I’ve been working on realigning my blog a bit the past two days. It is running on Thesis, which I am treating more as a WordPress framework than a theme, so I’ve been doing quite a bit of work to get rid of the default look and feel that the theme comes with.
A huge bonus of using Thesis is that most of the typography decisions are made with the theme’s control panel, so that gives me a chance to work on little details, like the search box. So, how’d I make a fancy search box?
First, lets get one thing straight: This is not a custom search box in terms of markup. This is the exact same, default XHTML that Chris includes with Thesis, all I did was position it where I wanted in the theme and style it to look the way I wanted.
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I am not a fan of Fox News. It has very little to do with their coverage of the news (I think Bill O’Reilly is hilarious) and a lot to do with their design choices on the web and in their on air graphics. They are laughable in comparison to MSNBC (at least their website) or CNN.
The Logo is Different
The logo sucks, but I suck at logo design too, so I can live with that. Instead I’ll point out that it’s completely different than the logo they use on air and instead appears to be some sort of Photoshopped, general Fox logo. My question:
Why the distinction between Fox News Channel and FoxNews.com? Why can’t we simply have Fox News and utilize the same logo with consistent branding? The content is, in theory, the same. The website is an extension of the TV channel.
Notice how CNN uses the same logo on everything. It never changes, they have a consistent brand everywhere you look. It helps that their logo is better because it lacks the overblown gradients and terrible font choices of Fox News. Fox could, at the very least, have a consistent identity mark.
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Do designers need to know how to program? I’ve gotten this email a few times and have been asked about it when interviewing for jobs in some form or another. The short answer is yes, for an interaction designer writing code is just as important as pushing pixels in Photoshop and maybe more so. I am not talking about writing heavy back end code, regular expressions or CRON jobs, I am just saying that a designer should know how to make their design actually work.
First, let me point out that I think the 20 different names for “designer” on the web are a joke. User experience design, interaction design, user interface design, web design, etc. are the same. The end goal of each is to create a website that is easy for people to use. That said, web design is not graphic design - a graphic designer (in my view) is generally someone who is “classically trained” who does design for design’s sake without much thought for usability.
37signals actually avoids Photoshop and does their mock ups in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This is obviously an extreme case and their design style allows for it, but it is an interesting idea.
If you look at the job listing for a Facebook product designer they insist their designers be fluent in CSS, HTML, PHP, and JavaScript so that they can prototype their designs. Those four languages are what make designs interactive, they are what determine how a user actually interacts with a page. Photoshop can only do so much - at some point mock ups should be interactive to allow for feedback on behaviors of links, buttons, menus and other elements of a page.
My personal process involves mocking up a loose version of a design in Photoshop, more for myself than for anyone’s approval, before beginning the code. A pixel perfect mock up in Photoshop is an oxymoron - the design is going to change when you move it to code. Content is dynamic, constantly changing, constantly moving - no graphics program in the world can account for that. Most of the detail work I do stems from me seeing a need for it in my design to highlight content or make a call to action more obvious, not out of a desire to make things “pretty.”
My official title at Bleacher Report is “User Interface Designer” - turns out, I spend most of my time in TextMate (thanks RescueTime!). Why? Because the things I do in Photoshop aren’t particularly useful is they never move out of Photoshop. Engineers have bigger problems to tackle than wondering whether a class or an ID is appropriate for a given element.
What about front end engineers? What about a graphic designer? Those jobs have their place, but in general it is a bad idea to separate design and code. A designer who doesn’t understand what it takes to implement an idea, or worse yet has an idea that isn’t possible, is useless. “But anything is possible, Ben!” I agree, as long as you have unlimited resources; otherwise, you need to make sure designs are usable and practical to implement.
I found this link while reading Paul Krugman’s blog at the New York Times, and it bothers me.
Do you believe Creation happened in the way Genesis describes it?
WARREN: If you’re asking me do I believe in evolution, the answer is no, I don’t. I believe that God, at a moment, created man. I do believe Genesis is literal…
I have had this argument who knows how many times with a number of people both on the internet and in person and each time I have the argument it baffles me how someone can deny that the theory of evolution is the best understanding we have of how we came to be.
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Since I spend a lot of time at work thinking about user interfaces, user experiences, and using design as a tool to make interacting with websites easier for users, I thought maybe I’d lend my expertise to airlines. There is one, simple thing that would improve everyone’s experience while flying.
Recently had a bad experience with United that could have been made better at three or four different points throughout the journey. But here is one tip that would make traveling in a cramped plane far more “special”:
Stop (letting people notice you’re) charging for food
I don’t care if you charge me for food - just don’t let me know you’re doing it. Tack $10 onto every airfare and provide complimentary snacks. If I am paying $350 for a ticket, I’ll happily pay $360 to believe I am getting something extra - i.e. a choice of snacks and a choice of beverages.
This translates well to alcoholic drinks, as well. Currently most airlines charge $6 for a drink. Why not offer people a chance to pay $10-$15 extra for unlimited beers or mixed drinks when they purchase their ticket? Sure you’ll get the occasional person who drinks $20 worth of alcohol, but I think it is far more likely you’ll have the occasional passenger who doesn’t feel like drinking on the plane and simply eats the $15 charge.
It’s the day after Thanksgiving and I finally got my site online after a WordPress or Dreamhost vulnerability (not sure which) allowed someone to change permissions on all the files on my web server. I didn’t care that my site was down on Wednesday afternoon when I discovered it - I had no plans of fixing it and moving it to Chris Pearson’s Thesis framework. But I did. Because United Airlines customer service representatives are inexcusably rude.
The Booking & The Upgrade
I booked my flight to Cincinnati, OH from San Francisco, CA in mid-October. Since I was flying on one of the last flights out of SFO to the east that would get people in by Thanksgiving, it was packed. The only seat left was towards the back of the plane in the middle. No thanks.
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