Design category
Really interactive websites
Living web sites that grow, develop and evolve to suit the taste of the people that read them are now finding their way on to the internet.
Roger Highfield - Web pages have 'come alive and started breeding'
According to the article scientists at Creative Synthesis are evolving a software that tracks the behavior of a visitor and what attracts him and what's not to improve the site experience for each visitor, by every refresh of a page features changed.
This is an awesome new technology that can enhance user experiences very much, can you imagine, tracking a visitor day by day, see what he uses the most what's not, and focus on what he needs the most, The more you use the site the more it gets to know you and adapt more to your needs.
Once the blog went live, control of the design was out of their hands.
Roger Highfield - Web pages have 'come alive and started breeding'
That is really awesome, I didn't see real application of that yet but if it is applied nicely, it will be a revolution in user experience, I mean by applied nicely not to surprise the user by every refresh with different navigation position, links switched, headers or links colors changed, etc....
The transition should be done gradually so the user adapt to it smoothly, I guess people at Creative Synthesis are smart enough to already know what I'm saying, and I hope we see an application of this technology out in the wild, see how far will it get.
April 18, 2008, 11:25 AM Comments 0 TrackBack 0
Focus on details
A little secret I just discovered, "focus on details" bosses / clients don't understand sketches or mockups.
That's all for today, C U soon.
February 20, 2008, 2:40 PM Comments 0 TrackBack 0
cssedit
Just found this cool app through Mac Tricks And Tips: Top 100 Essential Mac Applications it's cssedit, it's really superior in editing CSS, giving you the pleasure of watching the results at real time, you can click on any of the objects of the page and inspect which CSS rules are ruling it and start editing it through the code or by playing with the visual controls at the side, I think it's browser is running on safari engine, I hope it only have the ability to show you the real time results on more than one browser side by side at the same time.
Give it a try you will not regret it, the application costs $29.95 but you can try it for free, you will not be able to save files with more than 2500 characters, sorry windows users this app is for macs only.
February 6, 2008, 9:12 AM Comments 0 TrackBack 0
My red or your red
As a web designer, I usually like to hear opinions of colleague designers and even unprofessional family members and friends, every opinion I hear gives me more insight of how different visitors reacts to my design.
Ofcourse I get different reactions from "WOW" to "Excuse me, is that a site!", but what really may be a point of discussion is the choice of colors, I always get confused by how various people are in color tastes.
I always thought about this, why people are so different in color tastes? why do some people may adore a design color selections and others hate it?
All my life I've been thinking of this till I get to something and this is what I wanted to say from the beginning after all this introduction, please don't think I'm nuts.
I thought maybe every person see colors differently, for example what you see green I see red or what you see light grade of blue I see it very bluish like the blue in RGB, so now you thinking how do I get to this? why do I think that different eyes see different colors? I tell you why, remember back when your teacher first teach you colors how do she do it? she hold a red card in her hands and said this is red, then a blue card this is blue etc... so every child get in his head that this color is red and that is blue, after class a kid said I like blue color the other said I like green.
I'm not trying to prove something here, I'm just saying why not, maybe my theory is right, how will we know if we see colors differently or not, maybe there is kind of scientific research or something about this issue I don't know maybe scientist could prove or disprove this, but I'm speaking away from science and scientists.
By the way I like orange so much, maybe you see it as big lemons I don't know but I still like it.
August 9, 2007, 9:03 AM Comments 0 TrackBack 0
Happy Cog redesigned
The old Happy Cog site was great but this new site is even greater I like it's sentence navigation very much it delivers the message just perfect, and it's typography, colors & layout are very nice.
Designed by Jason Santa Maria top illustration by Kevin Cornell who is well known by his ALA illustrations Daniel Mall for markup, CSS, PHP, JavaScript and Dan Cederholm set up the WordPress blog.
What do you expect when the best of the web industry minds get together to create this master piece, I hope web designers, developers and more importantly user experience designers learn from those giants how to make a web site.
February 9, 2007, 8:48 AM Comments 0 TrackBack 0
SimpleBits re-brand
SimpleBits got a new brand, a new logo and site design, I will miss the old logo so much especially that it's on Web Standards Solutions book right on my desk, but the reasons Dan mentioned in his re-brand post do worth it.
December 5, 2006, 10:46 PM Comments 0 TrackBack 0
Transcending CSS: The Fine Art Of Web Design
Are you a visual designer? All you care about is the visual design of a website, you don't care much about what behinds visual interface like HTML or CSS.
The web has changed, and so has the art of creating web sites. Few visual designers are natural programmers, and as a result, visualizing how to work with markup, CSS and a range of programmatic techniques to create beautiful design is difficult.
Andy Clarke's new book
Transcending CSS: The Fine Art Of Web Design
is for that purpose, Andy is a visual web designer who get over this step and rocked the web with his beautiful designs and in the same time valid semantic markups.
November 26, 2006, 1:00 PM Comments 0 TrackBack 0
Best rebooters
It was a very cool reboot this November a lot of very nice reboots through the CSS reboot and the standards reboot here are some:
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Skylight is one of the designs I adored, I adore how simple and free this girl feels. fresh Illustrations, colors every thing is fantastic, nice colors and cool little shapes besides some of she's very nice illustrations through the posts adds a fantastic touch to the posts, Take a look also on previous designs all looks great. Dragon Armoury Creative is in the second position I like the colors contrast very much, black with fuchsia looks great I also like white text on black background and ofcourse the dragon theme is very cool.
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Intervisual unlike the previous designs Intervisual looks very professional the brand is really very nice and the colors are really really great while they are simple but they match perfectly and the type is very nice too. the only disadvantage is it's too wide it's 1024px wide, I suggest it be narrower or even better if it could be fluid like this site.
What I like about Laurent-LX is the idea of scrolling horizontally maybe it doesn't work well with text but it may work well with pictures like here, also the colors are nice.
Congrats all rebooters you all made a great job, thanks a lot and sorry if I miss mentioning some of the other cool reboots out there.
November 3, 2006, 11:28 AM Comments 1 TrackBack 0
Hello, I'm a human!
I'm a new client I was headed to this company office and at the gate I found this person with this smile on his face, he welcomed me warmly and escorted me through the sections of the company telling me briefly what every section do and how could I benefit from it.
I'm also a new client visiting this other company but this time I didn't find any smiley person waiting, I walked to the reception to find this very serious person wearing this business looking suite with that tie that couldn't be tied tighter than that, he asked me what I wanted without even looking to me I said well what is this all about
, he answered We are Complex Systems Inc.
he kept talking for a long time but I couldn't remember any of his talking I just remember some complex words like Fractal
, ionic
, rocket
, complexity
I was standing in front of him with my mouth open, he though he did his job perfectly and I now really think that this company is very professional and I will definitely deal with it, but actually I will not as I just realized that this whole thing is a lot bigger than I though and that they will take a lot of money beside I didn't understand what really will I benefit from there services.
Well I mentioned those two examples because I believe that this reception person is your web site home page, some time it's welcoming, friendly & nice and others it's exactly the opposite that you feel that it's dealing with you as if you are some kind of a machine that only need to get input of some data and that's all, so I'd like to mention some tips to make your site more humanized.
Brand
Starting from the brand which is the first thing that your client eye will fall on, using smart untraditional brands that delivers an understandable message through fresh colors. That's what Etisalat made with there brand, you can guess which of them is the new.
Content
About the content it's nice to feel that some body is talking to me while I'm reading a website, replacing words like "About" & "Services" with "Who we are?" & "What we do?" and using more friendly non-technical words may let the reader feel more at home more comfortable and encourage him to continue reading.
Design
Also replacing dull colors and sharp corners with fresh colors and soft rounded corners that let the reader feel as if it's natural interface than a machinery, big headers also help, here are some humanized web sites to understand what I mean.
Have a nice day ;)
September 30, 2006, 8:48 AM Comments 0 TrackBack 0
What brilliance behind Doug?
My mind has been hurting me since the last post about doug's change page trying to figure out what he's trying to say, like Glenda said in she's comment Doug Bowman is beyond brilliant.
If your mind hurts you like me I don't advice you to see Doug's new page titled Roulette try refreshing the page and the text will change, any body please help what does Doug mean by putting this roulette and the change poetry on his home page of Stopdesign?
September 8, 2006, 6:44 AM Comments 0 TrackBack 0
The artist behind Google's logo
I was always very excited and impressed about Google's logo and the way it's reshaped in holidays and events it's known as the oodles of Google Doodles take a look at there online museum it's fantastic, and I always wondered who's behind those fantastic pieces of art, today I saw through Reddit a link to a CNN article titled Google's unknown artist has huge following speaking about the artist named Dennis Hwang who's behind all this cools stuff since year 2000, I also found this page about him through there holiday logos online museum.
Hwang said his favorite was the birthday series honoring Michelangelo, Picasso, Van Gogh and other famous artists. CNN - Google's unknown artist has huge following
So those are the artist favorites and those shown are mine, what about yours?
July 20, 2006, 6:24 AM Comments 0 TrackBack 0
black on white or white on black ?!
I was thinking why most of web pages uses black text on white background, maybe because this is the default colors of any web page, and why is it the default colors maybe because who first put this standard wanted to imitate papers and ink.
Why is it the default to light all screen pixels and only put off some pixels resembling the text, isn't this illogical ? I personally think it is.
White on black is better for accessibility check my zoom layout, it's also easier on the eyes, open a black on white page in a tab and a white on black page on another tab and switch between them you will feel the difference and wonder why is black on white is the default, I have made Freestyler and another web site under construction white on black other than this site zoom layout, another examples of white on black or more accurately light on dark web sites is Veerle's blog & Dustin Diaz, I see it more logical that white on black be the default.
Well ofcourse it's difficult to change this now but what do you think if you go back to the very beginning and you have the choice to put this standard what would you choose?
May 11, 2006, 2:12 AM Comments 0 TrackBack 0