Just been looking at Tilt, a Firefox add-in that shows a 3D visualisation of a webpage. The result is pretty spectacular.
Archive for the Design category
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Check out Tilt
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Web licensing direct from FontFont
Just noticed that FontFont are now selling fonts with a licensing agreement for hosting on your own site and serving up via @font-face – the licensing is based on average page impressions per licensed domain, and the pack you download contains both WOFF and EOT formats. This means at present these would just be supported in IE and Firefox.
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FontShop are now selling webfonts directly
Just noticed this announcement today from FontShop – they are now selling font files in EOT / WOFF format directly along with a suitable licensing model. FontShop have been very progressive in supporting TypeKit to date, but this will provide a direct route for purchasing fonts from a foundry for use on the web.
TypeKit will still provide you access to a wide range of fonts for a low subscription fee, and will also go a long way to serving up the most appropriate format to different user agents.
Nice to see things moving forward and the industry starting to address the massive market that has been pretty much ignored to date.
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More tablet concept videos – Sports Illustrated this time
Just been watching another concept video to show an example of a tablet version of a magazine. I think one of the most interesting areas around this will be content design.
Designing a magazine for print is much more a labour of love than dynamic content injected into a CMS template – each feature is specifically put together with the design working in harmony with content. Generally publishing on the web is very different – there will be a single generic design and set of templates that present any article in exactly the same way. One of the few examples I can think of that breaks this trend is alistapart, where each article is uniquely illustrated prior to publication.
I’m interested to see where the balance will lie when publishing content for a tablet. It could range from having a dedicated production team within a publication to hand craft a unique design for each issue, to basic templated content within a standard framework.
In any case there is now a very definite case for sorting out workflow and access to content so that a publisher can easily target multiple platforms.
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Concepts around reading magazines on handheld digital devices
I still have my doubts about whether even the most advanced digital reader can compare to the simple pleasure of flicking through a physical mag, but this conceptual video gives some really great ideas about what the experience might look like.
I like the consideration for some of the less obvious ways that we use physical magazines and how these might be replicated – like leaving something lying around on a coffee table to make some kind of statement about your taste and attitudes.
Thanks to Dave for sending me the link.
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Blimey… just noticed the bottom of the Vimeo site
I’ve visited the Vimeo site on various occassions, but never actually scrolled to the bottom of the homepage. They have an incredible illustration hidden away at the bottom. Due to the location they can make much more of it without detracting from the content. Go and take a look, I love it.
Also check out how they are animating the position of the balloons and clouds using javascript to respond to scroll behaviour. Very nice, subtle touch.
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Previews of implemented CSS3 functionality
Although still a work in progress, I hadn’t realised how many of the proposed CSS3 features actually already have some kind of basic implementation in the latest set of browsers. Check out this page which provides live demonstrations of some of the more exciting proposals.
I think the major things I’m looking forward to are…
- Ability to specify multiple background images on the same element – so no need to add superfluous elements as styling hooks
- Multi-column layout – allowing text from a single element to visually flow into multiple columns, much like a newspaper layout
- Decent support for RGBA – so being able to specify the alpha channel when setting a background colour. This avoids having to cut PNG images in order to achieve a semi-transparent background.
- Support for specifying colours in terms of Hue, Saturation and Lightness. Although I’m not quite sure how I’ll use this yet, I can imagine this would make animation of colours more intuitive – for example, using javascript to animate the amount of light applied to an element.
The live examples are really worth looking at, and give a much better feel for what is coming up compared with reading a specification.
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Beautiful White Websites
I’ve just been reading this article on beautiful white websites, and in particular I love Pixelbot. Using a different typographic feature in each heading works well, and having a very visual but very minimal design also totally appeals to me. Serves as inspiration for learning how to make cute reflective robots in Photoshop.
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Trying on dresses with augmented reality
I’ve just been watching the Fashionista demo video cited on this article on augmented reality. It’s always a little scary when a new technology is hideously abused to deliver lots of cool things which have no practical value at all, but I think this is a great example of applying something new in the right way for an actual purpose.
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Designing content templates
A lot of the design work I’ve done to date has been oriented around interactive applications as opposed to content sites. I’ve recently started to appreciate the skill involved in designing suitable content for different templates and integrating content into a design. I guess previously I had the attitude that you come up with a design with a placeholder for where the main content goes, however this leads to blocky text that is hard to consume.
A really good example of this done well is BellamyStudio. I ended up looking at the site after a friend mentioned it. Each template has a very clear hierarchy of information, and the type design makes it extremely simple to scan a page and pick up the key messages. The overall visual design is simple enough to let the detail in typography and content come across without interference.
I love how stunning the overall design is, but also how simple. Little details show just how much thought has been put into this – I love the subtle use of colour to pick out the heading from the main content paragraph on each page.
