Have you seen Scribd.com? If you haven’t consider yourself lucky. You can try to avoid it, but every once in a while, for reasons I can’t really understand, an idiot will post a link to a document there.
The main advantage of excellent typography lies in its ability to be both attractive and functional at the same time. Although images communicate more vividly, text presentation can impress visitors with its sharpness and precise geometrical forms and curves. Consequently, chosen wisely and used carefully, it can be very effective -- and there are dozens of outstanding examples of how the latter can be achieved.
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In this article we present over 35 examples of big, "loud" and yet elegant typography in web design; some listed designs are Flash-based, and in some cases designs are based not only upon typography, but also upon some visual elements.
In this edition of Designing Details, I want to share with you a technique we use to go the extra mile on interface design. We believe little touches like these really improve the overall experience when using our products.
At first I thought a page that scrolled itself was just a cheap gimmick and offered no real benefit, but now that I see that whenever content (like a div you've got hidden away until someone open it up) is expanded and doesn't fit on screen, it scrolls for you. While not a deal breaker in any sense of the word, it is nice.
The Dilbert.com website just got an extreme makeover. Gone is the old, rather clunky but perfectly functional, website, replaced by a Flash-heavy website that only Mordac the Preventer of Information Services could love. Users have been pretty unanimous in condemning the changes. Among the politer comments: 'Congrats. Vista is no more lonely at the top in the Competition For The Worst Upgrade In Computing Industry, this web site upgrade being a serious contender.' You have to register to leave comments, but many seem to have registered for the express purpose of panning the new design.
Isn't it ironic that the guy who mocked the PHB and corporate culture on a daily basis now has a 100% flash site?
Look at all that green, that's how many modules are now ready for Drupal 6.
Looking through the "gallery" of demo apps built with Google App Engine, the only one that seems more than half-baked is HuddleChat, written by Google employees Darren Delaye, Braden Kowitz, and Kyle Consalus. But HuddleChat is just a feature-for-feature clone of 37signals's Campfire. The layout is the same, the tabs at the top of the screen are the same, the right-side sidebar listing participants and file uploads is the same. It even copies Campfire's trick of formatting a message as "code" if it contains literal newline characters.
Borrowing ideas is fair game, but copying an entire app is wrong. And it's creepy, in a Microsoft-of-the-'90s way, when it's a $150 billion company cloning an app from a 10-person company.
Lots of people know I hate the "b" word.
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Bryan and Steph thought everyone knew about personal publishing, online collaboration, and tracking conversations in the two-way web.
I'd rather call it web design involving accessible, collaboration friendly, two-way communication technologies myself.
This is the 5-minute "video from the future" demo presented by Dries in his State of Drupal keynote presentation at Drupalcon Boston 2008. The video demonstrates some of the mashup capabilities of an RDF and SPARQL-enabled Drupal as envisioned by Dries for the upcoming Drupal 7.x release. The version of the demo below includes the original narration by Ben Lavender (the audio from Dries's actual presentation is also available - the RDF material starts after the 52m:30s marker).
Also checkout the email at the W3C, really neat, exciting stuff.
Here's a list of ways to improve Drupal search that I've compiled from things I've learned from Robert over the past two years...
Some really powerful tips. Following the advice here will make wading through your sea of information on your Drupal site much easier.
To clarify the situation, I asked Chris Wilson what would happen if IE8 were to encounter a valid, well-formed document with a strict DOCTYPE. My worst fears were realized when he confirmed that the browser would behave exactly as if it were its predecessor.
This is gobsmackingly audacious. Imagine a new version of Word that behaves exactly like the old version of Word unless the document it is processing contains a hidden instruction to unlock any new features. That's what Microsoft is demanding that web developers implement. Unless you explicitly say otherwise, IE8 (and IE9 and IE10, ad infinitum) will behave exactly like IE7.
I've got several hundred photos offline that I've been meaning to upload, just never got around to it.
