Greg Storey, innovative web designer of Airbag, provides a short list of design-specific sites he visits frequently. Others weigh in in the comments.
“Nothing matters more to a product’s success—whether it’s a software product, website, cell phone, or garbage can—than good design,” Joel Spolsky argues. “Design is something you only have to pay for once for your product. It’s a part of the fixed costs in the equation, not the variable costs. But it adds value to every unit sold. That’s what Thomas C. Gale, the famous Chrysler automobile designer who retired in 2001, meant when he said that ‘Good design adds value faster than it adds cost.’”
According to the BBC today, “web users make their judgements about websites within a twentieth of a second of first seeing it”!
We understand what the Pajamas Media company is—a banding together of some A-list bloggers to leverage their web stardom into something new and bigger— but what is the website? A sort of human-edited Technorati?
Today their top story is something about Spielberg’s Munich. There’s a “next” button. Next what? Next featured story? Next page on this featured story? We click to find out. It’s another story, “Americans demand the US Senate schedule hearings on Iran”, but while both stories appear on the “top stories” list on the left, this is not the order in which they are listed.
A somewhat more informative link than “next” would have been nice—even “and now for something completely different” would have been marginally more helpful.
What follows below onscreen is the same on both pages, so we guess that the top green-shaded box is horizontal navigation.
We notice that the first item in the list entitled “Main” is “About Us”. Our suspicion is that the brains here could not mesh together properly and were all too polite to say so and too self-sufficient to care too much.
Did anybody quit anything else to do this?
Update 23 Jan: Aha, they’ve addressed every one of these issues, reverting to a more intuitive blog format. I’ll be visiting.
The latest version of ExpressionEngine, the web content management system we use heavily, has two new developments that are so exciting and important they’re being called nuclear.
Extensions are a third method of changing the system itself, making it EE extremely plastic. Whereas the other two methods—plug-ins and modules—allow for the addition of new functionality, extensions allow for the changing of current functionality.
Field relationships meanwhile add a lot of power to the system’s data handling. Now not only are EE’s data stacks shapeable, but tunnels can be created every which way among them.
Via cssbeauty, this portfolio site for Polish design company Helldesign has AJAX interactivity on the front that seems like Flash but isn’t.
For the first time in at least a year or so the BBC has tweaked its design. I like it, as I like what the BBC has done as a whole on its news site. What they’ve done is slick up the top bar slightly, making the tabs textured. They’ve also made the mastheads color-themed. News stays maroon but sport is black, radio is blue, television is a different blue, weather maroon like the news, and languages also blue.
During the course of making this site we made png4ie, an ExpressionEngine plugin to make it easy to display PNG files on the dominant web browser IE6. At deepend.it PNGs allow shadowed boxes on top of a gradient background. See the discussion at the EE support forum.
Il mercato dei videogiochi e’ in costante crescita e non si contano i titoli destinati ogni anno a piattaforme domestiche come Pc e consoles. Solo di recente pero’ il videogame – media maturo con un mercato consolidato – ha iniziato un processo di differenziazione che ha portato all’identificazione di mercati minori e paralleli all’edutaiment. Parliamo di ‘applicazioni serie’ per i videogame: dall’educazione, al training simulato in tempo reale, alla comunicazione sociale. Quello del Serious gaming e’ un mercato con grandi prospettive ma ancora limitato in termini di giro d’affari (voci di corridoio al summit dichiaravano cifre non superiori a 10 milioni di dollari per lo scorso anno). Tutti sanno che le opportunit? sono grandi e che le applicazioni sono praticamente infinite: al summit abbiamo visto giochi per la formazione manageriale e il team working, simulatori per conseguire la patente di guida e videogame per insegnare ai militari delle nazioni unite come comportansi con le popolazioni locali in territori di guerra come il Libano. I Serious games in relta’ sono un’entit? composita che non si puo’ ridurre ad una definizione univoca. Una simulazione di guida non ha molto a che vedere con un videogame per la comunicazione sociale – e’ per questo che proponiamo per le prossime edizione di avviare una piu’ organica classificazione delle tipologie di videogame non-entertainment. Abbiamo identificato il termine ‘Communication games’ come una definizione che meglio rappresenta gli obiettivi di un progetto come il nostro Food Force per Wfp: un videogame di comunicazione che parla ad un vasto pubblico di giovani (e non) e che ha caratteristiche sia di produzione che di design profondamente diverse da un videogame per la formazione aziendale o per l’insegnamento delle lingue in una scuola di fomrazione: a cambiare non ’ e’ solo il messaggio, ma anche il design, la complessit? del progetto e i budget sono molto diversi – come pure l’ampiezza dell’audience di riferimento. Un communication game nasce per diffondersi come un virus ‘positivo’ promosso dagli stessi utenti ai quali il prodotto deve piacere per coinvolgere.
