25 Oct 2010
cms, design, visual
There are a thousand sites out there which offer free (or almost free) wordpress themes; many of which look very very similar.
But earlier this year, I found www.themeforest.net which offered, not only the ubiquitous wordpress themes, but themes (or templates or skins or layouts, call-them-what-you-will) for admin pages and content management systems.
Why haven’t I come across this before? I spend so much time building back-end control panel and sometimes I really feel that I should add a sticker which says “No Designers were harmed in the making of this product” Will definitely be using some of these in the future.
Here’s an example showing Cleanity
20 Feb 2008
visual
This is a Digg Swarm
Digg is a website which allows its users to select (digg) things that they find interesting. Other users then read and rate these nuggets, and this determines how popular an item is; building a community of users who sieve online content and disgard the junk.
The Digg Swarm shows the process visually. Stories arrive as little circles, and the diggers “swarm” around them. As stories get more popular, they increase in size and as people dig more stories they also increase in size.
It’s a great representation of some complex data relationships; it’s also a really hypnotic display. Courtesy of Stamen Design who are doing lots of wonderful stuff – not just the pretty.
I love visual explanation’s of complex data. The classic of course is this 19th century chart drawn by Charles Joseph Minard. Beginning at the Polish-Russian border, it shows the size of Napolean’s army as the width of a line that shrinks from an initial size of 600,000 in June of 1812 to fewer than 10,000 by early December. As well as the number of troops remaining, the chart also shows geography, time, temperature and the course and direction of the army’s movement.
And here’s an article from the Economist (Dec ’07) which describes a couple of pioneering charts (one from that well-known statistician Florence Nightengale). But I particularly liked this:
And Playfair was already making a leap of abstraction that few of his contemporaries could follow. Using the horizontal and vertical axes to represent time and money was such a novelty that he had to explain it painstakingly in accompanying text. “This method has struck several persons as being fallacious”, he wrote, “because geometrical measurement has not any relation to money or to time; yet here it is made to represent both.”
5 Jun 2007
design
I loved this – www.noonebelongsheremorethanyou.com Breaks soooo many rules about web design and accessibility blah-blah-blah, but I loved it. Essentially an online ad, but such a witty one.
22 Mar 2007
design
Sometimes you read something and just go “Yes!” to it. The following articulated perfectly my grudge against Lorem Ipsum filler text – basically no one wants to read this garbage so it ends up at 8px white text on a black background.
By not having the imagination to imagine what the content “might” be, a design consideration is lost. Meaning becomes obfuscated because “it’s just text”, understandability gets compromised because nobody realized that this text stuff was actually meant to be read. Opportunities get lost because the lorem ipsum garbage that you used instead of real content didn’t suggest opportunities. The text then gets made really small, because, it’s not meant to be used, we might as well create loads of that lovely white space.
From I hate Lorem Ipsum and Lorem Ipsum Users by Tom Smith
And I found Tom Smith’s blog entry via Getting Real by 37Signals; a collection of essays where I find myself saying “Yes!” a lot!
17 Jan 2007
design
It’s scary how accurate this is. For me, I’d want to drop the slice “Time spent actually designing anything” and replace it with “Time spent explaining the realities of html and css to distressed designer”
2 Sep 2006
design, wordpress
Well overdue – but I’ve finally reworked the wordpress templates so this weblog has the same style and layout as the rest of my site. It hasn’t taken that long, an evening, but there are so many other things on the to-do list which take precedence, especially if they are for other people.
The site design is by Kuldeep Salhan, not me. Design is something I’d far rather pass on to someone else – I have no visual flair and don’t enjoy faking it.