Why we need another CMS
Every design agency needs a content management system. They are a solid business need. But, does every agency really need a custom solution? Especially when it comes to small business, the CMS is causing more problems than it’s solving.
Can a Great Product Trump Bad Customer Service?
I will be the first to admit that I am an Apple addict. It is probably an unhealthy obsession at some times, just ask my wife. In other words, I am a typical Apple customer. I own more Apple gear than most high schools (but less than Al Gore). My MacPro, MacBook Pro and iPhone make me especially happy and productive.
However, I cannot quite understand how a company like Apple, who can successfully focus so much time and energy on the User Experience, can fail so miserably at servicing their customers.
Blurry, Colorblind and Brilliant
“Design is in the details.” - We hear it every day and it is absolutely true. However, details without a blueprint to tie things together can lead to problems. We are passionate about details, perfect grid alignment, perfect color combinations, gradients, reflections and textures. These visual details have a major aesthetic impact on the website, but they can’t replace the content – The reason the website exists in the first place.
Why We Are Not Hiring
Designing Interactive has grown up a lot over the last 6 years. It has grown from a small freelancing company into a web application development house. We have done a good job of keeping ourselves busy with paid work throughout the years, but this past year was particularly successful.
However, our profitability has started to plateau this year and we need to make some changes to continue growth.
Sharing the Grid
When it comes to design, I’m a firm believer in simplicity. Occasionally I’m criticized for being overly simple, but I take that as a compliment. In my design, typography, grids, color, imagery and especially whitespace all stand for themselves. They don’t need any fancy treatment or “web 2.0″ effects. They work because they are simple and beautiful in their natural state.
Grids are foundational to all my designs. I always sketch out ideas on a Behance Dot-Grid Book, (thanks to Garrett Dimon for sharing this a few months ago). While these square grids are perfect for sketching idea’s and concepts, they don’t work for fine-tuning your design.
Fixing Disappearing Cursors in Firefox
The past few days I have been debugging the User Interface for Simpli5. Today I wrestled with a particularly frustrating issue in which cursors were completely vanishing from inputs in Firefox. While it did not affect the interaction of the input, I could still manipulate the text, it did cause quite an annoyance.
Here is a quick example which demonstrates the problem:
The problem is caused by the change in Firefox’s current rending frame. Setting overflow:scroll on our #Container div causes Firefox to use that div as it’s current rending frame. Thus, the cursor is being rendered on the #Container, not on the #Dialog div, which contains the input. Effectively, the input is covering its own cursor.
The fix is a simple change in CSS inheritance. Without setting an overflow setting on the #Dialog div, we are inheriting the overflow:scroll from #Container. By setting the #Dialog div’s overflow setting back to it’s default overflow:auto we are changing Firefox’s rendering frame to the #Dialog div, thus bringing back our cursor.
Here is the fixed example:
Thankfully, Mozilla has fixed this problem in Firefox 3.
Google Chart’s Resolution
A few days ago I posted my frustrations with Google’s charting API security. While I still believe there are some issues that would plague banks, government and other institutions that have highly sensitive data, I have found a solution to our problem.
Google Charting Frustrations
Last week Google released its Charting API which generates PNG based image graphs for your data. The data is passed to them through a URL and returns the image data.
Placing this image tag in your HTML will generate the following graph.
Designing Data Collection Forms
When designing a new web application, I wrongfully turn my brain into data collection mode. I determine what data entities I need to collect (people, orders, products, etc…), what fields I need to collect (name, sku, weight, etc…) and how to most logically group everything together into a usable interface. This process is all wrong.
Often I ignore, or worse… neglect, to account for the business procedure that is in place to actually collect and account for that data.
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Latest Comments
- Robert → “ I have to agree with the design of the site being great. I am more interested in how the website got ranked so high and some keywords land first page in searches when the page it lands on has no page rank.…”
- Etienne Segonzac → “ Hello everyone ! I would love to have a chat with other Pomodoro users (and the mailing list is quite slow). The thing is for me the main takeaways of the technique are the rhythm + the motivation of visualizing my progress. BTW, the Navel Labs app is quite gorgeous (and the compliment is coming from a concurrent…”
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