June 12, 2004
Well here I am, sitting at an iMac, it’s 6.45pm and still 80 degrees. Malaysia is very nice indeed or should I say this hotel is very nice indeed.
The wedding was great, the reception was great, and no doubt the presents will be great when we get back from a great honeymoon. The new Snooch site has been bubbling away in the background and this time away has helped me cement a few ideas.
Stopdesign has been redesigned and it’s funny how similar Dougs redesign, I mean the core message and IA, mirrors my ideas for Snooch - Ie, less importance on Blog and more importance on Portfolio. Also Articles and Speaking dates feature highly too. Not sure what the graphic design will be just yet, but I want this to be the last redesign I do for a while as i’ve got loads of content to plugh into MovableType so it’s in a form I can use in the future. Hopefully the winning plugin in the MT plugin competition will take the form of a easy way to add fields to an entry. We’ll see.
Anyhow, i’m alive and well in Malaysia. Enjoying the sun and being a Husband.
May 27, 2004
Doug Bowman is in the process of redesign. I say process because he hasn’t quite finished yet. Interesting debate about design and redesign has started as a result.
Pixel Perfect Digital is a site with loyalty free imagery available for download at pretty high resolutions. Nicely categorised, although the images are your typical stock variety.
May 25, 2004
A simple, but extremely useful, breakdown of the latest blogging software. It includes free and expensive software, from MT to Expression Engine.
May 25, 2004
Allofmp3.com are offering a gigs worth or music downloads for $10. You can specify codec & bit-rate from a HUGE collection of music. I’m going to update all my vinyl and tape collection so I can get it all on my ipod. Very, very nice indeed.
May 24, 2004
Who’s the daddy? Helvetica/Arial quiz.
May 24, 2004
A few new CSS things to look at this fine morning (all courtesy of email being down - I like monday mornings like this one)
http://www.webstandardsawards.com/
Some nice new sites, some of which are minging though. I really don’t get the whole rich, wallpaper background image, looks like the smoking room in ‘The Butchers’, design thing. It’s not big or clever. I’m talking about http://www.alazanto.org/
It turns out CSS Vault is either a. Not going to be here soon or b. Going to be run by people outside of the 9rules network. Shame. Although I can see his point.
Version 2 is a great idea. I think after the wedding i’m going to enter this competition, I think i’d have a good chance of getting somewhere.
http://www.cssbeauty.com/
Similar to CSS Vault. highlights for me - http://www.instablog.org/. This is great. Purely typographic. Design like a newspaper. I bit down and dirty with the CSS, with a few bugs, but otherwise really nice.
May 18, 2004
The BBC launches it’s new homepage design. Several changes have been made, most noticably the new bbc.co.uk brand. More on the brand from Matt Jones. I’m not going to comment. The usability has been improved considerably with the redesign of the category section. There is a really clear definition now between Wayfinding and Most recent content.
I guess this has been to try and accomodate different users interaction needs, in that some browse, some are very task focussed, some know where they are going, some don’t and need help. For those that don’t, and need help, the BBC has tried to accomodate for the different modes of interaction - library/categorisation and magazine-like editorial content.
May 17, 2004
Just finished upgrading Snooch to use the Developer Version of Movabletype. There’s ben a lot of discussion on many blog sites I frequent regarding the licencing. Six Apart have now started charging for versions of MT, dependent upon the author base and the amount of blogs. There is still a free version available, which i’m currently using, but all other versions have to be paid for, which is fair enough if you ask me.
MT is cheap as chips compared to other CMS based software. This new version has transended the underground ‘bloggey’ world and into a more mainstream, serious content management system which can be used for commercial applications as well.
A lot of mainstream CMS are trying to catch up with MT in terms of the valid XHTML it produces. A few are getting there (Drupal, Mambo etc) but they are still built around a fairly rigid, object based model. This is the strength of MT. You can make the objects yourself (they are after all just chunks of code.) Because of the new API Six Apart has implemented in this version of MT, the scope for much better plugins is a reality. In fact Six Apart have launched a plug-in competition. Hopefully we’ll see some kind of photo-gallery plugin come out of that rather on relying on rather tedious hacks.
As when I get more news on this, i’ll post it up.
I'm a graphic designer from near Cardiff in the UK. I've been a designer for over ten years now and primarily work on the web. I'm still partial to a bit of print every now and then though. I used to work for