September 1st, 2007 | Published in Art and Design, Personal
Special thanks to the very talented Edman for creating the new flame favicon (the icon that your browser shows in the tab)! You’ll probably have to empty your cache to see it.
August 30th, 2007 | Published in Art and Design, Internet
Buy.com’s shopping cart is one of the worst I’ve seen. It is cluttered with ads, making it difficult to find the products in the cart or how to proceed. The main content the user wants is on the right sidebar — a place usually reserved for non-essential information:
Compare this with Desiring God’s shopping cart:
When we redesigned the Desiring God website last year, we took the opposite approach. We tried to make it as easy as possible for the user to see what they are ordering and how to proceed to the next step. (Genius, huh?)
I know which one I’d rather use when purchasing something online.
August 17th, 2007 | Published in Art and Design, Internet, Links
This website has an interesting design. Making changes would be pretty difficult, though.
(HT: Abraham P.)
July 30th, 2007 | Published in Art and Design, Quotes, Science
“Science” means knowing and “art” means doing, and one is meaningless without the other.
–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), p. 124
July 23rd, 2007 | Published in Art and Design, Beauty, Poetry, Quotes
You cannot translate a poem into an explanation, any more than you can translate a poem into a painting or a painting into a piece of music or a piece of music into a walking stick. A work of art says what it says in the only way it can be said. Beauty, for example, cannot be interpreted. It is not an empirically verifiable fact; it is not a quantity.
–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), p. 117
June 17th, 2007 | Published in Art and Design, Quotes, Science
“Experiment” is a word that seems displaced and uncomfortable outside of science; in science, I suppose, a failed experiment is still science, but in art a failed experiment, whatever else it may be, is not art.
–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), p. 77-8
April 7th, 2007 | Published in Art and Design, Productivity, Quotes, Work
The best designers and the best programmers aren’t the ones with the best skills, or the nimblest fingers, or the ones who can rock and roll with Photoshop or their environment of choice, they are the ones that can determine what just doesn’t matter. That’s where the real gains are made.
Most of the time you spend is wasted on things that just don’t matter. If you can cut out the work and thinking that just don’t matter, you’ll achieve productivity you’ve never imagined.
–37 Signals in Getting Real.
April 6th, 2007 | Published in Art and Design, Internet, Marketing and Advertising
I was logging onto my bank account at Wells Fargo when I was shown an advertisement for a service I did not want. These were the options at the bottom of the ad:
This is a clear example of poor design and carelessness on the part of marketers and web developers. What is the difference between “Show me later” and “Not at this time”? Nothing. If I hit “Not at this time,” they show me later!
The solution, of course, is removing “Not at this time” and replacing it with “Don’t show me again.”