Paul Graham on design
In his essay ‘Taste for Makers’, entrepeneur and essayist Paul Graham outlines:
Good design is simple, timeless, suggestive, often slightly funny, and hard. Good design looks easy, uses symmetry, and resembles nature. Good design is redesign. Good design can copy. It is often strange, happens in chunks and is often daring.
Why not more websites made for mobile?
Very few major web sites have a mobile version suitable for PDAs or smartphones. Among them are:
- Instapundit
The technical knowledge is there, and designing according to webstandards, using CSS to separate presentation from content, allows for avariety of different presentations. And the mobile internet is growingvery quickly. We wonder, then, why it’s not more common, even necessary,to have mobile-optimized versions of sites.
Update: There’s now a WAP version of USA Today.
Airbag inspirations
Greg Storey, innovative web designer of Airbag, provides a short list of design-specific sites he visits frequently. Others weigh in in the comments.
Design adds value faster than cost
“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.’”
Gone in 0.05 seconds
According to the BBC today, “web users make their judgements about websites within a twentieth of a second of first seeing it”!
BBC tweaks masthead design
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.
2006, we’re on top of it
Both Any Budd and Cameron Moll have made their web design predictions for 2006. Rather bland I must say, or perhaps that’s because there was nothing new and surprising to us. This new Deepend home site uses transparency, PNGs, rounded corners and is published for mobile.
Plus, we believe Mr Moll is wrong about the Fisher Price look being out: it’s barely begun to penetrate.
