services
Designer & Developer Support
When other web suppliers tap us it’s usually for our ExpressionEngine chops.
Recently
products
External SAEF (Free)
Insert a row into any MySQL database table using a form on an ExpressionEngine page.
Tied Entries (Free)
An ExpressionEngine plugin to access content entries further than a single relationship away.
Elsewhere
"The hamburger menu is probably bad for business":http://growthrock.co/ecommerce-mobile-home-page-navigation/ — A/B testing by ecommerce consultancy Growth Rock.
A German court has issues the "first GDPR ruling":https://www.natlawreview.com/article/german-court-issues-first-gdpr-ruling, reports ??The National Law Review??. It concerns ICANN, the American non-profit that oversees the global WHOIS database of registered internet domain names, and German registrar EPAG.
Tyler Cowen: "Why read news?":https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/06/consume-recent-news.html bq. If you follow the news, you will work at it every day, more or less. Better those compound returns than to do something else once every three months and a half.
"Internet Trends 2018":https://relayto.com/kpcb/internet-trends-2018-g9d8y417idxm9 — all the stats. A presentation by Mary Meeker.
The "Web is coming to the Watch":https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/239/! No webfonts yet though.
Great fun illustrated article "on the aesthetics of Trumpism":https://medium.com/s/story/the-aesthetics-of-trumpism-6a73b233622/ by Nick Hilton. bq. This next product, emblazoned with the number 45, looks more like a golfer’s baseball cap than a trucker’s ... that styling — №45 in fancy serif font — would be perfectly at home on the label of a $100 bottle of scotch. Someone wearing this cap would not be immediately outing themselves as a ‘deplorable’ (as was, to a large extent, the appeal of the MAGA hat). It’s a flashback to a moment when the Trump brand was all about luxury hotels and links courses. No wonder it’s on sale. Hilton also wrote a piece on "Trump-based magazine covers":https://medium.com/s/story/a-visual-history-of-trump-magazine-covers-updated-for-2018-7255d632598c.
"Jony Ive talks watches":https://www.hodinkee.com/magazine/jony-ive-apple with the founder of the ??Hodinkee?? watch magazine.
I keep referring back to this article by Kyle Chayka — beautifully and ironically illustrated by Daniel Hertzberg — and in a nice homologue I keep forgetting the term it coins, "airspace":https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-global-minimalism-startup-gentrification: bq. It’s the realm of coffee shops, bars, startup offices, and co-live / work spaces that share the same hallmarks everywhere you go: a profusion of symbols of comfort and quality, at least to a certain connoisseurial mindset. Minimalist furniture. Craft beer and avocado toast. Reclaimed wood. Industrial lighting. Cortados. Fast internet. The homogeneity of these spaces means that traveling between them is frictionless, a value that Silicon Valley prizes. The title says it's sterile but is it? The word never appears within the article. Isn't airspace more a vocabulary? Here in Brighton there are nasty pastiches of it (Tortilla: Real Californian Burritos and Tacos), lovely expressions (Gails Bakery) and sophisticated extensions (Smallbatch Coffee).
"Ben Thompson concisely contrasts Amazon and Apple":https://stratechery.com/2018/divine-discontent-disruptions-antidote/. "I’m not sure that Amazon will beat Apple to $1 trillion, but they surely have the best shot at two."
Processes
Architecture
Before building your site or system, plans are required for both the back and front ends.
Design
It’s the competing considerations themselves that coalesce to form the design.
Installation & configuration
As well as smarts, what really makes a successful implementation likely is experience.
N
ow that the site’s wireframes have been generated during the architecture process, we turn them into mock-ups using visual elements such as a logo and an icon set; visual conventions such as a color scheme and a typeface collection; and visual rules such as a grid layout. Design appears in Jesse James Garrett’s useful Elements of User Experience diagram as the top level, labelled Visual Design.
As well as these elements, conventions and rules, the design must take into account a number of considerations that may initially appear to conflict until, with work, the tensions among them coalesce to actually form the design.
Dieter Rams, renowned industrial designer, has 10 Principles of Good Design.
Good design:
- is innovative
- makes a product useful
- is aesthetic
- helps us to understand a product
- is unobtrusive
- is honest
- is long-lasting
- is consequent to the last detail
- is concerned with the environment
- is as little design as possible.
The entire process, with dependencies
