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 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.
May 11, 2004
Yesterday saw the relaunch of Blogger. All the “Web Standards” blogs out there were thick with praise for this redesign (I guess most of them don’t actually see beyond Doug’s great design and the Standards implementation). Doug has documented the process which has some great insights into this new launch.
I think the real success here is the Usability work done (and Dougs interpretation of the required “Ease-of-use"). The work Adaptive Path have done is fantastically elegant.
Good design shouldn’t be noticed. A very well design book, or newspaper, just works. The design doesn;t get in the way of the message. The new Blogger site is a wonderful example of this. Ease of use was of upmost importance, Jeff Veen points out that the Blogger wanted to be able to set up a blog, in three steps, in less than five minutes. Quite an undertaking.
The registration process is superb, one of the best i’ve used. Ever. It’s so simple even my mother could use it (and that’s saying something). Here’s some grabs of the process. What’s nice to see is contextual help links next to items that you may want help with.
The new Blogger logo is a good step on from the previous version and it ties in very well to the overall “curved” look of the site. I’m not over familiar with the original version of the logo, but I do know it was square, orange and blue. It’s a great logotype though. It carries a lot of the brand values - ease of use, approachable etc.
There are plenty of new templates available with the new Blogger, and all of them configurable from within the Blogger web-based interface.
The templates can be seen in full here. Some great designs from Zeldman, Bowman and Dan Cederhome (although there are a couple of lemons in there too, but maybe that’s just me).All of the templates are XHTML, with CSS driven presentation (as you’d expect from authors like this).
May 11, 2004
I’ve just bought Ecto and i’ve just had a good look at the new Blogger design. I’m testing Ecto at the moment but once it’s working ok, i’ll review it here. Also i’m going to be going into the new Blogger design in some detail.
April 22, 2004
Gush. Nice looking app (IM and News aggregator), even nicer looking site.
I’m beginning to really warm to typography like this. I don’t know if we’ll end up getting sick of it though, in the same way I was sick of Verdana a couple of years ago, and Helvetica light a good few years before that. A fad, but a nice one at that.
March 29, 2004
I’ve been comment spammed. Some delights about Viagra, which is nice. I’ve deleted them and hopefully Movable Type 3 will be released soon along with the much talked about TypeKey.
March 04, 2004
Well, off to texas next week for 7 days to the SXSW conference which should be good. I’ve been thinking of exploiting the weak dollar by buying a laptop over there (and possibly an ipod if I can wangle it.). True, can’t really afford it at the moment but the way i’m looking at it is it’s about long term saving and we were going to buy one towards the end of the year anyway.
The model i’m looking at, the Compaq X1230US costs $1,699.99 from Circuit City in the US (kind of like Dixons) which is £932.18 and the same computer, funnily enough in Dixons in this country costs £1529.99 . That’s a difference of £597. Which is pretty good really. That extra money will come in handy!
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