services
Designer & Developer Support
When other web suppliers tap us it’s usually for our ExpressionEngine chops.
Recently
A revamp and redesign for Antidote Europe
The site now features nation-based language selection and a campaign-based layout.
Progress at the Israel Center for Social & Economic Progress
The ICSEP redesign relies on “Goldens”, a CSS grid framework for the golden ratio.
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
From the top: Chapter 1, Part 1 of The Internet History Podcast.
Joel Spolsky announces the public beta of HyperDev, “a developer playground for building full-stack web-apps fast.”
Likely the canonical review of Mr Robot, Season #1. By Matt Zoller Seitz.
As announced at WWDC 2016, Macworld summarizes the new things in iOS 10. Among them are voicemail transcription, a new Home app for HomeKit-enabled devices, and a redesigned Control Center.
Lately I’ve noticed an irritating profusion of paid-in-kind reviews on Amazon—see Is Amazon Doing Anything To Fight Latest Wave Of Fake, Paid-For Reviews? in The Consumerist. I think that allowing this is a huge mistake on Amazon’s part—the first I can remember seeing them make. It essentially makes their incredibly valuable review functionality—even other retailers include it in their web sites—valueless. Worse, it’s irritating and draining, because you have to scan to the end of a review to find out if it’s been subsidized by the vendor. See “How to Snag a Deal by Writing an Amazon Review” in USA Today. The current antidote? fakespot.com.
Nicely presented on Vimeo, Jen Simmons of The Web Ahead podcast gives a 1-hour talk on web design at a 2016 An Event Apart conference entitled Modern Layouts: Getting Out of Our Ruts. Lots of nice slides of magazine layouts, where she suggests web designers should be returning for inspiration.
Centralized or distributed computing? It’s a pendulum.
Hoefler & Co provides a wad of typography tips for mobile.
Ben Thompson on Apple: if they really want to become a services company they’ll have to change their fabled organizational structure.
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
