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)

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/Databases 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

Tags: design
Current Mood: giggly

Most of you have probably already seen the automated checkout lines in many grocery stores. The one down the block from my house has one, and I used to like it. I used to because it was actually very simple and once you got to know it, easy to get through. They updated it a couple of months ago and, while I still use it, I have developed a deep, abiding loathing for the damn machines.

Because they chose that font you see above.

Chainlink (that's not actually chainlink there, but a free knockoff that's pretty close) is one of those "decorative" fonts that implies butchness, connectivity, technocracy. It has all of those design elements, and many designers I know fall for its trick at first. But the infatuation quickly wears off: chainlink is so graceless at being a decorative semiserif font with masculine lines that you quickly go from being infatuated with it to being sick of it. It's not even like Comic Sans; it's not a matter of overexposure. Chainlink is just one of those fonts that is so clearly and obviously bad eyecandy that you get an ache the second or third time you see it.

The auto-checkouts at the QFC down the street have chosen to use three different typefaces: A decorative font I couldn't name for the display page (including the store's logo), Helvetica for almost everything (the price and quantity display, most of the touchscreen buttons, and the close-captioning on the left for those who can't hear the bright chirpy voice), and Chainlink for... well, it's hard to say what for. Some buttons (including the red (why the frack red?) [PAY NOW] button), the "Thank you for shopping with us" notice (which always makes me want to say "Fuck you very much too," mostly because of the font), and a few other seemingly random places.

The new design is awful all around. The new "Do you have any coupons?" page has yes/no buttons that are opposite the "pay now" and the "pay with a card" buttons, so for 90% of their customers that hand has to seek back and forth on the screen, slowing them down. The "No barcode" sequence has added a new page between the button and the touchpad for entry so you can choose to search the database by category: putting the search button on the touchpad screen, which has plenty of real estate, would have been much nicer.

But mostly it's that font. That godawful, testosterony, "I'm young and stupid and a programmer not a designer and I think this font looks manly and great and I'll sneak it in where I can" font.

Tags: design, geek
Current Mood: amused

Part of my job as a web designer is to stay on top of the current trends and to try and exploit them. The people with the best money are the presidential candidates, so I decided to look through them.

First up, Tancredo for President. Tom Tancredo is a one-issue candidate: he wants to fit everyone with a GPS Friend-or-Foe system and if you walk across the border, my friend, and aren't pinging as a friend his Terminator will come after you like it did Sarah Conner.

So what's with this website? Look at it! Skip past the splash screen (sooo 2004). Okay, the website is busier than a two dollar hooker in Tijuana. He's got an animated GIF that flicks by scary images fast enough to induce seizures. The wallpaper is scarily subliminal: Tancredo Tancredo Tancredo. (By the way, WTF is the candidates first name, people?) His bullets don't line up with his press releases and news items, there are some really bad typography decisions, and in an era of robust javascript there is absolutely no reason to deploy flash for some of the things he does with it.

But worst of all, our "Defender of America!"'s own head violates his borders! "Borders exist for thee but not for me?" What was his design team thinking?

Mitt Romney. Another splash screen but at least it says something even with Flashblock installed. Better color choices, nicer typography. The postal service Eagle takes you back to the splash page, not the home page: serious faux pax there. A really corporate tool, that Romney: "Mitt Gear," with a catcher's mitt. Not a horrible website, but much better than Tancredo's.

Ron Paul's website looks like that of a man who's already president. A man unafraid to use Web 2.0 colors. A man who can spend money on his goddamned design team! No splash page (thank the Gods). Three columns with solid use of colors to distinguish site points: you know where to put your eyes. Great use of typography, color, and iconography. Only the flashing Flash app detracts from the home page. Ooh, there's a z-order bug in his menu, making it hard to navigate the website. Icky. And that candidate's photo makes him look like it was taken after a night on a bender.

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.

Alan Keys is running for the school board with that website.

Mike Huckabee is back on track, but his home page has poor use of available real estate. (Yo, dude. C'mere. Not even Gramma runs in 800x600 anymore. 1024x768 with a fluid layout for minimization if you need it, okay?) More brave colors. I'm not so sure about the falling-stars logo, and the picture of him makes him look like a contestant on Jeopardy! rather than a presidential contender. There are too many colors on the page, making it look more candy-ish and less professional than it could otherwise.

Ooh, lovely graphic sensibilities in Draft Al Gore!. A strong Web 2.0, even if it is a black site like McCain's. Mouseovers are effective (but slow! Who the hell did their Javascript?).

Dennis Kucinich has a nicely routine website, but he has a major problem: his javascript-based rotating banners don't all have the same size, so the left column jerks up and down as the page rotates! Bad, bad error. On the other hand, his icon usage is absolutely first-rate, far better than Hillary and Ron Paul. Solid use of color. Good campaign photo, but that whole "violating the borders" thing is there (I know, it suggests a dynamic "out of the box" meme).

Barack Obama. Splash page. Lots of rounded corners and softer colors here: a kinder, gentler candidate. Good color use, and good iconography. An excellent website, all told.

Rudy. Surprisingly pedestrian, given the kudos received by his print design team. Really, is the best photo you could grab for the candidate a poorly resized 320x240 still from a TV interview? Oh, it's Flash? Not everyone loves Flash, Rudy. Colors are solid but uninspired. Not the website of a man who really wants to be president.

Mike Gravel. Woah. It's like Web 2.0 Photoshop sensibilities draped over Jimmy Carter's color scheme. Fun, cute, but not campaign-worthy.

John Edwards, after the (*ungh*) splash page: Green? Uh, green? Are you trying to tell us something, Mr. Edwards? Your design team could absolutely learn a trick or two about column headers and layouts from Ron Paul, 'cause that news block in the lower left hand corner completely sucks. Your To-Do list is folksy but unconvincing. The "Important Deadline" javascriptlet is very cute, but the fade-in it causes is a bit alarming. What did you just do to my browser, John? I absolutely loved the Creative Commons banner in the lower left: a nice touch.

Joe Biden (another splash page) has a blog, not a website. It looks like this page was assembled in Wordpress. And sure enough, a close look shows that it was: Wordpress or something very similar, a standard CMS of some flavor. I'm betting Wordpress. It looks like a template site. That's not bad, but it's not first-rate work either.

And last but not least, after the splash page (enough already!) Hillary Clinton is not a lesbian and is not sleeping with that woman, and she has Barbara Streisand on her home page to distract us from the current brouhahah. She reminds parents that she's on their side. Team Hillary has icons for their "things you can do to help" bar, but they're like from Toys'r'Us or something, the kind of icons a mom would choose (hint: not a president!). That said, her color choices are good, the flag is subtle in the background, and the use of red as a standout for "give me money!" make for effective eye-guides.

Final assessment: Ron Paul has the best website, followed by Obama, McCain, Kucinich, and the Draft Gore folks. (It would seem I'm a sucker for dramatic black backgrounds.)

Worst website? John Bowles of the American Nazi Party.

Tags: design, geek
Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Nine Inch Nails, Piggy

A couple of weeks ago my company replaced the existing set of coffee carafes with a new set. The old set was very beat up and probably deserved replacing, although there were no leaks and no noticeable degredation in performance.

Ever since then, however, getting coffee has come with an added level of stress. When pouring yourself a cup of coffee, I'll press down on the dispense lever and the machine may or may not dispense some coffee but, long before it reaches a full eight ounce cup it starts to cough and sputter. It's out. For some reason when that happens, my stress level seems to shoot upward dramatically and I curse the damned thing. This is an almost universal reaction to the new carafes; everyone feels this way about them, but nobody is quite sure why. This never happened with the old carafes. I've figured out what makes them stressful.

The new carafes are hydraulically fed. You pump a lever to push air into the carafe chamber, which in turn pushed the coffee out. In the old carafes, it was gravity fed: the lever was at the bottom, and you pushed it to open a simple valve that would dump the coffee. I suppose the new carafes, having to hole at the bottom, are less troublesome should a leak develop in the valve, since essentially all that means is that the carafe doesn't work, but at least it doesn't leak either.

The design of the old carafes allowed for a window above the valve that would tell you exactly how much coffee was left. The new ones do not have this feature, and therefore running out of coffee is an unpleasant and stress-inducing surprise.

Sure, you ran out of coffee with the old one, but you knew before you pressed the lever that that was likely to happen. You could even place bets with yourself based upon experience if there was enough left for one more cup. Emptying the carafe was both anticipated and gameable. You also knew, if you had just emptied the carafe, that it was your responsibility to refill it; no such responsibility is communicated with the new ones.

This could all be solved with a simple addition that would probably add two bucks to the manufacturing process: a thin tube flush with the surface of the carafe showing you how much coffee was left. Without it, the carafes seem almost optimally designed to frustrate and stress the user.

Tags: design
Current Mood: annoyed