February 2009
2 posts
Branislav Kropilak Photography →
Some of the most original and refreshing photography I’ve seen in a long time. Via Subtraction.
World Events - Impact on Web App Traffic →
Quite telling how Flickr, Last.fm and Google all registered drops in traffic during the inauguration ceremony, but Twitter spiked.
January 2009
2 posts
The Feltron 2008 Report →
Nicholas Felton is back with another beautiful and meticulously designed report detailing his activities and habits in 2008. For more background info, check out Paul Boag’s interview with Nicholas on the process behind the reports. You can also buy printed copies of his reports from 2006-2008, as I’ve just done.
November 2008
2 posts
Tim Van Damme's Web Based Biz Card →
So elegant it just directly seduced my brain before my eyes could figure out what was happening.
Rocket Assisted Construction of World's Tallest... →
October 2008
2 posts
The Big Picture →
Stunning photos gathered from the top news agencies on big stories and events. Hop on their RSS feed.
Twitter Follow Cost →
A magnificent idea - look up how Twit-happy people are before you follow them, in average updates per day and the ingenious new unit of milliscobles (relative to Robert Scoble’s thoroughly ridiculous average of over 21 a day). I’m quite cheap at 0.18, or 8.64 milliscobles. Get following.
September 2008
6 posts
Liberty City (GTA4) vs New York City →
Side by side comparisons of locations in New York, and their modelled representations in Grand Theft Auto 4’s Liberty City.
Application Interface Design Guidelines →
An excellent set of rules from Matt Chisholm, many of which you will doubtless have noticed if you’re a Windows Mobile user.
Web Designer Cheat Sheets →
Covering everything from Photoshop shortcuts to HTML entity references.
Modular Wine Glasses
A reinvention of the wine glass set by Sherwood Forlee. Metal stems for enhanced strength and interchangable glasses for easier storage.
More photos over at Yanko Design.
Good Night Firefox (Good Morning Chrome?)
Some exciting times may be just around the corner in web browser land, as news of Google’s rumoured foray into the browser market is “leaked” in the form a rather spectacular Scott McCloud drawn comic strip.
Here are some highlights:
WebKit based: debatably the best performing rendering engine out there at the moment
Tab process isolation: one process per browser tab, so one...
August 2008
12 posts
Olympic Medal Table Bias
Now that the spectacular events in Beijing have drawn to a close, I’ve been looking at the final medal tables and how different news sites are representing them.
There’s something suspicious about the sorting order. The official table ranks by gold medal count (but includes a rank by total medals), putting China in first place. This method is also used by the relatively neutral...
Lost and Found 2.0 →
The power of a social network — a lost camera is found and returned to its owner.
An Event Apart Blogged →
Jeremy Keith has very sportingly blogged (live) the first day’s sessions at the currently running An Event Apart — the conference for people who make websites.
A Bizarre Attack on Fire Eagle
The BBC ran an article today voicing the concerns of a couple of privacy groups over Yahoo’s Fire Eagle.
I’d love to know whether the director at the Centre for Digital Democracy actually used the service before declaring that sites like Fire Eagle are “building and collecting more data, not just about the content you like but where you go and where you are at the moment.”...
WatchEndanged indigenous cultures, and the extreme diversity of their realities.
Bubble Calendar →
A brilliant idea, but I think I’d struggle to resist popping a whole month away on a whim.
NY Times Olympic Medal Count Map →
Beautifully produced visualisation of olympic medal counts by nation, per olympiad. Plenty of trends to spot, such as the increasing diversity of nations scoring medal wins, and the enourmous effect of the home advatange. See also the 2008 games tracker from the same masterful interactive design team.
This Redesign, Thing
Following in the footsteps of many others, I’m now aggregating activity from a number of websites I use into one chronologically ordered stream as you see here. Such systems are colloquially referred to as lifestreams.
Rather than use a hosted lifestream service such as friendfeed or socialthing, I decided I wanted more control over design and functionality so I’ve written an...
Watchvisualisations of various forms of traffic in Britain
WatchDelicious redesign: before/after, animated
July 2008
4 posts
How Dopplr Learns →
Dopplr reveals some of their clevers.
O2 stuffs up Apple's iPhone 3G launch →
My RSS Feed
I’ll be moving my RSS feed for this site about a bit over the next week or two, so please bear with me if you get a volley of “new” old items re-appearing.
Hopefully FeedBurner will work its magic and you won’t notice a thing.
June 2008
3 posts
Cool Drainage
Two interesting sinks. Both via Yanko Design.
NOFRKS Design →
Beautiful site with a scroll based page navigation system. The background image you see is dependent on the time of day as well.
Automated Phone Systems →
Seth Godin has some thoughts on the value of automated customer service phone systems. My personal favourite is Virgin Media’s, which seems to route your call to a different centre based on a function of your answers, and the day of the week. Only one call centre is ever able to handle your query - it’s the one that your account number is actually assigned to. Keep trying until you get...
May 2008
1 post
Web Form Design →
Luke Wroblewski’s new book on designing web forms comprehensively covers the art and science of laying out the blanks, in every aspect from design and organisation, to validation and inline help text. A fresh addition to the must-have web designer bookshelf.
April 2008
2 posts
DHL Non-Express Tracking
Expecting a delivery sent via DHL, and armed with a consignment number, I attempted to track the package. Hilarity ensued as the code was not recognised by the fast track box on the front page, an actual pop up appearing to display an error: “Please enter a Number (only one) in the FastTrack Box.” Since my tracking number contained spaces, I stripped these out by hand, and...
Little People →
Art installation by Slinkachu at Nuart, Stavanger, Norway.
March 2008
5 posts
Designing Office 2007 →
Jensen Harris, the man responsible for user experience in the Microsoft Office group, delivers a near-comprehensive talk on how the Office 2007 UI was conceived. A must-see for interface designers, and highly recommended skim-viewing for anyone who’s used at least a couple of the previous versions of Office.
The Second Best Firefox Extension in the World →
After the almighty Firebug, and just ahead of AdBlock Plus.
Splash Pages can be Good Things
At HP, if you’re not in the USA and you don’t think to inform them as such when you hit the homepage using the dropdown at the top (not a primary nav element by any means), you’re in for a big dose of inconvenient. Typical usage path for HP website (at least, mine, a few minutes ago): Hit www.hp.com Select “Small & Medium Business”, “Servers” Happily...
Absolut Quartet - Interactive Musical Robots →
Ever dreampt of being able to play a melody and have a robot jam along with you by firing rubber balls at a giant marimba, while another blends in a haunting layer of harmonised crystal glass resonation and a third keeps the beat with an assortment of percussion? Your day, my much disturbed friend, has finally come.
February 2008
3 posts
Jan Von Holleben - Dreams Of Flying →
Pure photographic magic.
PR Suicide →
A free lesson in how not to put the lid on a national PR disaster for your small business, by Mr Langsdon of Lichfield, Staffordshire. Although he could have been quoted out of context, he seems to have implied that he and his business stand by the original statement on the bill, and that, except for the exposure of the message to the customer, this kind of thing is standard procedure.
January 2008
5 posts
Twitter Help →
Probably the best web app support form in the world.
Hypo-D-Crit
The New York based School of Visual Arts is now offering an MFA in “design criticism”. One might wonder if the first project for students would be a critique of the course’s own webpage; itself a hilariously dire attempt at their principle discipline - design. Here are four problems with the this site that you won’t need an MFA in design criticism to spot. Image...
A Year in Iraq - New York Times →
NYT’s graphics folks produce yet another captivating infographic depicting fatalities in the Iraq conflict, coded over time by organisation and cause of death.
Stupendous Structures for Science
Ten incredible scientific research facilities from around the world. These photos are must-see category one alpha plus. Part one, part two.
Fluid - Run Webapps as Native Applications on OS X →
December 2007
4 posts
Full Fat Task/Email Mashing
The lovely people at Remember The Milk, a web based To Do list service have built a Firefox extension on the GMail/Greasemonkey API to bring their To Do lists right into GMail. The problem I’ve always had with all these web services for managing my personal data is that they’re all over the place on the web. Now I have one of the most important ones integrated into a website I visit...