Web Design Culture (Archive)

Page 3 of 6 (51 total articles)
  • December 17, 2007 in Web Design Culture

    Dear Yahoo! / Digg, What Were You Thinking?

    About a week ago, I was browsing Digg when suddenly I felt as if I had stepped into a time warp. I half expected my flat screen monitor to shrink and morph into fish-eyed CRT in front of my eyes. There on the home page was a giant banner made up to look like a Windows error dialog box. It was blinking red with a familiar X icon in the left-hand corner and it read "You are the 1,000th visitor: Congratulations you won!". I call this advertising "punch the monkey" advertising in honor of a flash ad that circulated a few years ago. You still see it around on cheesy sites but Digg knows better. So what could be worse than a site in the Alexa top 200 claiming that you are the 1,000th visitor? How about the Alexa #1?

  • December 10, 2007 in Web Design Culture

    Automated Mass Emails With a Nauseating Personal Touch

    We've all seen it before and we've all rolled our eyes. We get a suspicious looking letter in the mail--it could be junk or it might be real. We decide it's better to be safe than sorry so we rip open the envelope for a quick look. It's junk alright, but there at the top it reads, "You've been chosen, MATTHEW, to receive a special 0% introductory rate!" This tactic got old the minute we had the technology to do it. Is it really any better to do the same thing to our legitimate subscribers?

  • December 5, 2007 in Web Design Culture

    Browser Tricks: The Web Designer's Smoke and Mirrors

    I love that there is an air of mystery around the web designer. I imagine it feels a lot like being a magician pulling rabbits out of hats--only out of computers. I never know what will and won't impress, though, and my friends and clients are rarely impressed with the things that impress me. Changing the font across an entire website with a simple CSS modification often gets me little more than a nod. In my mind that's a pretty big rabbit. But there is one little trick that has never failed to conjure up the wows I like to hear. It's a Firefox extension called Tab Effect.

  • December 3, 2007 in Web Design Culture

    The Independent Web Designer in 2008 | 5 Make It or Break It Characteristics

    2007 is almost over. Time to start thinking about the future. If you've been designing web sites for more than five years or so, the tools and processes your are using today are completely different than the the ones you used when you started. Gone are the days of and tags, CSS and Javascript finally started working, and my nose goes up extra high when I hear the words "Front Page".

  • November 30, 2007 in Web Design Culture

    Digg Me! Oh, Please, Please, Please!

    Digg is a great concept. In my opinion, it has made the single greatest contribution to the awareness of the difference between traditional media and the web. Because of Digg, we are now able to comment and vote on just about everything. For these things, Digg, I thank you. You have made the task of spreading the good news of the web much easier. Now, all due credit having been given, I would like to point to a little mess Digg has created.

  • November 12, 2007 in Web Design Culture

    Investing in Design is a Good Choice in the New Millennium

    Throughout the history of humanity and up until just a few short decades ago, the everyman has had little opportunity to enjoy, appreciate, and participate in the world of design. The work of the artisan and fine craftsman had to take a backseat to more basic needs. But as we have learned to more effectively harness the created order for the good of humanity, a society has emerged that has more time to ponder the products of the right side of the brain. This phenomenon has caused the value of the artist and designer to rise to a level never before experienced. As Daniel K. Pink wrote in his 2005 book A Whole New Mind, the right-brained population may very well hold the keys to the kingdom in the generations to come. I think this statement is supported by stories like this one from UX Magazine in which they describe their successful investment in a list of companies providing exceptional user experience. In no other medium of expression is this concept more evident than the web. A design can make or break your business and the businesses of your clients. So keep working on your design skills. Even if you are a programmer's programmer, you can increase your economic value by becoming more design literate.

  • October 18, 2007 in Web Design Culture

    A List Apart Web Designer Survey Results

    A few months ago I pointed everyone to the web designer survey hostedby A List Apart. The historic survey is complete and the results arenow in.

  • October 5, 2007 in Web Design Culture

    Grow Collective - Web Design Co-operative

    Grow is a co-operative based in the UK. It seems like there are more and more of these types of loose collections of independent designers. New media producers tend to be very entrepreneurial and independent so the co-operative may be the solution to the cons of going it alone.

  • September 26, 2007 in Web Design Culture

    Writing Well is Never Bad

    In new media we frequently find ourselves in situations where we are forced to wear more than one hat. The fact that many clients use us as their complete ad agency solution is just the nature of the business. Because of this it is important that we are reasonably good writers. Common grammatical errors which are easy to avoid can be deal breakers when you are emailing a client, writing copy, or blogging...

  • September 20, 2007 in Web Design Culture

    What Does Your Design Really Say?

    As designers, whether we realize it or not, the products of our labor have a huge effect on culture at large. Specifically, web designers decide how linguistic data should be presented to the population which affect how they will interact with that data. Wow! Design matters. A perfect example of this is the recent project of design gurus Pilipp Steinweber and Andreas Koller called Similar Diversity. Essentially, Similar Diversity is a graphical representation of the common word usage in the writings considered holy by the major world religions. It portrays all religion as a huge nebulous blob of similar thoughts and ideas. This design is saying something and affecting the way people think in a very tangible way. It reminds me that every decision I make in my design process should be evaluated carefully so I can better understand the message I am conveying with my design. Can theology really be reduced to a mechanistic chart of similar words ripped from their original context? After all the meaning of a word changes dramatically when you change the words around it. No. Religions are opposed to each other in concept not in common use of language to express those concepts.

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