nsfmc

off topic, but there's an artist[1] that exploits this to really good effect, really makes you think about what place 'the original' has in art especially for pieces that are entrenched in the public consciousness (i.e. mona lisa, warhol, etc)

But that sort of meta thing only works with art i think, not so much thumb drives! :)

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaine_Sturtevant

Which is to say that the problem with these spec websites is that they commoditize design (and coding) work in a way which devalues the process behind the trade, which is arguably what you're really paying for.

And say what you will about the quality of the end product, the damage is that people walk away with the idea that design or programming or whatever is not getting there it's about the destination. For a reason why this is a bad idea, look at why people wax poetic about 'thoughtful design' or any of those sites that focus on the details.

It's not that these sites are actually bad and for someone who wants an aesthetic facelift, i'm sure these are often 100% useful, but the utility and the domain of applications where something like 99designs is pretty limited, so i guess you get what you pay for.

I think the trick, though, is making sure that you can align style with your customer. When i first saw trunkclub i thought "netflix for clothes" which is a pretty novel concept if you figure that reselling overstock, late season purchases ala http://gilt.com/ is a pretty solid concept but if you also add-in the whole "personalized wardrobe" aspect, then it's really something exciting for folks that want nice wardrobe standards similar to what jesse at http://putthison.com/ advocates but don't need it this season.

But the whole self-righteous and incredibly passive-aggressive "man, i think these guys have a huge problem..." followed by the "man, these guys need to shape up" and "n00b mistake!" are unproductive to the extreme.

I mean, find a bug, report it, move on. Maybe i've got some unrealistic notion of karma or general human benevolence or something, but it seems hard to believe that this is such a difficult path to take especially when nearly everyone commenting has to deal with bs of this sort day-in/out.

I've recently noticed some unintuitive (initially) painting issues: box-shadows with large blur radii freak out webkit/mobile safari. I had thought my site was dying because of some wacky js pokery i was doing and spent a considerable amount of time tuning my js to no effect. it turned out that this was a problem with how shadows are drawn in css when atop (i.e. looks like they're composited live, so umm... watch out).

Who knew? This was a sort of performance issue i remember coming across in ios core animation lectures and never considered (stupidly) that might be an issue when you get dynamically generated shadows from css. But the moral here really is, while repaint and reflow are killer, also watch that you're not doing some insane paint, because, you know, that's also a performance hit.

Aside: I was really hoping for something like a webkit or chrome plugin that lets you watch paint/repaint/reflow for your own js-heavy sites like a slow-mo Timeline feature in webkit's inspector.

http://designobserver.com/images/features/jacobs.jpg

which, if you ask me, is beyond hilarious and the most ridiculous self-lampooning brand statement ever.

    Jacobs 
    by 
    Marc Jacobs 
    For Marc by Marc Jacobs 
    In Collaboration With 
    Marc Jacobs for Marc by Marc Jacobs

Marc Jacobs skewered his own eponymous empire with his "marc by marc for marc" tote. This fascination with cheap bags seemed like part reaction to, and part extension of the high-end handbag frenzy that gripped the fashion industry for much of the 00s. It had all the same qualities of exclusivity and brand envy, but also seemed at least in part to be an acknowledgement that things had gone too far. Was Mr. Jacobs’ self-mocking tote a mea culpa for the astronomical hand-bag prices he had helped engineer at Louis Vuiton or was it a sly attempt to mainstream the phenomenon?

[1]: Paper, Plastic, or Canvas? (Dmitri Siegel) http://observatory.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=7917

edit to include alt content of the image link.

So the problem is that the w3c is obtuse and hard to use as a lay person, but also that their most recent moves to improve their image do nothing for improving the author's sales pitch for standards-based web technologies, which, let's be honest, is not really their job[1]

To be fair, the w3c is a bit obtuse, but it's also not an educational outreach organization, it's a standards body that makes recommendations (and the recommendations are actually targeted towards browser implementers first, and end-users second). I don't think the author or his clients are really their target audience.

[1]: http://www.w3.org/Help/#compliant

More to the oss point, if you want to really treat this in an oss sort of way, then fork the project's theme or what have you, make skinning it a sort of project people would actually give their time to rather than dangling a carrot.

I think the majority issue here is that most people don't mind giving up their time for something they care about, but most people don't like being commoditized.

    1. print "hello, world!"  
    2. finish your program

The reason you mock up in psd (gross) or fireworks or a sketch book (yay!) or anywhere is because you can be purely expressive in an orthogonal capacity than you would be if you were implementing in code from the start.

You ignore issues like "oh, will this p be in a div or in a series of lis contained by... blërg" while those implementation details are valid to keep in mind, they're not entirely crucial to address when you're sketching which is really the key word here.

Gates and Allen thought they could process the traffic data cheaper and faster than the local companies. They recruited classmates to manually read the hole-patterns in the paper tape and transcribe the data onto computer cards. Gates then used a computer at the University of Washington to produce the traffic flow charts.

cheaper and faster indeed!

It's almost like a reminder that you forcibly need to step outside yourself to discover passive behaviors that can result in flaws or exploits or what have you.

"no, i think you misunderstand, you're a web developer when you know weird positioning bugs and javascript inconsistencies between browser releases. you probably don't want to be that person, or at least, probably not yet."

because the unspoken statement or it might have been actually spoken was "keep designing and working at a high level and find acute domain expertise elsewhere until you really want that level of knowledge."

and i think that when it comes to design, you really don't want too much domain knowledge. certainly you want some, but you don't want to be constraining your design before you've even made something. But you need it at some point, but i think, and this is the important part, that you know when you need it

Still, i think the visceral reaction from commenters is due to the disparity between social demographics and engendered best in this quote: "I joked with the Foxconn executive who was with me that of all the places in the world that could probably manage to get bigger television screens installed, it was probably here at Foxconn, who make televisions for the world's largest brands."

an aside, it's a bummer that the photos, which appear to be 500px wide, are resized in the webpage to be 1000px wide making it look totally janky.

Stop and think about that last point. If you're five or ten feet from a wall in your office and say you place a vector that runs perpendicular to your palm. It takes a surprisingly small amount of hand movement to get that vector to hit any portion of the wall.

By the time i had gotten used to the system, i could use it usually by performing completely minimal gestures so much so that people didn't even realize i was engaging it explicitly. This is similar to how you can see people playing wii tennis on their couch without standing up. [1]

If you read that sculley interview[2] you hear him talk about commoditizing the performance to create consumer products that react the way you expect them to. For me, gspeak convinced me that this was basically the case with a gestural interface, the hard part was figuring out something to do with it. I suspect this is a hard issue for many people because the majority of the complaints i see are basically "so what, i can't see myself using it" and fair enough, answering that question is really hard. But the underlying problem of how to provide that interface isn't your problem anymore, just like you don't have to figure out how to track touches or mouse movement anymore, you just build on top of that as a given. that seems like a net win to me.

A large part of gspeak for end users and designers ends up being the development of a descriptive and non-conflicting gestural language for the task at hand. The folks at usc have a good example of what i mean [3].

Say what you will about wild gesticulating or how lame it seems, the system (as any other) is only as cool as what you do with it.

[1]: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/11/13/ [2]: http://www.cultofmac.com/john-sculley-on-steve-jobs-the-full... [3]: http://www.vimeo.com/8083372

I don't think at the time it was designed there was a sense that anybody would actually want features like actual baseline alignment (i mean, look at the extent of UILabel's typography options for a good example of this sort of present-day rationalization) I've nearly given up on having any semblance of generalized baseline alignment in css like i do in, say, indesign, which although horrid, at least got that part right.

That said, if you want a good argument against a strict baseline grid i'll supply one and a half: derek birdsall1's notes on book design[1] and mine:

When i started working through my mfa i had completely drunk the grid kool-aid from Samsara, Elam, Bringhurst and (natürlich) Müller-B. I was obsessed with vertical grids and i used them much to my detriment (because i was blindly plugging away). My shit looked mechanical which is not really me at all. Then i met another designer who said, in passing: "who really uses grids? You make shit look good. When you're done, you tidy it up with a grid if the spirit moves you.* It'll probably already be on some grid, everyone's brain does that, and your post-rationalized grid's practically ready-made. how cool is that?"*

Now, this sort of presumes you can make shit look good which is a tall order, but really it means following your gut and possibly using a grid to keep it in check. If you start with a fixed grid, you limit many of your options from the outset because you're trying to fit stuff into these little squares.

Of course, this takes lots of practice. Practically speaking, grids take much of the choice out of things. If you need to make something that looks cool fast, rip one out of Müller-B and plug away. It will look awesome. Otherwise, loosen up, have some brown liquor and design away until you're happy or trashed or both.

[1]: http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=97803001034...

Writer seems, conceptually, like using an old ibm word processor (remember those with the one/four line text display that would then typewrite that onto the page?) It seems like a sophisticated version of that. maybe with the new printing in ios 4.2, you could make a usb-teletype that would print out the document you had just written. (aside: i would love a usb-teletype printer)

still, props to y'all for making that leap. i don't have an ipad, otherwise i'd probably have some other comments.