‘Design’ category

I booked a stand at the Brighton and Hove Business Show one week before the exhibition. A week in which I was flat out with client work during the day. So, I spent 24 hours over that week getting my act together. Here’s what happened…

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We think it’s time there’s a Top Trumps pack for online design.

“I’ve got 85 for interactive design — 37Signals.” “Ha! I’ve got Cooper. 90.”

Here’s the file, for download and customisation. What categories would you use? What score would you give yourself? How can we get a system that stops everyone awarding themselves 95 points?

No fighting in the backseat…

Download Web Trumps.ai.

At the SCIP event last month, the group leader asked the community organisations if they had any specific problems they wanted addressing.

“Accessibility,” said one man. “What do you mean?” “You know, blind people, that kind of thing.”

Ian shifted in his chair, and then spoke. “Do you have a problem with the site? Are people coming to you, complaining that they can’t access it?”

They weren’t, and a conversation developed. What kind of people visit the site? For what? It’s a radio website, so would partially-sighted people be coming through the site, or through streaming players, or iTunes? Is there any evidence of people using screen readers to reach the site?

How useful is it to focus on blind people when we think about accessibility?

Not everyone sees things the way you do

For us, accessibility is a broader concept. It’s about all the different ways people might want to access your site. If you have events, will people want to view them on the move? Do you need some mobile pages?

Is there lots of good information on your site? Will people be wanting to print it out? If so, you should have good print stylesheets to make the printed pages look good and not waste paper.

I like to use a computer-based calendar. I don’t want to visit your website to find out about new events. Can I subscribe to your calendar?

And what about news? I like to read mine as email. Can I get news from your site through email?

This is accessibility. Making sure your site is accessible to all your users in the way they want to interact with it. And that means blind people with screen readers. But it also means a great deal more.

More tips »

We’ve been doing some interface design for Magic Studio, a multimedia tool used by schools.

In one task, the students have to decide how significant they think economic, social and environmental factors are for a variety of objects (in this case, buildings).

Ian’s been facing the problem of how to represent the results. Three separate screens? Live feedback? Perhaps the icons should be coloured or varied by size to convey their different axes?

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Ian and I were at a community IT event a couple of weeks ago. The aim was to connect design agencies with community groups who needed assistance with their online presence. It reminded me of how differently people see technology – annoyance, tool, magic or secret club.

Community groups are used to doing things themselves, and more than one of them had tumbled down the rabbit hole with a Dreamweaver book in hand. I wanted to make the point that it’s more important that they can articulate their needs and find willing helpers than it is to understand the technology details.

Ian took the opposite view – that people have inflated expectations of new media, and that if they expect to be running a publishing system they have to learn the language and workflow of the tools they’ll be using.

In a way it comes down to roles – you need someone who can draw the organisational big picture, and someone who understands how to format posts in Wordpress. In community organisations these roles often fall on the same person, and thinking about their online presence from such different vantage points can be difficult.

We’d love to hear what you think about these designs for a new marketing pack.

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I was lucky enough to visit this exhibition while in New York a couple of weeks ago. I took a few stills and videos of interactive works that particularly caught my eye. Most of this is documented on the Design and the Elastic Mind website, but here are a couple of extra views…

Below is a talk given by the MOMA design curator Paola Antonelli, who gives an overview of the main themes of the exhibition and a closer look at some of the works it encompasses.

Source: http://www.ted.org/index.php/talks/paola_antonelli_previews_design_and_the_elastic_mind.html

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If you are thinking about commissioning work on your existing or new website, you’re going to want to write a brief to give to your developer/designer at some point so they know what you want. Here are some topics to get you thinking in the right direction and help you do just that.

What do you need a website for?

It may sound like a daft question, but it is at the top of the list for good reason. Even if you have an existing website, ask yourself the same question again. What do you need it to do for you? What are your short and long-term business goals? Do you need to raise awareness of your product? Increase sales by widening your audience? Get your brand message across to a new audience? Once you’ve really know what it needs to do, we can start to think about how we can achieve it… This question will help us define what the key design and functionality needs to be.

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We call ourselves interactive designers. What exactly do we mean by that and why should you care?

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If you’re involved in web production, it’s likely that at some point you need to generate a lot of graphic text – page headers are often graphics.

If you do this kind of work, it’s well worth investing some time to learn how to script Photoshop – you’ll save plenty of time and reduce your chances of RSI.

We scripted Photoshop to create all the graphic titles on the Moore At Kew website, pulling all the text from an external text file. kirupa.com – Photoshop Scripting