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.
Take Control Books, now with account management
Both the site editor and the 48,000+ userbase get a plethora of AJAXy features.
Come springtime, southeast England’s countryside is powered by ExpressionEngine
Countryside 2010 showcases hundreds of outdoor events and activities.
Get saltEE: salt-co.com retrofitted with ExpressionEngine
The EE-powered site needed to look just as it did when updated manually.
Extend ExpressionEngine’s reach with External Entries v2
Update, select from and insert into any MySQL database directly from an EE template.
Get more next/previous power in ExpressionEngine with Nearby Entries
Amplify the power of ExpressionEngine’s next/previous entries.
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
Released: Steve Jobs’ and James Murdoch’s email correspondence negotiating over HarperCollins e-books for iPad. Note how Murdoch’s careless spelling and grammar improves after receiving a reply in Steve’s impeccable English. Murdoch capitalizes News Corp’s businesses, “Studios, Books, and Newspapers” but then writes lowercase “apple”, which, if deliberate, is kind of thuggy.
Cary Grant’s 1963 op-ed in This Week magazine on dressing well.
Hanna Rosin writes on the iPad and young children. The beginning could have appeared anywhere, the middle in any number of magazines, the end in only a small handful. And a rather relevant topic at the moment in this house, where Good Morning is spoken as “Where the iPad gone!”
Surely the definitive article about internet wunderkind Aaron Swartz. Only eating white or yellow food seems a glaring sign that not everything there was quite right.
The 20 Most Popular Homes in Dwell. Many of these homes are small so encourage ingeniousness and are in general encouraging.
The visual effects of Iron Man on YouTube.
Stand up for your work! Or as The New York Times puts it, “Taking a Stand for Office Ergonomics”.
Andy Ihnatko, MacTech Conference attendee, on the group tour of Disney Animation, an advance screening of Wreck-It Ralph, and John Lasseter’s desk. [via TidBits]
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
