage by setting up a little script to run through a file, file names, or output some code that would have taken me quite some time to do manually. In other cases, I’ll take advantage of actions and batch processing in Photoshop in order to run through a long list of images in the shortest amount of time, with the least amount of manual processing possible.
Delegate tasks efficiently. Which tasks are of the need-to-do-now variety and which are less important? In a lot of cases I tend to block early sections of my day for the easy to do tasks in order to get them done, as well as to do something that requires less concentration in general, and devote the rest of the day to one or two of the more important projects on the docket. This doesn’t always work well and may not be what others recommend, but it helps me to work through tasks efficiently as well as to prepare myself mentally for the most important project; I do break this pattern if important projects are more urgent than usual. The reason I adopted this pattern was primarily as a way to deal with early morning meetings, as meetings would often interrupt my creative flow on the larger projects.3
Look on the bright side. You could always be doing something less fulfilling than what it is you are getting ready to start. I’ve not written much in the past year as far as short stories, editorials, poetry, and web design posts go, and this is because I lacked the motivation to do so. Why? Because I don’t always appreciate my skill and look pessimistically at my ideas. Don’t emulate that. Look for the good in your ideas, and you’ll be less likely to put them aside.
Make your goals public. It’s more difficult to slack off when others are holding you accountable, though it is easy to cheat that one if you’re doing it online only. Make the announcement on your blog, but make sure you’ve got a living person breathing down your neck to make sure you’re completing a task.
To summarize. You should find a mitigating factor, delegate tasks efficiently, look on the bright side, and make your goals public in order to make sure you get yourself motivated. As I said, these are simple things that I’ve done to motivate myself, and they work for me; which means, they may not work for you; which means…that you should think of things that help to motivate you, write about it, and act on it. Get to work, and hold yourself accountable to your goals.
- I find myself putting things off quite a bit. Mostly out of fear of the task rather than shear laziness, but neither excuse is good because once I start a task I generally do it quite well. ↵
- We’re talking simple things, writing, working on new projects at work, nothing intensive. ↵
- Not that I have to participate in a ton of meetings, this pattern just made it easier to deal with the days that included morning meetings. ↵
27 Jan 10
How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell
True, true. While I’ve never had a client this extreme, many feel they are themselves designers; proffering advice, making changes, and concluding they no longer need to pay you for the work their 12 year old nephew can do.
Wordpress finds new ways to amaze me; some of these things are neither impressive nor particularly noteworthy, except that these things enable users to customize this platform in ways unimaginable to regular Joe Blogger, who simply uses the system. And in spite of how common such things are to those who truly dive into it, I struggled for quite a while trying to find the best way to change a bit of core functionality.
If you scroll down to the bottom of the site on the home page, and on any entry page, you’ll notice a set of buttons that will help you navigate to the next and previous entries, or the next and previous pages of the home page. I needed a way to style these, and oddly enough Wordpress did not provide a class name for either of those links. Too bad. So I needed to find out how to adjust that in order to target those links. In addition to that, I needed to also make a small change that classes wouldn’t have allowed for, which was to get the function to output code for the cases in which there were no other pages or posts in a given direction. My first thought was to find whatever core file these functions were located in and then make the change there; I proceeded to do this, got it working, and decided that I should go about this in a different way if I ever wanted to upgrade without having to change that file every time–if I even remembered in those instances.
The tags in question were: next_posts_link, previous_posts_link, next_post_link, and previous_post_link, as well as a few more functions that were related to them. Each of these provides the basic functionality I needed to modify; I tried to replicate these functions, using the same name, in an effort to essentially overwrite the original Wordpress core functions. Well, I located them in the link-template.php file, copied and pasted them into my themes functions.php file, and proceeded to make the necessary changes. When I uploaded functions.php and refreshed my site, I had a big giant error; actually it was less an error and more a blank screen, which is worse in a lot of ways as you have no idea what went wrong. I should have known from my programming experience that I couldn’t duplicate these functions in this way.
I was stumped for the longest time, and search after search on Google was leading me towards something called, add_filter, which it turns out doesn’t quite overwrite the function so much as filter the function results through your new function; this was not what I wanted to do on any level. I couldn’t manipulate the data through a filter to achieve the needed results.
After some time, and a lot of searching, I landed on a Wordpress MU forum (still not sure what MU is), that gave me my answer–the most obvious answer–which was to take the functions I needed and rename them. I could then use those new function names in place of the old ones wherever I needed them in my theme files.
That’s easy, ain’t it? Why don’t people explain this more often, or even need to to do this enough for it to be found on Google?
Update 1/19/2010: I wanted to clarify just in case some one stumbled upon this looking for an actual bit of code that might show them what I was up to. So here goes.
Instead of adding a filter to the function you want to change:
add_filter('next_posts_link', 'new_next_posts_link', 0);
Add a new function to functions.php and call it in your template wherever you were going to use the old one.
function new_get_next_posts_link( $a, $b ) {
/*Code Goes Here*/
}
function new_next_posts_link( $label = 'Next Page »', $max_page = 0 ) {
echo new_get_next_posts_link( $label, $max_page );
}
Part of me really enjoyed what I had to work with in the previous iteration; part of me wants to continue using it and it was a bit of a struggle to get this version going; now I’m stuck, whether this is good or not, because a good portion of the files for the old version are gone. That leaves me with this fully integrated Wordpress theme. Not that this is a bad thing.
Prior to the version you’re reading from now, the site was an integration between Wordpress and my own static site; I built parts of it beyond Wordpress, portions as a theme, and the rest was some amalgamation of both. In this version my goal was to build the site using Wordpress as a CMS and create custom templates for pages that I needed. So far, so good.
And this didn’t take nearly as long as I thought it would. Once I finally settled on the layout, design, and coded a raw version, I could convert it to a theme that can be used with Wordpress. The initial process took me about two weeks, as I had roughly two pages to get together, and some other work to do, while turning it into a theme took four hours.
Four hours.
I’m blown away by that. I’ve just about got theme customization down to a science, which is why I think I will be offering blog design and development as a service in the very near future.
And I can’t speak of the greatness of Wordpress nearly enough. It is a fantastic platform for building simple dynamic web sites.
Anyway, my thinking here with the new design is to focus a little more on writing. I do it from time to time here and in other places, but I was often turning to quotes and links in an effort to fill up this site and that gets a little boring for me and anyone who happens to be swinging by the site.
At this point, I have a little work to do on the portfolio, but the site is good to go for now.
05 Jan 10
Call to Action Generator
Stuck on that big button and have no clue what words will send that user into a clicking frenzy? Give this site a try.
05 Jan 10
30 Best Blogs of 2009
So it’s time to stop being wishy-washy about our value assessments. A few years ago, someone convinced me to drop the title “Best Blogs” from this annual list and change it to “Most Notable” blogs of the year. It made sense at the time, when the medium was still figuring itself out: chiefs were being chosen, voice still being refined. But as I began to assemble this year’s list, it became clear that, no, these blogs actually were my favorites, not merely the most interesting.
15 Dec 09
Color Powered: ColorBox
A light-weight, customizable lightbox plugin for jQuery 1.3
I will be using this on an upcoming project. This particular lightbox is excellent, and by all appearances highly customizable.
13 Nov 09
31 Three Redesigns
I’m way behind in noticing this, but 31 Three has a fresh new look. Nice work again.
Last week I had the unfortunate experience of losing most of my previous website (the database was thankfully salvaged) which pushed me to redesign this website a little earlier than I had hoped.
Too bad it was prompted by something like this, but we’ve all been there once or twice as designers, no?
13 Nov 09
The myth of the page fold: evidence from user testing
People tell us that they don’t mind scrolling and the behaviour we see in user testing backs that up. We see that people are more than comfortable scrolling long, long pages to find what they are looking for.
A convention I’ve long suspected of being past it’s prime. Link should be useful for future reference.
29 Oct 09
Minor Speculum
This was an old project of mine involving Larry, Jared, Myself, Scott, Keith, and a few others over the course of a couple of years. It was short lived, but I’m thinking of restarting this thing. Browse it, then let me know if this is a good idea or not. Anyone.
Update: 11/2/09 I have purchased the domain, minorspeculum.com, and it appears the site will be going live once again to live in glory, or to die a slow shatteringly terribly death.
When I first browsed to CNN.com on the 26th of October and noticed the change, my initial reaction was a bit underwhelming; in spite of this, I was physically assaulted by that red header. The red got to me, it felt like they had taken a step backwards in their design, and I was pretty unhappy. This was in stark contrast to the rather neutral feel of the previous iteration.
Then I started to browse the site and get a handle on my reaction, and I’ve found the red grates a little less on the nerves, but only because it’s become background noise to me now, and the new design bothers me less, though I do not like the direction they’re heading in.
In Their Words
This redesign is more user-centric in execution. They’re promoting new customization features, will focus more on video and photography, and will promote more feature oriented content; it appears they’re minimizing the importance of breaking news stories (more on that later) in this design.
A new section, NewsPulse, lists the most popular news of the last 24 hours. This is determined by popularity, however, what makes it popular is unclear to me at this time. Perhaps number of views?
CNN.com senior vice president and general manager K.C. Estenson touted the makeover as “a total reimagining of CNN.com… the breadth and depth of the new site will give users a fresh new way to experience CNN’s content.” – Multichannel News
All in all, an interesting direction for the news organization.
The Good
CNN.com has done some things right in this new redesign that I want to note. First, the site seems less visually cluttered, particularly at higher resolutions; second, there is a sense of intended visual balance in the organization of the front page and the site overall; and third, the red, while a little too powerful, brings some warmth to the almost somber impression the previous design engendered (in me at least, perhaps not the general population).
1. Visual Clutter
In a lot of ways, the redesign seems a lot less chaotic. Many sites in this genre suffer from a bit of information overload, with sidebars, ads, and other features adding visual clutter to article pages; this design seems to minimize that clutter by opening up the old content containers and leaving ample white space at wider resolutions.
At lower resolutions, the affect may become less obvious, but still feel less constrained, and so this is a win for me.
2. Visual Balance
Visual balance is certainly important in design and, in particular, it is especially important in designing a web site for a news organization. Below is the comparison between the two version’s home pages.
In this particular case I say the new version is purposefully designed because each section below the primary content has a fixed height and width, and it appears that it is done deliberately to separate elements in a more obvious fashion; the old site suffers slightly as it has a cluttered feel now.
3. Color
While not particularly necessary, it is a bit of a change of pace from the more neutral design previously in use at the site. This could go one way or the other as the red header is an assault on the senses.
The Bad…ish
Between you and I, this design is a step backwards from the previous rendition; while it is not the case in a side by side comparison, the content “feels” smaller, though it is better organized visually. Quite frankly, the more I use the site, the more I appreciate it.
The Header
One of my least favorite parts of the old design was the header; this is mostly because it was the one aspect of the site that was liquid and would expand based on the window size. This was not appealing to me because it was far too large and you were moving from the center of the screen all the way to the edges to access different sections of the site. A bit of a burden from a usability standpoint.
The one complaint I have about the new header is the placement of the logo. I’m so used to logos being placed at the left edge of the layout that it just feels off, even though it looks just fine where it is, and evokes a bit of a newspaper feel in it’s placement.
Text and News
The size of text on the home page is a bit problematic at higher resolutions. The default size is far too small, and this is particularly troubling, as the previous site did not suffer from this.
Additionally, breaking stories have not been placed in such a way as to be the primary focus of browsing; feature stories and videos have been given the most prominent position in the design, while breaking stories are a secondary element. This gives me pause, as it makes it clear what the content creators deem to be most important.
Conclusion
Overall, this redesign works, even while it feels like a step backwards, simply because their focus has changed from pure news delivery to delivery of media and the creation of a customized user experience.
This was one of my primary sources of news, and I will continue to use the site to gain more perspective on its implementation as well as for the content they promise to deliver.
26 Oct 09
CNN Has Redesigned
Hope I’m not late to the game on noticing this redesign, but so far, there is a lot to like; though I’m a little underwhelmed initially, I’ll need to explore a little bit more before I can post my thoughts.
Well this development is a mildly odd thing, considering I thought this already happened. What this tells me is the web has progressed so very, very far in such a short time. I don’t remember my old Geocities page, but it probably disappeared more than a decade ago, sadly.
Anyway, Geocities got me in the web design game and it turns out that it was a pretty good decision; for nostalgic reasons, I am saddened by this news.
A moment of silence please.
08 Aug 09
18 IDE’s for Windows, Mac, and Linux
Quite a large list of software to aid in web development.