Tag Archives: websites

The antidote to over-stimulation

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Whilst reading http://contentsmagazine.com/articles/space-to-breathe/, the quote antidote to overwhelm and over-stimulation struck a cord with me. Quite a lot of home pages try to do everything, but by doing this they overwhelm the visitor. The absolute antithesis of that has to be the new WorkFu site, and to say I was impressed with their new homepage was an understatement:

I was blown away. I’d just never seen anything like it on a homepage recently.

Again, I think this comes back to confidence in design. Knowing that you’ll be able to convey the desired message in such a simple way without additional clutter Continue reading →

You can’t force people to use your product

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As it turned out, sharing was not broken. Sharing was working fine and dandy, Google just wasn’t part of it. People were sharing all around us and seemed quite happy. A user exodus from Facebook never materialized. I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, “social isn’t a product,” she told me after I gave her a demo, “social is people and the people are on Facebook.” Google was the rich kid who, after having discovered he wasn’t invited to the party, built his own party in retaliation. The fact that no one came to Google’s party became the elephant in the room.

I think this ex-Googler has it spot on: You can’t force people to use your stuff. How many of us have a Google account? And how many times did we use Google Wave, or Google+?

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Everything that can be invented has been invented

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“Everything that can be invented has been invented”

Quote anecdotally misattributed to Charles H. Duell, Commisioner, US Patent Office, 1899

Apparantly a misquote, sometimes the web can feel like this at times. You work on a idea you have just thought of, only to find it already exists.

Whilst working on something for http://10k.aneventapart.com/ – an event where you can submit a little web app which is no larger than 10k, I did a bit of googling to find the exact same thing has already been built.

Colour Palette Creator

After seeing Andy Clarke’s post ages ago about creating colour palettes, I thought it would be a great little tool to have – and the 10k event was the perfect opportunity to make it. But I was beaten to it: http://slayeroffice.com/tools/color_palette/

And again…

A while ago I had the idea of a neverending book idea, where everyone can add a sentence to continue the book. Yep, already been done.

The same goes for website designs. I saw a blog design with the identical look to one of the rejected mockups for this blog. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t take mine further than the PSD stage; good job too.

Why am complaining?

Most of my ‘ideas’ are just that – they never get past a quick doodle in the Moleskine. I should be grateful these people are building my ideas!

Back to the drawing board

So once again, I am thinking of things to make for the event. Lets build it quick before anyone else does!

On ‘Magpie Designers’

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In an ever-changing web world, new technologies are constantly evolving. With the emergence of alternative font display systems, new CSS effects and the increased uptake on modern browsers, designers are using these new techniques more and more. Add this to a sprinkling of current design ‘trends’ such as the noise filter, and pixel perfect line details and it makes for some very similar looking websites.

It is inevitable then that these new and shiny capabilities will catch a web designer’s eye (especially after years of browser constraints) but are we turning our eagerness to use the latest styling techniques into a world of monotonous and similar designs?

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URL ABC

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A better-late-than-never post on a game played by Tim Van Damme, Elliot Jay Stocks and Sam Brown (i’m sure there are plenty more people playing the game!).

Simply go to your browser, type in the letters A-Z and blog the results. So here are mine:

  1. amazon.co.uk
  2. bucket.unstoppablerobotninja.com
  3. cufon.shoqolate.com
  4. delicious.com
  5. entitycode.com
  6. flickr.com
  7. google.com
  8. hootmonitor.com
  9. ilovetypography.com
  10. jasonsantamaria.com
  11. kitbag.com
  12. logooftheday.com
  13. maban.co.uk
  14. next.co.uk
  15. o2.co.uk
  16. prandall.com
  17. n/a
  18. readernaut.com
  19. scrunchup.com
  20. twitter.com
  21. n/a
  22. viget.com
  23. n/a
  24. xavierencinas.com
  25. youtube.com
  26. n/a

But rather than just knock them up in a UL like some, and being that kind of person I had to make an ordered list and use capitalised letters. The CSS to do that is:

.alphabet-list{list-style:upper-alpha}

So play along and leave your results as a comment!