Adobe Cards is awesome. I can’t stop watching it. For whatever reason, it’s entertaining and keeps me tuned in each time.
The movie interface is nice, too. It’s nice that dragging the slider doesn’t cause hard jumps through the movie. It just sort of continues at the normal pace.
It’s entertaining, smooth, high quality, and a good design. I think it’s an excellent showcase for what’s possible with the new Adobe Creative Suite 3, so a job well done in that regard, too.
A few designs I found appealing, in no particular order…
UPDATE
Here are a few quotes I’ve come across [from scientists, designers, photographers, programmers, marketers, etc] over the last few days, or weeks, or months. I found them to be short and insightful, so I figured I’d keep track of them here.
If everything is important, nothing is. —Unknown
Very often people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. —Clement Mok
However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results. —Winston Churchill
Reflection is like refactoring. If you can measure how much you are doing, you aren’t doing enough. —Unknown
Computer Science is the only discipline in which we view adding a new wing to a building as being maintenance. —Jim Horning
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. —Aristotle
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. —Alan Kay
We don’t know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we don’t always appreciate their fragility. —Malcolm Gladwell
If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered. —Stanley Kubrick
Buying a Nikon doesn’t make you a photographer. It makes you a Nikon owner. —Unknown
Instinct is the gift of experience. —Malcolm Gladwell
Selling to people who actually want to hear from you is more effective than interrupting strangers who don’t. —Seth Godin
You don’t need to win every medal to be successful. —Jason Fried
In many cases, the more you try to compete, the less competitive you actually are. —Kathy Sierra
If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six sharpening my axe. —Abraham Lincoln
Amidst all the attention given to the sciences as to how they can lead to the cure of all diseases and daily problems of mankind, I believe that the biggest breakthrough will be the realization that the arts, which are conventionally considered “useless,” will be recognized as the whole reason why we ever try to live longer or live more prosperously. The arts are the science of enjoying life. —John Maeda
I can’t help but to enjoy reading 37Signals’ design decisions. For those who don’t know, they’re just posts that provide a small insight into 37Signals’ design process and why they chose to do a particular something, a particular way. I’m sure most people who do the type of work that I do would agree that it’s interesting to peak inside of someone else’s design reasoning.
Garrett Dimon is an Information Architect who is working on a bug tracking system that he has appropriately named, Tracker. I’ve been keeping up with posts on the issue tracker, and I’m really impressed with some of the concepts and ideas. To save some hunting, here are the posts thus far:
Looking into other designs often help me to think outside of the box a little more, which I believe is important to keep that fresh, creative edge (assuming that I already had it, of course).
By nature I think most of us find really smart people to be fascinating. Of course Albert Einstein is among the list, but I’m not a physics major, so it’s hard to relate (even though it’d be hard to relate if I were a physics major). Those who probably intrigue me the most are the one’s who do what I attempt to do. Such as programming.
At a recent Ruby conference, a presenter had an abrupt situation that resulted in the presentation belonging to no one. With less than an hour to prepare, two members of the Rails core team (Marcel Molina, Jr. and Jamis Buck) were asked to do a live code review of an application they had never seen before. Whether or not the application code was hard to follow, it was entertaining to watch/listen to two very knowledgeable people, who’ve done so much for Rails, talk about things I can relate to. Maybe I’m alone on this one, but I think watching really smart people discuss what they know best is captivating and inspirational.
I think business cards are really fun to design. They’re fun because the space is so limited, you’re forced to make smart decisions about what should go on it. I’ve designed two. Although I’m really lacking in logo design—I can draw up a solid logo, but often can’t get the drawing mapped out in Photoshop.
Here’s a flickr set of business card designs. It’s just as satisfying as a CSS gallery.
One of my favorite photographers (although I don’t know too many) is Rebekka Guoleifsdottir (her Flickr stream). She has not only inspired me to really dive into photography, but she has also made me want to travel to Iceland—it looks awesome there.
Strobist is writing a series called “Flickr and You.” In part one, they talk about Rebekka Guoleifsdottir, and how her fame became known through Flickr. It seems as though her photography is spreading like wildfire, and she might owe much of that to Flickr (she just reached over 3,000,000 views). Since Flickr is one of my top places to spend “internet time,” I naturally find articles like this interesting. Let’s hope Flickr doesn’t change by attempting to capitalize even more on its ability to fuel the fire for amateur photographers all over the world.
Just recently, I found a Web Design Inspiration set on Flickr that has a wealth of good, solid designs. There’s a brief description of each, along with a link out to the actual site. Not surprisingly, I’ve clicked through each individual design (only within the Flickr gallery—I’m not that bad). Here are a few others (not in the set) I’ve come across lately:
If you’re stuck in a rut in terms of creativity (like I am right now), you should click through that Flickr set. I don’t always get motivated just by looking at other designs (real photos actually do more for me), but today, it helped.
Typography is really interesting to me, as well as inspirational. Whether or not I employ all of the things I’ve read is a topic for a different day; but there’s nothing wrong with having a few good references. Not that I was there, but at SXSW 2007, there was a presentation titled, Web Typography Sucks (which is yet another reason to use Textile). The authors have put together a nice collection of references (including their presentation):
Those are some of the best articles I’ve seen on the topic. So bookmark it if you’re at all interested. I was hoping to make it my entire life as one of those to not post about conferences, but since I’ve already blown that, I figured one more wouldn’t hurt.
I realize not everyone likes to browse Flickr, but I do. I’ve posted about a nice Flickr gallery before, but I’ve found a couple more worth mentioning.
The first heavily uses HDR, which is an editing technique used to, essentially, bring a photo to life. It basically increases the difference between light and dark, by using several different exposures of the same image. Part of me doesn’t want to get into that, as I’ve played with Photoshop a lot, and I’d rather not edit images outside of what can be done on the camera—for now, at least.
The second is (from what I’ve read) the most viewed user on Flickr. She’s an award-winning photographer. If you’re not planning on viewing either of the above galleries, at least check out her freeze! set.
Mark Twain once received a telegram from a publisher that read:
NEED 2-PAGE SHORT STORY 2 DAYS.
Twain replied:
NO CAN DO 2 PAGES 2 DAYS. CAN DO 30 PAGES 2 DAYS. NEED 30 DAYS TO DO 2 PAGES.
As his reply implicitly states, there are difficulties associated with short and concise writing—it’s not easy. I agree wholeheartedly. I think this same type of reality exists while programming in Ruby. I can get something working really fast, but (for me at least), it seems like I keep wanting to extract and refactor until the method is as small as it can possibly be. I could probably spend days trying to out-do my current code and get just as much satisfaction as if I were developing something new. I love how much you can do with one single line in Ruby. It’s motivational.
And for the record, I don’t apply the short and concise writing methodology here (obviously). This site just isn’t that sophisticated. But I can see the challenges and fun in that, too.
Had I not come across these designs, two colors I might not choose for a design are brown and blue (together). However, these complimentary colors are very appealing. Here are a few examples I’ve come across lately:
One day, I’ll design a site in brown and blue.
Inspiration comes at you from all directions. Everyone (hopefully) finds inspiration in his or her own way. Often, for web design, you’ll hear some designers claim that they never use the web itself to find inspiration, while others say that’s the only true way to keep new designs fresh. It’s debatable because it’s an opinion—a feeling. And what matters most: using that inner feeling to drive you to put your efforts into something meaningful.
Just tonight, I came across a site called Investing Talents. It appears that they put out a quarterly magazine developed by creative Christians, covering all sorts of topics relating to creativity: design, writing, poetry, etc. Their mission seems to be a good one, in that they promote you to use your gift toward a common good in support of an overall purpose—to bring glory to God.
This is the purpose for Investing Talents: to encourage the investment of our talents so that we may never lose our ability to bring glory to God through their use.
The magazine sort of caught me off guard. I found myself inspired, but not just to come up with a new design; but to design for a purpose other than my own satisfaction—something bigger, something with meaning.
When a muscle is not used, it weakens. Our creativity is a muscle, also a gift, which if not used and exercised for good, can weaken and possibly disappear. In the same way, someone who makes good use of his talent can reap the rewards of his investment for many years as it grows and strengthens. It is this pulling back and reaping that is the picture of God taking and giving. God “takes” “talents” from the unwise investors and “gives” those “talents” to the ones who have been wise with their investment.
So far, I’ve found a lot of inspiring statements and remarks. It’s a different kind of inspiration than what I’m usually seeking, but undoubtedly in a good way. I enjoyed the read and I’m looking forward to the second issue.
Investing Talents is courtesy of Godly Creative People (I love their search box).
At the Rails Edge conference, one of the speakers mentioned how, as a young programmer, there was no better feeling than to write a program with an enormous LOC count. It made him proud. And I tend to agree. I remember first learning C/C++ and how good it felt to have a rather large program compile successfully. “The more the better,” I thought. Well, that’s hardly the case. Software development entails writing less and less LOC, intentionally. The creator(s) of Rails have made some logical assumptions that have allowed them to extract a lot of the annoying and incessant work, which provides a more focused development process.
As an example, here’s the controller portion for an edit method using the well-known MVC Java framework, Jakarta Struts:
public ActionForward edit(ActionMapping mapping,
ActionForm form,
HttpServletRequest request,
HttpServletResponse response)
throws Exception {
PersonForm personForm = (PersonForm) form;
if (personForm.getId() != null) {
PersonManager mgr = (PersonManager) getBean("personManager");
Person person = mgr.getPerson(personForm.getId());
personForm = (PersonForm) convert(person);
updateFormBean(mapping, request, personForm);
}
return mapping.findForward("edit");
}
And here’s the cleaner, simpler Rails version:
def edit @person = Person.find(params[:id]) end
Rails takes care of the tedious, repetitive, grunt work—much more than I realize am making note of, here. From this example, to cut the Struts method down to one line, a few assumptions had to be made:
person, plus conversion code)throws Exception)That makes sense to me. While working with Ruby and Rails, I’ve enforced my desire to do more with less. It’s often more of a challenge to write less code to achieve the same results, but it’s much more fun.
Much like photos, I enjoy looking at random CSS designs. And for that very reason, I have a bunch of feeds from a number of different galleries. Here are a few of the better designs I’ve come across over the last few days.
I like to browse photos on Flickr every now and then. If I see someone with a nice collection, I’ll subscribe to their feed. It’s inspiring to look at nice photos. I stumbled across this Flickr collection yesterday. It’s probably among the best I’ve ever seen. It makes me want to travel, just to take more pictures.
I sometimes browse Flickr because I like to look at photos. Mainly for two reasons: 1) inspiration and 2) because I like to look at photos. Part of why I used to often visit Popurls (with “3x more buzz” selected) was because of the random collection of photos streaming through the site. Flickr leech is a much better option for quickly browsing photos on Flickr. I’ve never heard of it until today, but it looks promising.
I hate to be one of the 50 million people who’ve mentioned the iPhone within the last 36 hours, but I’m going to anyway. Clearly, Apple has done something amazing for the mobile space. You can feel the innovation just by looking at this thing. Watching the video series on the iPhone site is impressive. But I’m really referring to this post by Jason Fried, it just happens to involve the iPhone.
Across the web, 37signals is known for innovative thinking, and it shows not only by their products, but their everyday blog posts. With the iPhone, a lot of people (including myself) got blown away by “its ability to do this and that,” (and that’s not to mention its visual appeal), and forgot about what truly matters: usability. Sure, it’s cool, but is it practical? Probably so, but while the rest of the world is wooing over this new toy, Jason Fried doesn’t lose focus. He goes straight at the core by mentioning an interface that requires you to stare at. He’s not necessarily claiming that as a flaw, but an interesting observation. But the fact that he’s looking past the bells and whistles, focusing on the usability of the iPhone (even though it’s Apple, and we’re supposed to just accept what they give us as perfect) says something about the way he thinks. He doesn’t let Apple’s reputation influence his thoughts.
Innovative thinking requires you to not be easily impressed, look past aesthetics, and find the true reasons for a product to exist; what problem(s) does it solve? Then again, if the design is talented enough to carry itself, and out-weigh usability issues, you may be in an entirely different category. And probably the same category Apple is in.
Sometimes flash development intrigues me. I’ve played with flash before, and I’ve found it to be fun but challenging. I know it does a lot of the (what seems to be difficult) fancy things for you, such as tweening and custom motion paths, but it’s still challenging. I’d like to watch someone work on a site such as http://www.thibaud.be/, just so I could see how difficult it truly is. I don’t think I’d ever consider flash for a site, but there’s a part of me that would like to be proficient at it. Proficient enough to build a basic site with good flash practices, at least.
This portfolio is clever and fun to look at. Try spinning one of the tags around. Or throwing one across your screen. Then open a couple, look through them, and close them. Notice how they go down to their respective spot in the line-up? I think that’s awesome. And I don’t know if you noticed, but if you happen to click on a tag that has an embedded flash movie, while the movie is loading, the preview image is wiped out. Cool stuff. You simply can’t do those kinds of things without flash.
I’ve mentioned a time or two about January and how things will be changing at work. Well, one of those things just so happens to be a new office space for our team. It’s more convenient for us to be away from the other (distracting) projects that normally surround us, and put more focus into what we’ll be offering. That’s for another post, though.
We’ve already moved into our new office space, and we’re attempting to establish a pro-creative environment where collaboration and innovation become the norm. I’ve found that a bad environment can definitely take a toll on your productivity; likewise, a good environment can support and promote productivity. So a new office space with slightly off-white walls isn’t going to cut it for us. We’re planning on painting the walls, and here are some of the shades we’ve considered:
#790003 | RGB (121,0,3)
#889A65 | RGB (136,154,101)
#BABAA9 | RGB (186,186,169)
#807753 | RGB (128,119,83)
#262F4F | RGB (38,47,79)
Oh yeah, here is the one color within the office that we do have to match:
#62789D | RGB (8,20,157)
These tones cover the generality of that color, so for the green tone we might choose another shade, but it has to be a variation that will coincide with the static color that we can’t change (#62789D). We’re thinking the walls should be dark, so things like pictures, white boards, etc. will stand out and add character, rather than a white board hanging on a plain white wall. If you had to choose one of the shades above, what would you pick? Any other suggestions?
I found this app a few days ago, and lost it in the transition from work to home. But I knew I’d find it again. Aside from me being slightly color blind, I really enjoy a good color tool. I mentioned the other day how a large part of design is color matching. I thought it was nice to have all of those colors right in front of me, but I still had to pick and choose. With Kuler, I can pick and choose my own color themes, or browse the thousands that other (more talented) designers have created. This is one instance where I find the community to really benefit the application. The interface is awesome, too. And since it’s Adobe, it plays nicely with Photoshop (you can download the swatches). It’s free, so you have no reason to not try it. I’ll post the link again, just in case you missed it the first time. Have fun…
This is kind of an odd way to be inspired, but it worked for me. I had to get light bulbs the other night and they just so happened to be close to the paint section. Walking by the paint aisle, with all of those snippets of colors, I thought of designing. I stopped for a minute and started matching up colors. Sometimes the hard part about designing is coming up with the color combinations that work. Having hundreds right in front of me was kind of nice. So I found a few blends that I probably wouldn’t have chosen had I not been able to randomly associate one with another; I put them in my pocket (they are free). No HEX codes, just raw colors. I think I like that approach. Maybe I’ll start a paint store.
2008 by Ryan Heath | Get In Touch
