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Sigh.
I’ve just spent the last few hours wandering around the various “open source” analytics programs trying to find the exact right fit for what I want. I’m not finding it, which means that (headache ahead) I may have to write something myself. There’s a django-analytics placeholder in GoogleCode, but it’s empty. I at least have a model!
Basically, I have a distributed subscriber/producer package, and I want to be able to present individual producers with analysis specific to their work. Because the work is long-form text, I want to be able to tell the viewer that the reader scrolled every paragraph into view (no, really!) and actually read the work, not just scanned it. Both of these are more or less beyond the province of Piwik, Google Analytics, or OWA.
Time to put the research aside and concentrate on finishing the product.
This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.comTags: design, django, web development
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Want.
The link above leads to a 40-card set like the child’s game “Memory,” but with 20 different typefaces. The object, obviously, is to find the two cards in the same typeface. It’s such a brilliant idea, and so charmingly executed, that I can’t wait for it to be commercially available. It reminds me of the equally funny, but probably not safe for the streets, t-shirt with the badly typeset phrase, “Kern This, Motherfucker.”
This week, I was with a few friends of mine just standing around talking, and one of them proposed a project. I took a few seconds and said, “Well, let’s see. I wouldn’t go with that color. I’d propose a name that’s not so regionalized– what you’ve got is more general than the specific place, but you could have individual forums for those places– and I’d go look up old Hanna Barbera cartoons, specifically the ones about Yogi Bear & Booboo, and make yourself a color scheme and maybe a line theme from those.” She looked at me and said, “I thought you were a developer, not a designer.”
“I’m not a designer.”
“Yes, you are,” another three of my friends chimed in at once.
Okay, so I guess I’m a designer. Maybe I should get the asshole shades to go along with the attitude.
The same day, I was talking to another friend who’s recently lost her job and was wondering about what it took to do HTML and CSS for someone these days. She asked me if it was okay that she wanted to do it by hand. I reassured her that yes, everyone good did exactly that, and WYSIWYG was more or less dead, or at the very least relegated to beginners and hacks. I didn’t want to dissuade her as I had tried one certain fellow a few months back, but the more I talked to her the more I realized that something was missing.
Hunger.
Work space
I love design and implementation. I love everything about it. If you look at my Delicious feed and compared it to what I write at my Livejournal site, you might well wonder if you were reading the same two people. In the past week, here’s what I’ve gleefully consumed:
Okay, if you’re not all that interested in marketing, you can cut out Seth’s page, and if you’re not that interested in programming the NoSQL article probably isn’t interesting to you either.
But otherwise, that’s all about making a website that’s gorgeous and works and is navigable. And that means not just looking at website design. I love packaging design. LovelyPackage and The Dieline contain some of the sexiest graphic art out there right now, the kind people pay for, the kind that really has only one purpose: to move product. Those are the people designers should be looking at. More good ideas come out of two student designs of things not web-like than out of a thousand CSS galleries. Not that you shouldn’t watch CSS Galleries.
Speaking of CSS Galleries, you ought to be familiar with the new school, Smashing Magazine, Vandelay, and related “smart” blogs about web design.
Look at the photo I took of my workspace. Along with my Monthly Keeping Focus sheet and daily Shoot ‘em Down Task Manager, I have a big notebook and my little Moleskine, the latter of which I’m paranoid about leaving without. What if I have a good idea? Books on HTML (the Flamingo book is my bible, dammit), information architecture, inspiration and interfaces. Ever since I got laid off, I’ve realized just what a hot-house of development Isilon really was: brilliant, rapid development in an isolated little corner of the web where the real world rarely intruded. But this stuff I’ve listed above, now this is what I keep on top of every week because I love this stuff.
And here’s the point: if you don’t, don’t expect much out of a web designer/developer career. All that too much? Tough. Still with me? Good. Go read The Little But Useful Guide to Creativity, by the inestimable Leo Babauta, and get started building your next big thing.
This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.comTags: design
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 The billboard This billboard is near my house. Now, it some respects it entertains me, because it's some sort of weird winner in the bad design category. At least the Nescafe' billboards taunting Starbucks for trying to horn in on the "instant coffee" market use one typeface consistently. Starbucks is also trying to emphasize the "nativeness" of their coffee with that canvas bag background, but it deserves a closer look.  The cup: painted on, brush over stencil. A close-up look at the cup logo in the lower right corner shows some interesting detail. It looks as if the cup was painted on with a thick acrylic or oil, as it seems that there's fiber seepage right along the margin of the cup. I could be wrong, that might be a graphic art artifact. Or it might be deliberate. Whatever it is, it's closer to what the original artist might have wanted. It comes close to communicating "illustration screened onto aged canvas bag." But look at the lettering:  The letters The letters are utterly crisp. The cup and the letters show two different levels of skill with the illustrative arts. I could do this ad in ten minutes with the GIMP, the alpha channel, and some playful dodge & burn effects. This does not communicate "illustration screened onto aged canvas bag." This communicates bad photoshop job. If the ad campaign wants to communicate something by associating the canvas coffee bag with their advertising campaign, then they had damn well better get a better class of artist, one who can make a request for stencils and screens look like stencils and screens. This campaign fails to impress me. Tags: design, sighting
Current Mood:  annoyed
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I don’t know if this is a common phenomenon. I’ve spoken with a lot of artists who swear by their Wacoms and don’t ever work on anything else at all, but I’ve found that while my Wacom Bamboo is good for some things, when it comes to rapid design I’m much happier tossing off sheet after sheet of paper with a handful of colored pencils. I’ll use the Wacom for clean-up, and that’ll be extensive use, but the initial will always be done on paper. The tactility, simplicity, and above all else the narrow focus of “just draw it on paper” seems to work for me.
This was especially true yesterday. I was trying to design a blackboard theme, with lots of chalk lines, and no matter what I tried, my handwriting via the Wacom sucked. On paper, my hand is quite readable, but on the Wacom, no dice. Scrawly, off-center, badly angled. I imagine if I have a Wacom Cintiq the quality would have been substantially changed, but a Bamboo is for clean-up, nothing more.
This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.comTags: chat, design
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As some of you may have heard, I recently lost my job at Isilon. In that great tradition, I have put up my resume. Have a look, and please comment on the content or presentation of either version:
Kenneth M. Sternberg, Senior Web and User Interface Developer and Designer.
There’s a copy for printing here.
This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.comTags: design, javascript, linux, personal, python, web development
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A couple of weeks ago I purchased two new (used) books on graphic design from Half-Price Books, and one of them, Graphic Design Basics, published in 1999, had exactly one mention of the Web. In a paragraph in the introduction touting job opportunities for graphic designers, author Amy Arnston writes in a section on careers that "Web pages increasingly call for design skills with page layout, logo design, scripting, illustration, typography and animation." And that's it. That's the sum total mention of graphic design for the web in her book. She actually spends more time discussing the potential need in the "near future" for graphic designers to be skilled in 3D environments for VRML (remember VRML?) than she does HTML. Everything else is posters, books, and packaging. All of which are perfect topics for a book on graphic design, but somehow it seems like even ten years ago is another world, a world where graphic design was the province of the rarified advertiser, rather than anybody and everybody who needed a web page. Tags: design
Current Mood:  giggly
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I liked John McCain's old, black, magnificent website. In response to Barak Obama's presumptive nomination, his campaign has rolled out a new theme and layout. That website's design aesthetic sucks. A quick review of something I wrote back in November of last year about a certain candidate's website: John McCain. Bold. Maverick. Black. With a none-to-subtle silver star in a mililtaresque wingding. Lots of blue, not a lot of red. Good Web 2.0 sensibilities where needed, limited flash, reliable javascript. A thoroughly solid website, but weak on the jingoism we've come to expect from McCain. Is this man not a true American? Still, I like the site, even if it doesn't look campaign-y. It's time to take a look at the new John McCain website. Oh, Gods, the background! The background! What the heck is this, the circus? Look at those stars! The last time I saw a background like that it was on the side of a carnival ride, the kind that gets a cotton-candy-and-greasy-corndog barf every hour on schedule. The website is busy; javascript graphics constantly shifting images, distracting the eye from reading what it wants to read. There's some kind of widget on top of those images, but what it does and how it does it is not at all clear. He's still using that buffet-line lime-jello green for his "Donate" button. The whitespace all around is uneven and poorly managed. Look at the banner logo (in the " masculine hygiene product" font) and the way it relates to the widget and image rolls underneath it: they don't grid properly at all. It makes the website pinch distractingly. Worse, go to "site map"; the left nav bar is a few pixels too low, revealing poor border and margin management with CSS. Form fonts don't correspond with the overall font of the page. Typography management is underwhelming. And the bottom of the sidebar has no border, but instead bleeds into the background. Whoever took over the Women for McCain subsite didn't follow the template correctly. All in all, John McCain's website communicates that McCain is a follower, not a leader, who changes his site not to demonstrate his strengths but in a poor attempt to conceal his weaknesses. Obama's overall website design hasn't changed. His team quite obviously has a solid style guide that it follows reliably, with someone very much in charge of making sure the confidence and modernity of the site is never, ever compromised. He has new widgets to communicate his thanks to those who got him this far and short entries on his future strategies. The only tic that annoys me is the use of a serif font when blockquoting Obama himself, but a sans-serif for the rest of the website. On the other hand, the color scheme is so well-integrated with the typography (someone over there not only understands hue, he understands saturation) that he more or less gets away with it. McCain's website is a clumsy imitation of this cool, disciplined elegance, and it shows. Tags: design, web
Current Mood:  amused
Current Music: Suzanne Vega, The Queen and the Soldier
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In the absence of any formal plan, I've been doing random exercises from Jim Krause's excellent textbook, Design Basics, and in an exercise on composition he recommends finding magazine photos of landscapes with horizon lines and, with black sheets of paper, cropping the top and bottom of the photograph at various heights to change where the horizon line is with respect to the eye. Being both lazy and geeky, I instead went to Flickr and found a half-dozen photos tagged with the word "landscape." My main criteria was that I wanted ones where the horizon line was dead center of the photograph. I then called up the photographs in GIMP and cropped them the easy way: by reducing the vertical window and enabling the scroll bar. Out of six photos, five were improved by a radical crop in one direction or another. The one that did not improve was a street scene where the building blocked a lot of the sky, but even that benefited from a slight crop in one direction or another, moving the horizon line away from the mid-line. The general rule that the center of a photograph is the most boring place to put anything held true even for the gorgeous landscape photos some people put up on flickr. Tags: design, photography
Current Mood:  creative
Current Music: Mike Oldfield, Tubular Bells (demo)
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So, I spoke with my manager earlier this week. Isilon is growing and we're implementing a formal education reimbursement plan and all that goes with it. I have a very strong grasp of the entire stack of C/Python/Ruby/Perl/Appservers/Webservers/D atabases on the server side side and HTML/DOM/ECMA(Javascript)/CSS on the client side. But I told him that I was never quite happy with my grasp of visual design. I can do it, but mostly without much inspiration. It's not something that comes naturally to me, and it takes a lot of practice to wake it up. He thought my graphic design sensibilities were fine for the industrial applications I wrote for Isilon (and F5, and Carbonwave, and all the contracts I did for CompuServe), but agreed that if I thought that was a skill I need to improve then, by all means, I should take a class and submit expenses and all that. I am an idiot because today, while I was playing with my wacom pad, I figured out what layers are for. I mean, if you're a graphic designer, let that sink in. I've been doing this for ten years and only today did I figure out just how useful layers could be. I've always done all my prototyping on paper and then just scribbled it into photoshop all at once. Bleah. All that wasted time. Tags: art, design
Current Mood: annoyed
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