Inspired by a new article on A List Apart: Sites that use tagging systems like Magnolia, Flickr, and Digg also provide insight into search behaviors, as each user defined tag illuminates the way in which users label content for retrieval. Simply search for a term you think people might use to find your site, then [...]
Here’s my problem: I have to remember the date I made a change on a website if I want to do a simple before and after comparison in Google Analytics. Something happened on March 17, but you’d never know it by looking at Google Analytics. What if Google Analytics let you place a simple marker [...]
It seems the topic of failure is coming up a lot lately in the design blogs I read. Perhaps we’re all collectively dreading our Q1 reviews. Lame joking aside, this passage resonates right now as Maggie and I are building up her bookbinding empire, which is arguably a design process within a business context. As [...]
Fellow Fitster Noor is blogging her experience at SXSW Interactive. She has an insightful post up describing her first impressions as a conference “nobody.” Today marked my third day at SXSW and it has been a really bizarre experience. There are times when I feel like I’ve been swallowed whole into the tubes of the [...]
Should an art museum website exist to drive more people to the physical museum? Or should it focus on emulating some of the qualities of the museum experience like exploration, curiosity, research? I strongly believe the latter, though I understand the reasons why museum sites tend toward the mundane. Of course, my ideal museum website [...]
This is the kind of design I wish more newspapers would embrace. The text-graphic combination is a useful format when you need to present complex information. Additionally, you can load this format up with a lot of information without it feeling overwhelming. Unfortunately most newspapers usually opt for the brain numbing USA Today-style “factoids” when [...]
Contrast, size, hierarchy, and space – excellent rules of thumb for novices and pros alike. Let your type breathe. Don’t be afraid to leave blank spaces in your pages. This negative or white space will help focus attention on the text — and it’s the text that speaks loudest, so let it be heard. Next, remember the [...]
A great example of designing for the long now. The new repository is intended to be an insurance policy for individual countries and also for humanity more generally, should larger-scale disaster strike (anything from pestilence to an asteroid impact). The Norwegian government put up more than $7 million for construction. The Bill and Melinda Gates [...]
This is a really clever way to evaluate whether a typeface suits the task: apply the text and type to a completely different context and see if it feels comfortable. Ask H&FJ | Hoefler & Frere-Jones
The Campbell-Raws on a typical Saturday afternoon. Image via Boing Boing Gadgets On weekends, both my lovely and talented wife and I turn our attention to any number of side projects we have cooking (sometimes literally). An ethnographer might more accurately describe “turn our attention to” as “race against the clock to create as much [...]
Sans Comic Sans is written by Matt Raw in Brooklyn, NY.