Mostly, designers get paid to negotiate the difficult terrain of individual egos, expectations, tastes, and aspirations of various individuals in an organization or corporation, against business needs, and constraints of the marketplace.
The em dash is the nineteenth-century standard, still prescribed in many editorial style books, but the em dash is too long for use with the best text faces. Like the oversized space between sentences, it belongs to the padded and corseted aesthetic of Victorian typography.
Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
—Albert Einsten (usually attributed to, that is)
The above quote came by way of the article, Metric Mania, in the New York Times Magazine. A helpful reminder as influence online tends to be measured with eyeballs, not engagement.
As mentioned in my last post, I created a demo application for a presentation I gave at Refresh Louisville. It’s called Rate Calculator and uses several common parameters to give you an idea of how much you should be charging per hour.
Obviously don’t use this as the basis for your financial planning, it does not come with any guarantees. However I do want to make it as accurate as possible so I’ll continue to tweak it.
More importantly I created the application as an example of how you can use media queries to create different versions of a site using the same markup. So if you have the occasion view it in different devices – the iPhone (probably Android as well), desktop and iPad for now. Also planned is the addition of a low-fi version for IE 6 and low-resolution desktops.
It was my pleasure to attend – for the second time – An Event Apart (AEA) in Seattle earlier this month. Jeffrey Zeldman himself said it was the best AEA yet. So its hard to beat that. As when I attended last year in Chicago, what impresses me most about AEA is the immediate usefulness of the material. Its very easy to take what youve learned and start applying it to your work as soon as you return.
This evening at Refresh Louisville, Ill be presenting what Ive learned in the form of a demo app. The application is called Rate Calculator and aids in finding a workable hourly rate based on several common factors. The app makes use of several things taught at AEA: advanced CSS3, media queries, designing for mobile first, HTML5, designing for humans and a few design decisions explained along the way. Ill also give a quick overview of implementing type via @font-face.
You can get a preview of the mobile version, desktop version and iPad version of the app on Dribbble. All versions use the same HTML. And I should probably mention I use the word “app” loosely, its primarily a demo, but I will make it available for use and reference after the presentation.
If you live in or near the Louisville area please come join us this evening at 7pm at the BBC Taproom, Downtown. Hope to see you there!
I published a usability update to the site this morning. It uses CSS3 so the changes are only available in Safari, Firefox and Chrome. Come check it out and let me know what you think.
Update
This was a small April Fools’ prank. I used -moz-transform:rotate(180deg); and -webkit-transform:rotate(180deg); to flip the site upside down. If you missed it I’ve included a screen shot of how it looked.
This concept model is for the blog that will comprise a significant part of the new site. It attempts to do what a concept model should do – communicate complex ideas in an easy-to-understand format. The image links to the full PDF of the model.
If you’re a web designer I think 2010 should be a good year for you. Why? Well besides the fact that working on the web continues to be a strong industry, I think there are three specific reasons.
Web Typography
This already has been predicted by others so nothing new here, but 2010 will be an exciting year for web typography as more and more typefaces become available via services like Typekit and exciting technology like the .webfont proposal.
If you haven’t familiarized yourself with @font-face then there’s no better time than right now. Jonathan Snook’s article – Becoming a Font Embedding Master – is a good place to start.
Mobile Platforms
The iPhone has been around almost three years now, add to that Google’s Android, the Kindle and other e-readers, the forthcoming Apple tablet and Microsoft’s tablet and you begin to see that the personal computer has a lot of company.
The reason for the excitement in this case is because you can use “regular” HTML, CSS and JavaScript to produce highly functional and amazing products for these platforms. Well, at least for the iPhone and Android, see jQTouch to get a sense of what I’m talking about.
Innovation in these areas could set you far above the norm.
Web Design Blogging
I think we will see a lot more high-quality web design blogging in 2010 than in previous years. There are websites like Project 52, articles bemoaning the current state of link list dribble and plenty of other web designers declaring their desire to blog more in 2010.
There will be rewards for original thinking and creative writing in 2010. Plus with all the new technology (like HTML5 and CSS 3) becoming mainstream there will be that much more about which to write.
