Category: Design

Those sneaky bastards have redesigned. I can’t believe I never saw a preview. Ahem.

For all you geek web-designers out there, take a look at 37Signals’ latest launch: Design Not Found, a website dedicated to pointing out the errors we web designers/developers tend to make. Everything is super-professional and you won’t find harshly-worded reviews, just truthful, honest feedback, stuff SU has been so kind as to be doing for me for years.

And now that I’ve really worked tightly with developers on a multi-million dollar project, I understand the importance of small things like showing errors correctly, and this site will do a good job of learning you what to look for. In true 37Signals fashion, the Design Not Found site is a pleasure to use and looks phenominal.

I can guarantee the person who designed this graphic is getting paid too much, whatever the amount.

..But since everyone feels the need to fucking have a say in how Alternate is run, post all your comment shit to this post. Tell me how much I suck, how much you hate this site and how badly it’s designed. Go ahead, here’s your chance. This is absolutely the last fucking thing I need right now but apparently you all feel the need to jump in and tell me how to run a site that I helped start a few years ago where no one read it and we didn’t fucking care. We started it so that we could make public some of the things that we talked about in private and felt that other people might be interested in. We also felt that journalists and other webloggers at the time were too wishy-washy and refused to put forth a strong if not popular opinion. We feel strongly about what we tend to write about and voice our posts accordingly. That’s it. I don’t owe you a god-damn thing and if you feel that I should sit here and take personal attacks with a smile and a shrug then you can fuck yourself. There.

Something I’ve noticed recently in the non web-design world that I think web-designers (especially those obsessed with rules about usability) can learn a vaulable lesson from: Most VW New Beetle owners actually in fact use their flower holders.

Why this is important can be broken down into 2 seperate ideas that come together to make a sucessful whole: 1) The flower holders (I’ve heard) actually get in the way a little bit of using the windshield wiper toggle switch. Not so much as to hinder the use of it, but to make you think twice about it. (Again, that’s just a rumor. I haven’t tried it myself…) and 2) VW knows its market with that car so well that they could accurately predict that a flower holder is something they would want. Let’s face it. It’s not a standard accessory and probably never will be, except in this case.

The point I’m trying to make is that branding and market-research do in fact hold sway over usability when it comes to customer experience. Now, the flower-holder doesn’t get in the way of shifting the car’s gears or turning the steering wheel or make the car any less smooth a ride on the road. It would be ridiculous if it did hinder those things. But by accepting the minor loss of having their wiper switch not work like other cars, they make the tremedous gain of having people very happy with their purchase, happy enough to put flowers in it, on a regular basis I might add.

Now, I’ve drawn similar theories about website design from the automobile industry before and have had them dismissed because people have been around cars for the better part of 100 years and websites are still in their infancy, making people more adept at figuring out a car’s ‘interface’ and that making a car move can only be one way out of like 4 total ways (automatic, manual, truck-style automatic, and semi-auto), making it very easy to figure out which way the car needs to be manipulated. Websites, on the other hand, can be any number of navigation styles and even within those, people take liberties with how you get your job done there. And the argument I’ve made against this is that, yes, people have been dealing with automobiles longer than computers/the internet and, yes, the interfaces are much more varied and confusing.. but I also think that there’s somewhat of a sliding scale… sure, cars took 100 years to get where they are today, mostly because of advances in technology. The internet has skyrocketed technology-wise and people are ready for whatever comes next. It’s not that people weren’t ready for cars like we have today 50 years ago, the technology just didn’t exist to create and sustain them.

But I digress.

The most important sentence from above is: Branding and market-research do in fact hold sway over usability when it comes to customer experience, at least when the idea in question does not get in the way of the actual major function of the product. I guess I just wanted to point out the simple fact that people do use their New Beetle’s flower holders, for whatever reason and that the internet could be viewed with the same openness to new ideas as VW had been when someone said ‘Hey. What about a place to put a flower?’ Or when someone at Apple said ‘Hey. What about blue?’

Something I realized today:

A marketing director is just like a designer, only they have 50% of the knowledge, 0% of the skills, and 100% of the power.

It’s too bad that only designers will find this funny:

Helvetica Bold Oblique Sweeps Fontys

 “A bold as Best Font?” said Christopher Rankley, editor of Typography Today. “They may as well have handed the award to Chicago, for God’s sake. Or, better yet, Chicago Shadow Underline.”</span

Or Tekton or Comic Sans, even. And what about Helvetica Neue Light Extended’s fabulous work in the GAP brand campaign, among countless others? Why must this workhorse weight always be ignored?

I cannot believe how fucking retarded this is. It’s a flash animation/movie presented by the Business Software Alliance about a girl graphic designer who happens to be a malicious evil software pirate by night. And one night (apparently via Hotline) she downloads ‘a virus that steals her design portfolio.’ Then she’s transported inside her computer to fight off the virus. She magically picks up money on the road video-game style and uses it to buy liscenced software, which both kills the virus and enables her company to become a giant corporation. Where, I’m assuming, her young slave-like underlings who make minumum wage must illegally copy her software for their own freelance gigs on the weekend. Or something similar, I’m sure.

Don’t get me started on how making money for a real designer isn’t just like driving down the road, let alone that the tiny amount of money our heroine pays and the massive library of software she ends up owning don’t even come close to matching.

Okay, so that title is a stretch, but Jen and Christina are looking for IA/webdesigner types to fill out a survey for their new information architect site, BadPractices.org. So. In an attempt to employ the right architecture (seeing as how its for IAs and all), they’re polling around and looking to see if their ideas are the right ones. If you’re an IA or something similar, go fill out the form and help ’em out.