I tend to agree with the physicist from UNCC here that the Colosseum and other buildings that exhibit these “metamaterial” designs were probably self-selecting (in that they didn’t fall down during earthquakes), but we definitely don’t give the ancients enough credit with their engineering and scientific prowess… Scientists are hard at work developing real-world “invisibility……
Category: Design
Churches, We Need to Talk About Website Accessibility (and Discrimination)
“Failure to comply with Section 508 of the Department of Justice’s ADA (American with Disabilities Act) Standards for Accessible Design could expose your company to hefty fines, the risk of expensive criminal and civil litigation as well as a reputation for being unfriendly to the disabled.” https://userway.org/ I’m going to make a rant here. Forgive me……
Is your website mobile friendly?
It would surprise you to know how often I have new clients who have never done the simple test of checking their website on their own iPhone or Android device. However, it’s definitely something that everyone should do. If your site doesn’t look and operate well on a mobile device, you’re losing visitors and need……
Welcome back, serifs
I’m a font nerd. I’m constantly working with (and sometimes against) clients who want a particular “look” for their website or app or presentation and trying to push them to look ahead. One of those conversations typically has to do with fonts. One client I didn’t have to fight with was Guy Sayles. His new……
“What’s a computer?”
There’s this meme that keeps coming back on Twitter. A young person discovers a floppy disk and calls it the save icon. Apple is using the same idea with this ad. When the mum asks her daughter what she is doing on her computer, she answers “what’s a computer?” via Apple’s new ad shows how……
What Does Your Brand Do?
Longevity and repetition are two of the hardest to use tools in a marketer’s toolbox, but also the most effective. via Marketing at millennials won’t save your tired brand | The Drum There are definitely some points in this post that I disagree with (importance of having a “famous” brand and working towards that being a……
The Way the Stems Meet the Curves
Technically, this is an absolutely fantastic update. They have taken the blunt shapes of the old letters and improved on all of them to create a beautiful wordmark. At small sizes the change is almost imperceptible but at larger sizes the change is a feast. If the way the stems meet the curves on the……
Waiting for the gift of sound and vision
“Because now you have designers, who instead of being encouraged to come up with their own, new, crazy ideas, are being encouraged to do the things that have been proven by the data to deliver results. A lot of times, in thriving marketplaces, a lot of ideas come from the bottom up. You see new……
Experience Designing
“In the old days you were either cool and a bit flakey or on it and a nerd. What we need today is cool nerds. People and agencies that can fathom the deep jumbled soup of networked technologies and surf the rich broth of culture. And help their clients to do the same. Experience design……
Redundancy is not helpful
“Each additional link places an extra load on users’ working memory because it causes people to have to remember whether they have seen the link before or it is a new link. Are the two links the same or different? Users often wonder if there is a difference that they missed. In usability studies, we……
Classical Inscriptions, Fonts, and Avatar
“The Renaissance was chockablock with copyists who learned and then duplicated Latin epigraphic scripts for various purposes. This imitation game had a great amount of influence on the Renaissance antiquities market at the time (forgeries could be bought all over Italy), but it is also revealed in the fonts we use today–particularly Roman fonts. The invention of fonts……
A Complete History of the Millennium Falcon
Fantastic read on many levels. Even a nod to Stainless Steel Rat for Wayne Porter… The Millennium Falcon underwent a long and arduous number of conceptual iterations before its final iconic shape emerged; the one we now once again see blasting its way across the big screen. In fact it wasn’t even known by its famous name……
Cortical Origami
“It turns out that the huge explosion in the number of brain cells in the brain’s outer layer, called the cortex, forces that layer to swell and then collapse in on itself to form those characteristic creases. This cortical origami—which has also evolved in a handful of other brainy species, such as dolphins and some primates—may……
14 Degrees of Visibility
Brinton charts 14 degrees of visibility all the way from black type on a yellow background (the most legible) to blue type on red (the most offensive). This research is certainly nothing new today, but gets you thinking about how the theories have been exercised. Take, for example, the classic hazard symbols, or street signs—they……
Gender Equality Reflected in Pantone’s 2016 Color of the Year
This might make Franklin Graham’s head explode, but I think it’s a good move to associate design with “politics” and assert the relevance of seemingly mundane things such as color choices to cultural conversations: Pantone Color of the Year 2016 – Rose Quartz and Serenity: “Joined together, Rose Quartz and Serenity demonstrate an inherent balance……
What’s Important for Your Website?
At the annual Minecraft conferences the young fans are not provided free workshops on how to play Minecraft but on “Video Creation 101″. What will they do when they go back home? Source: 15 Digital Marketing Trends for 2016 That Could Destroy Your Business Last night I dreamed that I had been brought into a……
This is an aspect of web marketing that I personally detest (and think is wrong)
Minimize cognitive load by building on existing mental models and reducing the need for users to remember things from one part of text to another. Source: Legibility, Readability, and Comprehension: Making Users Read Your Words | Nielsen Norman Group
Stop Worrying About Your Website’s Design
I have this conversation with website build or revamp clients almost daily… It might sound odd for someone who runs a web marketing company to say that website design really doesn’t matter as much as you think it does. But it’s true. Focus on the other aspects of your business and stop worrying whether your……
How Much Does Your Local News Website Cost You Each Month?
“We estimated that on an average American cell data plan, each megabyte downloaded over a cell network costs about a penny. Visiting the home page of Boston.com every day for a month would cost the equivalent of about $9.50 in data usage just for the ads.” Source: The Cost of Mobile Ads on 50 News……
Introducing the U.S. Web Design Standards
“The U.S. Web Design Standards are the U.S. government’s very own set of common UI components and visual styles for websites. It’s a resource designed to make things easier for government designers and developers, while raising the bar on what the American people can expect from their digital experiences.” Source: 18F — Introducing the U.S.……