I just came across The Darfur Wall site and I’m really stunned how effective such a simple idea can be. There are 400,000 numbers, one for each person killed in the Darfur genocide. Each dollar donated lights up a random number. You can zoom in or out to get perspective, or view an animation of the lights coming on over time. Go and look.
Archive for the Design category
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Highly Original Charity
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Cinema Site Designs
In a vague attempt to combat the winter-induced sleep addiction that hangs from my eyelids each night when I get home, I thought I’d take a quick look at cinema listings. Obviously it’s much more worthwhile to walk to the end of the road and sit in a different seat for a couple of hours being entertained.
I couldn’t really find anything that appealed to me (that I hadn’t already seen). However, I did notice that Prince Charles have redesigned their site recently, and the new version is really well structured and easy to use. I think they’ve done a great job of presenting lots of information in one place without leaving you feeling like you don’t know where to look. I tend to be a little short-sighted and tired this time of night, but could intuitively get what I needed without thinking about it at all.
In constrast, the Curzon site manages to incorporate most of my pet hates about design. They have much less information on the page, but leave you feeling stressed and unsure what to look at. There’s no kind of visual hierarchy to guide the eye (everything in upper case), so you have to read most of the content to work out which piece to look at. The cherry on top is a layer of pointless and annoying animation.
I think you really have to consider your situation when making decisions around design. Cinema sites are purely functional, so I’d like to be able to get the information I want as quickly and efficiently as possible. I really don’t think animation works well in this context at all.
Anyway, as you can gather I ended up ranting about design instead of going to the cinema. Fool. At least I get to test out my tasty new keyboard.
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The Grid
I was reading The Designer and the Grid last night. I had some vague awareness of this area of design theory, but hadn’t delved into any real detail. I saw a great talk earlier in the year by Andy Clarke that made me realise I should really do some reading in this area.
I think I tend to work mostly from a visual / aesthetic point of view when carrying out design work. Another way to approach it is to decouple laying out content in the most appropriate way, from the visuals layered on top of this. Where I’m interested in grid theory is around this first step – using various grid configurations as faded layers in Photoshop or Illustrator to provide structure around the initial step before visuals are even considered.
I guess I tend to jump directly to the fun, high impact stage, and sometimes this means there is insufficient structure around how the content is presented.
I’m also playing around with ideas about the best way to convey or test pure content layout. This can be done in a flat way with Visio or Illustrator, but I think you can get better feedback using a simple interactive model that allows you to click through a particular scenario. I like the idea of using static html pages with very understated greyscale CSS, and maybe combining this with Wiki style content that can capture notes around the design, or feedback from others.
Then again, maybe I’m just trying to avoid writing spec documents in Word. I was reading an article from Joel about that whole subject, and it made me realise I should make an effort to embrace the word processor a little more than I do.
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Kiss My Bot
I need your help! I’ve finished V2 of my chatty little MSN bot, and I need some help testing and expanding her vocabulary.
If you’re running MSN messenger and feel like helping out, then add ninarobot@gmail.com as a contact. She should automatically accept the invitation, then you can start chatting to her.
I’m logging anything she doesn’t understand, so hopefully I can add support for anything you throw at her that doesn’t quite get through. Feel free and unlimited when chatting – nobody is judging you!
Disclaimer: it’s quite possible that she’ll crash at some point, or stop responding. If that happens, just leave a comment on this post and I’ll restart the bot application and try to work out what went wrong. Also if you have any ideas for additional tasks she should be able to carry out, or things to chat about then let me know.
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Current Reading and Exploding Fruit
Our ceiling is currently spattered with smoothie, looking in many ways like a murder scene. I think the difference is that I’d have more motivation to repaint and cover it up if I had indeed mutilated and killed. The culprit was a little, innocent looking fruit drink. You would think that you’d have to leave something like that for days before an explosion, but this was bought from a Starbucks around 9pm then left on the side the next day. We came home to find fruit flung around the flat.
I really had no idea how excitable and violent a little fruit drink could be. I guess I’ll know to be more careful next time… or at least film it.
I’m finding that a downside of living round the corner from Foyles and Borders is a tendency to get excited and buy more books than I have time to read. I’m trying to get through the following over the next week or two:
- The Designer and the Grid
- The Best Software Writing 1 (Joel Spolsky)
- Adobe Illustrator CS2: Classroom in a Book
- Foundations of Atlas: Rapid Ajax Development with ASP.Net 2.0
- The Lady in the Lake (Raymond Chandler)
The Joel Spolsky book is really enjoyable – reading after a recommendation from my brother. Many technically oriented books simply have no style. This is a collection of technical articles that break the trend.
I also realised that I’m much more familiar with Photoshop than Illustrator, so I’m making a concerted effort to work with both products together (hence the official training book). I tend to find that even in familiar areas you can pick up lots of useful information by following the path of someone else.
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Sunday Photos
I thought it might be interesting to post up a few of the raw photos from the shoot on Sunday to compare to the finished site design. In particular this is the original image that was used for the site header before mucking about with it and getting the crayons out. As before, you can check out the finished design at kimelliott.net
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New Site Finished
I spent Sunday morning rolling around on various London pavements with a camera. My girlfriend is a very talented writer, and I’ve been meaning to put together a site to support her work for some time. I had a few ideas about how the design could develop, so we packed up a bag of suitable shoes for modelling and took to the streets of London.
Unfortunately the kind of shots I was after involved being at ground level, which got a few odd glances. The main image we ended up using was taken lying on the concrete in the middle of the road (Lower Regent Street) looking up towards Picadilly Circus. I was happily surprised how much fun it is to run around London behaving strangely.
Having returned home with an array of design fodder, I spent a few hours coming up with the visual design incorporating the photos from the earlier session. Eager to keep up the momentum I spent the evening building the site which went public around 1:00.
The results can be seen at kimelliott.net. I love how it feels to start from nothing and finish a design just based on materials you make yourself. I’ll definately try to work this way in the future.
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Overexposed
A little while ago I mentioned that I intended to get a little more serious about photography – creating a design from scratch using only raw materials that you collect or make yourself seems much more appealing than using stock images. If I have a particular idea for a brief then I wanted to be able to go and wander around London and find a cardful of suitable images to incorporate in the design.
To support this I picked up a Canon 350D, which is my first SLR (grown-up camera with a big nose). I felt a little cheeky for a while, like I was borrowing a camera without permission, but it’s finally starting to sink in that it belongs to me.
The best way to get into the habit seems to be actually wandering around with the camera out, around your neck. I still feel a little conscious about doing this (for fear or either mugging or getting accused of being a tourist), but I’m starting to get beyond this now. In particular I wanted to get a load of texture shots that can be used to add depth, but for more abstract work. It’s particularly fun taking a close up shot of a wall or pavement with people wandering by.
You’ll notice I’ve added a little flickr plugin to this site that will display the most recent photos I’ve uploaded. I haven’t quite decided on how much of myself to expose (no jokes please). I’m used to the idea of blogging to the world, but as yet undecided on whether to add a full visual commentary too.
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Blink
I was pondering recently how quickly I form an impression of a company or service the first time I visit a website. I attended a session a short time back where a number of site designs were flashed in front of the audience for around half a second each. I had a distinct opinion on the sites that I trusted, and how I felt about the companies purely based on exposure to the design for a very short space of time.
You frequently hear people talking about how good design is about communication, not decoration, but you only get a strong feel for this when you actually pay attention to your own behaviour on exposure to a new design.
I looked at a number of sites recently and realised that I very rapidly come to trust or reject a company based on how I ‘feel’ about them. This is usually a snap judgement made on a subconscious level within the first couple of seconds of seeing the site.
I can come away with a radically different opinion of a company purely based on the design of their site. I think it’s fascinating how all of the small decisions that you make with a design all convey a message and contribute to the first impression that people form.
I think a lot of the craft involved is not so much coming up with a good design, but one that conveys the right message when people make their snapshot judgement.
Incidentally, there is a very interesting book called Blink all about how we make these kind of rapid assessments when exposed to new information.
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Typography: don’t think, feel
I saw a really interesting presentation at @Media last week, where the panel included Jon Hicks. Jon was responsible for the design of the Firefox and Thunderbird logos. Unfortunately I picked that day to wear a Firefox t-shirt, so ended up feeling like a bit of a groupie, or whatever the equivalent is in geeky circles.
Although this is probably a lifelong undertaking, I’m starting to learn about typography. I find it fascinating how very subtle changes in the structure and shape of a typeface will result in a completely different message being conveyed with the design.
This was demonstrated rather nicely by Jon by putting up the original Sex Pistols poster using a different typeface. The result is very amusing, and makes it very obvious how the correct use of typography in a design will have a massive impact on the impression that people come away with.
