Skip to navigation Skip to content

how-a-web-design-goes-straight-to-hell

How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell – This had our office in fits of laughter, its funny because it’s true.


jagger

Possibly the best Client Letter Ever.

via swiss miss


sara_strand_petfood_1

Im not sure how old these are but thought they were definately worth a mention. Love the design and the texture of the material.


apple-attention-to-detail
Apple show true dedication to the details in every corner of their software. The shortening of the dialog and replacing “OK” with “Empty Trash” makes all the difference in terms of clarity. See finerthingsinmac.com for more like this


Inspirational design from apple. Watch how the visually impaired, and even the fully blind, can use the 3GS.

Making a revolutionary mobile phone means making it easy for everyone to use. That’s why iPhone 3GS comes standard with accessibility features that help people with disabilities experience all that iPhone has to offer.


Scott Thomas – The Design Director of the Obama campaign, is putting together a book chronicling his creative process for obamas historic presidential campaign.

The Obama presidential campaign was innovative. For the first time in American politics, a candidate used art and design to bring together the American people—capturing their voices in a visual way.

The book is available to pre-order for $50 from designing-obama.com and you can also pledge a donation to the author to make sure the book makes it to print.


Jared Spool of UIE talks about a set of interviews he and his company conducted with users of Netflix.com.

While all these things are what the designers at Netflix work hard on every day, they go unmentioned by their customers. It’s not because these aspects aren’t important. It’s because the designers have done their job really well: they’ve made them invisible.

Unfortunately, this is not good news for those of us who want people to know what we do. If we do our job really well, nobody can see what we’re doing. It’s only when we do it poorly that we have something to show.

The best interfaces are the ones which stay out of peoples way. Well designed interactivity goes unnoticed but with poorly designed interactivity comes a tangible frustration.


Splash Pages, Do we really need them?

Yes, sometimes we do. Should we use them? No, we probably shouldn’t. Splash screen (or splash page) is a front page of a web-site that don’t provide the actual content, but offers visitors some kind of intuition or background information for what the site is about. Designers use splash pages in their portfolios to impress potential clients with eye-candy. Companies tend to make use of them to draw users’ attention to their latest products. And users literally can’t stand them, because splash pages usually take a long time to load and provide (almost) no navigation options – except of entering the site.

(more…)


Flash is the Bane of the Internet

The Adobe Flash Player is a multimedia application created by Macromedia (now a division of Adobe Systems). Flash Player features support for both vector and raster graphics, along with a scripting language and bidirectional streaming of video and audio content. The player is a virtual machine that runs Flash files, which are often embedded in websites to present animations, games, GUIs, or other visual interestingness. If you’re reading this website, you probably know all of this. What you might not know is that Flash sucks. It is the bane of the Internet, and it needs to go away.

Usability and Accessibility

The ironic thing about Flash is that its use is so frequently self-defeating. Flash is often used in an attempt to make sites more user friendly. But replacing familiar browser components with custom Flash garbage only hurts usability. Consistency is imperative for a UI — users learn how to do something once, and can apply that knowledge in tons of places. But with Flash, overzealous designers try to “fix” what they see as bad interface models by creating custom Flash crap. This sucks.

While we’re on usability, let’s talk about people who are disabled. Flash sucks at accessibility. Though Flash has some features that are supposed to improve accessibility, they’re weak and almost never used. The fact of the matter is that Flash is pretty much inherently inaccessible. If you want to use Flash, and remain accessible (and indexable — web spiders can’t understand Flash binaries either), your only real option is to create a second version of your site that uses standard technologies. That sucks.

Technically, the accessibility and usability issues apply only to poorly designed Flash sites. Someone could (and probably will) counter that it’s not Flash that sucks, but people who are using Flash the wrong way. I’d argue that a tool that encourages suckiness is itself inherently sucky, but I’ll spare you that schpeel and move on to the one thing that makes Flash incontrovertibly sucky, regardless of how you use it.

Closed Specification

Call me idealistic, but I hate companies that use closed specifications to stifle competition. And that may be my biggest issue with Flash. Sure, Adobe provides the SWF and FLV Specifications to developers who want to create Flash content. But first you have to agree to the SWF File Format Specification License where you promise that you will “not use the Specification in any way to create or develop a runtime, client, player, executable or other program that reads or renders SWF files.” That sucks.

Don’t care about the closed specification issues? Well, you should. As more and more content is stored in Adobe’s proprietary format, the company is gaining a tremendous amount of power. They’ve already announced a version of Flash that includes DRM support, allowing “copyright holders” to prevent users from skipping advertisements and restrict copying. Heck, digital rights management (DRM), combined with the overly restrictive anti-circumvention legislation in the DMCA, could make it illegal to download and save your own damned YouTube videos! That would definitely suck.

Glad to see Adobe has it’s priorities straight. While they rushed to include DRM support, the company has been dragging it’s feet on Flash support for 64-bit operating systems (there is none). This problem is years old. And it’s not like the advent of 64-bit CPUs was a surprise. They should have been working on 64-bit Flash in the late 1990s — or they should have at least given it some thought! And, seriously, it’s taken a team of coders more than two years to port a plugin from 32-bit to 64-bit? Christ, Apple ported an entire operating system from a RISC to a CISC chipset in less time than that. Sounds like the Flash code-base sucks too.

So what’s the alternative?

Yea, you got me. That’s what really sucks. Microsoft Silverlight might provide a viable alternative once it’s released. But chances are it will suck at least as much as Flash. Maybe if the W3C standards for SVG and SMIL are ever fully implemented a decent open solution will exist and the problem will go away (if you’re in Firefox, check out some of the SVG samples, they’re pretty cool). But until then, we’re stuck with Adobe’s crap. So I implore you: use it right, and only when absolutely, positively, unquestionably and undeniably necessary.

Grafted from ImMike


Latest Tweets (follow us)


back to top