February 2008

The Archives

• Design, Process

  Too many cooks in the proverbial design kitchen?

  02.19.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  Great post about how a poorly conceived design feedback process can really undermine an otherwise potentially successful design.
  Group intelligence is multiplicative when idiots are involved - combining a half-wit with another half-wit does not result in a full-witted person, it results in a quarter-witted person (1/2 x 1/2 = 1/4). Combining a full-witted individual [...]

• Design in the Wild, New Category, Signage, Thoughts

  Design in the Wild: Cloverfield and Relative sickness

  02.19.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  I like the way they convey the potential sickness in a relative way (”similar to riding a rollercoaster”), rather then just saying “Some people may experience dizziness, nausea, etc.”

• Design, Resource

  Icons: small in size, huge in complexity

  02.19.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  Turbo Milk has an illustrative piece on 10 common mistakes in icon design.
  Designing icons has always been an art I admire and respect as one of the more difficult challenges in graphic design. Not only do they have to look good and accomplish a specific goal (or else!), but they have to do so [...]

• Links

  Links from February 18th

  02.19.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  53 CSS Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without

  Bluepod Media brings Bluetooth to football stadiums - Engadget

  Seth’s Blog: Facebook’s generational challengeA really concise, profound take on the good (and bad) that a Facebook society brings.

  The Case For Co-browsing, Or How ESPN.com Got More Mobile Than PC Visitors

  More people will be accessing the internet with their phones than [...]

• Design in the Wild

  Design in the Wild photos kickoff: Can your Brand be No Brand?

  02.18.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  Now that I’ve gotten almost caught up with everything, I’m going to start addressing the photo portion of this site a bit more. To recap, my hope is to find examples of good/bad design, products, signage, etc. in the wild and post them here. Some will have more commentary than others and some will probably [...]

• Links

  Links for February 17th through February 18th

  02.18.08 | Permalink | 1 Comment

  Some good examples of how Ajax, when properly used, greatly improves usability

  Don’t design for “mobile” - design for mobilityThe innability to recognize this is at the core of so many failed attempts at "going mobile."

  How to Design a Usable Remote ControlGood article breaking down the design of the TiVo remote control.

  The Tipping Point For The [...]

• Customer Service, Gold Star, Process, Social, Thoughts

  Web 2.0 and the developer dialogue (+ invites to Socialthing beta)

  02.18.08 | Permalink | 2 Comments

  Not long after my post about Socialthing, I got a comment from one of the developers:
  Alex, you’re very right that more will come out of it. Subscribing to all of your friends’ RSS feeds can be completely overwhelming. A service like ours allows a user to see everything on all of their networks without being [...]

• Gadgets, Thoughts

  “Mac Owners Are Snobs” and in other unrelated news, I got a MacBook Air

  02.17.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  Its true. I did. Hooray! So far (apart from a couple of initial wrinkles - i.e. runaway kernel_tasks which I think I discovered the root of) I love it. I will post a more thorough review in the next few days.
  In the meantime, check out this study by Mindset Media, that found that Mac users [...]

• Thoughts

  An analysis of Obama and Clinton’s websites’ coverage of major issues

  02.17.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  In response to a lot of the criticisms stating that while Obama is a great orator, he’s soft/vague on a lot of the major issues, a former colleague at ITP, Matt Burton, has done a thorough job analyzing how the websites of each Democratic candidate fares in addressing the major issues of the campaigns. [...]

• Data, Thoughts

  Obama/Clinton Gallup Poll visualization

  02.16.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  Maybe the Twitter/Superbowl visualization has got me fired up but now I want to take the most recent Obama vs. Clinton Gallup Poll data and overlay the major campaign events on top of it. According to this it seems like Hil enjoyed her best day right around Super Tuesday and its been downhill since. Maybe [...]