A place for our creative musings on web-design, technology, and life.
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We have been providing quality hosting service for our clients for 3 years. ServInt over that time has powered us and we can honestly say we’ve had no unscheduled downtime in that period. We highly recommend ServInt to all our colleagues.
My good friend Brant Arthur sent me a link this morning to a site worthy of some acclaim. A totally original concept based around the use of household appliances, a digital camera, and a back/forwards button. It was created to guide you through promotional material for a book by Miranda July. Enjoy!
http://noonebelongsheremorethanyou.com/
The writeup on An Event Apart is still in the works.
Well here I am sitting in Seattle airport just about to leave for Boston to attend An Event Apart 2007, which is an intensive 2–day web design and development conference. I'm awaiting the conference with some anticipation as I've been contemplating for weeks what the highlights of the conference might be. The opportunity to mix with some of the web's greatest designers is reason enough to be excited. I've picked out Interface Design Juggling with Dan Cederholm and Good vs. Great Design with Cameron Moll to be my favorite picks thus far from the topics presented. I am prepared to be surprised though as many of the topics covered are going to be great additions to the knowledge arsenal here at Simple Station Inc.
I'm hoping to cover as much of the event as possible in the journal, though I'm not 100% sure how I'll recharge my laptop during the conference. Worst come to worst there may be a few days of lag between the conference and the time when I publish my notes.
Boarding time! Boston and An Event Apart 2007 await me.
Lately I've been thinking about what makes good and bad design. I always strive for and embrace simplicity in my design style. Frustrated by years of navigating poor web sites I have realized that the net should be about finding information, second it should be about good design. The two components can work harmoniously, but it takes a good designer to pull it off.
Recently Joshua Porter wrote a great article on 5 principles to design by. He states:
The litmus test. When people enjoy Art, they say "I like that". When people enjoy Design, they say "That works well". This is not by accident. Good Design is something that works well.
After just pouring through Cameron Moll's blog this morning, I came upon this tidbit of wisdom that I just couldn't help but pass on. Graphic designers, photographers, web-designers — enjoy!
Fear is the Adolf Hitler of creativity killers. It is responsible for supressing and destroying more brilliant ideas than all of the other creativity killers combined. It is a core ingredient of the most potent creative poisons. Fear limits the volume and dilutes the quality of the ideas we generate. It radically constricts the judgement of creative directors, bosses and clients.
Kodzis identifies top creativity killers, some of which include casting premature judgement upon ideas in their infancy, establishing unrealistic deadlines, dealing with managers whose moods change with every iteration, committing creative suicide through lack of discipline, and doing more of the same.
Whenever I hear someone utter the rationale "...because we've always done it that way," I am forced to suppress the urge to throttle them. For creative professionals, it is both insult and injury wrapped in one backward reaching statement. The essence of creativity is the pursuit of something different. The antithesis of creativity is to keep doing what has always been done.
I'm reminded of Greg Storey's confession upon turning thirty-five:
There is no secret sauce to what I have done with one exception, I never stop working on my confidence.
Hear hear, brother. In my book, there's no better tranquilizer for fear than confidence.
This video from Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, explains the basics of Web 2.0 in 5 minutes. It's a little fast paced, but for those of you needing a true crash course, this may help you wrap your head around it.
Well I just reserved my spot at An Event Apart in Boston. It looks like it's going to be an awesome conference and having never been to one, I'm really excited. They have an awesome lineup of speakers, including some of my personal favorites: Steve Krug, Dan Cedarholm, and Cameron Moll.
Here’s your hCalendar hookup:
Boston here I come! If you're in the area and would like to meet up let me know.
There will be some routine maintenance performed on our server on January 23rd (today) at 10:00PM that will result in all client sites being down for 20-45 minutes.
I have recently been involved in a large amount of web design research for an international client, and made some keen observations about how bad advertising can ruin sites with good design principles.
Let's take a look at the very popular faith site called beliefnet (1 million plus views per day) and look at a page on the site with advertising. Beliefnet was not chosen for any other reason than it's the first one that came to mind when I thought of bad advertising on a site with some good design. (more...)
Well I sat down this weekend and thought I'd highlight a few of my favorite websites, and 2 of my favorite designers I've discovered this year. With all the buzz and hype of "Web 2.0" everything, I've narrowed down 8 websites from 2006 that I've actually found useful.
Simple project management with to-do lists, milestones, time tracking, file sharing, calendars, and more. We use Basecamp to take charge of communication, collaboration, and organization for projects big and small. The design is simple, yet effective. The book they have written titled "Getting Real" has been an eye opener in it's approach to developing web-based applications.
Visit site: basecamphq.com
The easiest way to send invoices to your clients via email. If you are entrepreneurial you'll really appreciate the simplicity of the design behind this tool. We use Blinksale for all our invoicing and we love it. Some of our favorite features of Blinksale include:
Visit site: blinksale.com
We use Feedburner to provide statistics, and formatting for our RSS feed that is generated by our blog. Over the past year Feedburner has really taken off, and we've been really impressed with the simple tools they provide to manage RSS feeds.
Visit site: feedburner.com
Having read a few of Cameron's books and after taking a glance through his portfolio I've been really impressed by his sense of style and simplicity. His site (in particular his portfolio page) has a lot of design touches, which I find classy.
Visit site: cameronmoll.com/portfolio
From the first t-shirt I've bought I've been hooked. This site sets the standard for e-commerce in my opinion. The checkout process is simple, professional, and fast. In addition the mission of the company is really neat. People around the world design and submit t-shirt designs, and then the community rates them to decide what gets printed. Tshirts by the people, for the people.
Visit site: threadless.com
The 'who's who' for college students, Facebook is a university networking tool (you need a uni affiliated email to sign up) that allows you to keep track of your college friends using relationship tracking, degrees of separation, photo albums, specialty groups, and more.
Visit site: facebook.com
Cork'd is making life easier for wine lovers. You can catalog, rate, and review wines in your Wine journal, find out what your buddies are tasting, and discover new wines to try and buy. A one stop shop for finding a good wine, be it for a dinner party with friends, or trek on New Year's.
Visit site: corkd.com
Although this is a bit of old news - I really got into CSS based design this year, and the Zen Garden has been a prime place to find some neat design ideas, and see the code behind it.
Visit site: mezzoblue.com/zengarden/alldesigns/ or csszengarden.com
Yet another designer I've grown to admire over the past year. Jon Hicks is the owner, and has some really top-notch portfolio work. He's done icons for some of my favorite programs such as Firefox, Thunderbird, and skEdit.
Visit site: hicksdesign.co.uk
claimID lets you track, verify, classify, annotate, prioritize and share the information that is about you online. We use it to display what work is about us, and what is not.
Visit site: claimid.com
Well as any good marketer knows (and as I found out) your business name can be a factor in either making or breaking a startup company. A year and a half ago Sentient Development was founded—and has recently been renamed Simple Station Inc. This is the story of why the basic rules of naming play such an important part of the business world. (more...)