design Archives - Daniel Bachhuber

Webstock: Miranda Mulligan, Your Survival is Designed

This week I’m at Webstock, a lovely conference in New Zealand. I’m doing my best to write little blog posts about the amazing presentations. Please forgive any typos, etc. If you’re here too, come write a haiku at Automattic’s booth.

Miranda Mulligan (hey, I know her!) helped take the Boston Globe through a responsive redesign, and now is Director at the Knight Media Lab at Northwestern. She’s the first in five generations of women to not make clothing for a living. Clothing matters; what you wear is an indicator of what you value.

Webstock: Aza Raskin, Design is the Beauty of Turning Constraints Into Advantages

For the last couple of years, Aza Raskin (@aza) has been working on helping bring design to solving health challenges. Solving difficult problems happens by changing how you ask the question. The big meta problem of design is figuring out how to ask the right question.

Simple.com Has One of the Best Experiences on the Whole Dang Internet

Simple.com Has One of the Best Experiences on the Whole Dang Internet. Yep.

&what;

&what;. Easily find HTML character entities.

The Pattern of the Week

The Pattern of the Week. Freezies.

Responsive Web Design: Missing the Point

The point of creating adaptive sites is to create functional (and hopefully optimal) user experiences for a growing number of web-enabled devices and contexts. It’s not because it’s “the right thing to do”. It’s not because it’s fun. It’s not because it’s trendy. It’s not so you can impress your boss by resizing a browser window.

In order to deal with all this diversity, we can no longer just cross our fingers and hope that these devices’ browsers are capable enough to properly render desktop designs. We need to actively take matters into our own hands and do all we can to create more contextually-aware, flexible experiences. The desktop-only days are gone. And yes, addressing this involves adapting layouts, but it also involves addressing a ton of other stuff.

Brad Frost — Responsive Web Design: Missing the Point

Wilson Miner: When We Build

“Design is the choices we make about the world we want to live in.”

Data Data Everywhere and Not a Drop of Value

Data, big, medium or small, has no value in and of itself. The value of data is unlocked through context and presentation.

Bryce Roberts — Data Data Everywhere and Not a Drop of Value.

WordPress.com idea: Nothing but custom CSS page template

For those who have the custom design upgrade enabled on WordPress.com, it would be neat if we offered a bare, stripped to the basics page template you could style to your hearts delight. For instance, if I do a year in review post, it might be nice to prepare a unique design for that. Dustin Curtis is notable for producing custom layouts for each post.

Obviously you can do this now, but you first need to reset a lot of design first. If you switch themes, there’s no guarantee your resets will still work.

Google Reader redesign: terrible decision or worst decision?

Google’s current “bet everything on social now because we missed the boat” movement feels a lot like Microsoft’s “bet everything on the internet because we missed the boat” movement in 1997.

Marco Arment — Google Reader redesign: terrible decision or worst decision?

Google Reader’s new web interface is unusable for me. Good thing I have Reeder (for now).