Archive for the ‘Design’ Category
May
11
2008
at 11:13am
The much celebrated WordPress 2.5 upgrade was released about a month and a half ago and I’ve finally gotten around to upgrading my installation. I was really looking forward to the new Happy Cog designed admin interface. But guess what? I was disappointed.
The new design is surely nicer looking than the old (although I didn’t really have a problem with the old design). They’ve made quite a few interface changes – some good, some not so good. Read on to see some screenshots and analysis of the new interface.
Read more…
Posted in Design, Open Source, Software, Usability | 10 Comments »
Feb
24
2008
at 10:21am
I’ve come across a couple of interesting browser upgrade campaigns lately. Yes, lots of IE testing! Anyway, it’s kind of interesting to see the way different sites have presented the message.
Purpose of a browser upgrade campaign
The purpose of a browser upgrade campaign is to:
- tell people they’re using an outdated browser
- explain why this is a problem (optional but effective)
- suggest alternatives
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Posted in Design, Usability, Web Standards | 2 Comments »
Feb
01
2008
at 10:53am
We’ve just released our new design for TWF and A Padded Cell to the public. This new look came together fairly quickly. A few weeks ago we started playing with some colours and fonts and quickly developed a prototype within a few days.
Liam and I worked closely together on this design. It was truly a joint effort. I would work on it for a little while then hand the laptop over to him and he would add some more elements to it. It was really fun to work together on a design and I think it shows in the result.
The new look is a lot more sophisticated than the old look while still retaining a bit of funkiness which was really important to us.
Posted in Design | No Comments »
Dec
17
2007
at 2:15pm
Todays’s 24 Ways article, Increase Your Font Stacks With Font Matrix is another take on listing the fonts available in different operating systems and encouraging designers to use a wider range of fonts. This is something I covered with my Complete Guide to Pre-Installed Fonts in Linux, Mac, and Windows (not sure what to think about the similarities there!). Obviously Richard Rutter knows a whole lot more about typography than I do so it’s good to have his take on this topic.
I was inspired to come up with my list after looking at the font stacks on Joe Clark’s site. Check out his typography stylesheet for some interesting ideas.
I find myself using the list I from my A Padded Cell article all the time now. Just today I added a few more options as a back-up for a heading that’s already replaced by sIFR. From the way I have it’s easy to pick one font from each column, although I find Rutter’s chart to be a lot cleaner and better as a quick reference (and he’s got Adobe fonts included). I thought a lot about the best way to display that information, especially since I wanted to include information about which fonts are near equivalents of each other, as originated here.
In an upcoming update to A Padded Cell I’m using this font stack:
"Lucida Grande","Lucida Sans Unicode","Eras Medium ITC","Mg Open Moderna",Helvetica,Verdana,sans-serif
It’s working well so far but we need to do some more thorough testing before final release. I’ve also used that list to add some Linux alternatives to the font stack in various stylesheets I’ve come across at work.
If you’re finding my list to be useful I’d love to hear about it!
Posted in Design, Software, Web Standards | No Comments »
Nov
11
2007
at 11:11am
It’s finally finished! I’ve been working on this article off and on for months. It took a lot of research (especially when I didn’t have access to a Mac, and now when I don’t really have access to Windows), and a lot of messing around with sample graphics to get the sizing right. This is a complete (to my knowledge) list of fonts installed with OSX, Ubuntu (as a sample Linux distro), and Windows as well as MS Office.
I hope this list will make it easier for web designers to use a wider variety of fonts in their designs. There are really quite a lot of fonts available as long as you’re okay with things looking a little different on diffrent operating systems.
Enjoy!
Complete Guide to Pre-Installed Fonts in Linux, Mac, and Windows
Posted in Design | 1 Comment »
Nov
05
2007
at 3:58pm
Simplebits is on a 404 hunt. Others have already done some searching. But what have they come up with? Lots of “cool” examples of clever but completely useless things to do with 404 pages.
I really don’t get why it’s considered to be a good idea to do something silly/”cool” with a 404 page. At this point the user has encountered an error, and you’re not going to tell them what to do about it? This example (and others) actually tell the user to turn around and leave. Is that really what you want? They’re trying to find something on your site and you tell them to go away?
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Posted in Design | 1 Comment »
