Going to work for a start up…be mentally prepared
It’s a roller coaster. It’s an adventure. It’s worth it. So be ready. This following is a presentation by Mike Arrington of Tech Crunch
Use actual text instead of lorem ipsum
What are you talking about? Lorem ipsum is a gift from the web gods. How will I get people to admire and appreciate my beautiful designs if I stop generating ipsum paragraphs and headings. This is how I use to feel until I read this entry from the book Getting Real by 37 Signals.
Lorem ipsum changes the way copy is viewed. It reduces text-based content to a visual design element — a shape of text — instead of what it should be: valuable information someone is going to have to enter and/or read. Dummy text means you won’t see the inevitable variations that show up once real information is entered…
I know designers hate it when they show clients a design, only to have them ignore the design an focus on the text you put in 5 mintues earlier. I’ve been there, trying to explain to clients that it’s just “filler” text. But, if text is an important part of the design, we should spend more time with it and figure out better ways to weave it in.
Perhaps, start your layout with text and then add graphical elements to emphasize the text. I don’t know the answer, but I do like the idea of people paying just as much attention to what there website says, as to how it looks.
I will say lorem ipsum has its place and use. But, if we can avoid it for real copy text, we can get a much more accurate picture of how our design will work.
Best Steve Jobs quote I have ever heard
Posted by: Mark in Design, Inspiration, Usability on July 31st, 2008
“When you start looking at a problem and it seems really simple with all these simple solutions, you don’t really understand the complexity of the problem. And your solutions are way too oversimplified, and they don’t work.”
“…Then you get into the problem, and you see it’s really complicated. And you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That’s sort of the middle, and that’s where most people stop, and the solutions tend to work for a while…”
“…But the really great person will keep on going and find the key, underlying principle of the problem, and come up with a beautiful elegant solution that works.”
—Steve Jobs (1984)
Thank you to Jeff Veen for sharing this quote with us at An Event Apart.
What I learned from Jeff Veen and Hay Net
Posted by: Mark in CSS, Design, Inspiration, Usability on May 15th, 2008
We design websites for people. Well at least that’s who I thought we were suppose to be designing for. Anyway, when I browse the web I see a bunch of cluttered up web pages and unwelcoming copy text. Somewhere along the road the user has been cast aside for personal agendas, corporate politics, intrusive marketing tactics or some other reason. A lot of sites try and fill every inch of the page with as much information as they can, creating a confusing message that leaves the user unsure of what they need to do or where they need to go.
Where did simplicity go? Jeff Veen provided a brilliant example of good web design by showing us a picture of the old Hay Net website. He said people come to Hay Net for 2 reasons, they either have hay or need hay. So what does Hay Net do? They provide their users with 2 options of have hay or need hay. Brilliant. Perhaps we should keep this in mind when we are designing web sites.
I now present you with Hay Net.
* Update: It’s a shame the new Hay Net site decided to clutter things up.
Inspiring words from Jason Santa Maria
Posted by: Mark in Design, Inspiration on May 10th, 2008
At An Event Apart in New Orleans, Jason Santa Maria gave an inspiring talk on why Good Design Ain’t Easy. Here a few quotes from my notes of his presentation.
“The message comes first, it’s not about making everything look nice”
I’m so glad to hear someone say this. As a web designer our primary focus should be on creating a design that clearly conveys the message of the site, not on creating a graphical masterpiece that looks nice. Of course it never hurts to have very functional web site that looks good. Jason goes on to say,
“It’s not fair to compare print to the web. They are different animals”
When we design a website we need to break free from the print design mindset and realize that we are designing for the web. The web has different constraints and different objectives then print does. Also when we evaluate a web sites we need to evaluate them like we would different animals. Good web design is different then good print design.