Tuesday, October 11, 2011

CSS Shaders: Hell Yeah.

CSS shaders “define a filter effects extensibility mechanism and provide rich, easily animated visual effects to all HTML5 content.” They work particularly well with CSS animations and CSS transitions, but they even work on video & SVG animations.

This is great.

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Getting Back to Zero

The ability to consistently look at a design as a new user while laying out elements and keeping the project goals in mind. Getting back to zero. An on-going back-and-forth between making design decisions, fleshing out ideas, and seeing them through a user’s eyes with their goals in mind.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

peterbaker: Last week the NY Times Bits blog reported on a study, conducted by web usability expert Jakob Nielsen, that shows how generic and/or bad photography is ignored by people visiting websites. My guess is that this photo from the Yale School of Management actually shows real students; stock photos would rarely be this poorly cropped or show models slouching (as with the guy in the blue shirt). Still, on this particular page, the photo is pure filler. Users are here to understand the school’s application process, not to judge the degree of student slouch. Most likely, the dean or other manager asked designers to “jazz up” the page so the university would look more exciting and thus attract more applications. But on the Web, jazzed-up = ignored. Moral of the story; hire a good a photographer and use photography well.  Super interesting and highly relevant to what I do every day.

peterbaker:

Last week the NY Times Bits blog reported on a study, conducted by web usability expert Jakob Nielsen, that shows how generic and/or bad photography is ignored by people visiting websites.

My guess is that this photo from the Yale School of Management actually shows real students; stock photos would rarely be this poorly cropped or show models slouching (as with the guy in the blue shirt).

Still, on this particular page, the photo is pure filler. Users are here to understand the school’s application process, not to judge the degree of student slouch.

Most likely, the dean or other manager asked designers to “jazz up” the page so the university would look more exciting and thus attract more applications. But on the Web, jazzed-up = ignored.

Moral of the story; hire a good a photographer and use photography well. 

Super interesting and highly relevant to what I do every day.

©2011 Ken Seals. Built on a Mac with TextMate and Transmit. Hosted on Dreamhost and powered by Tumblr.

Ken Seals

I'm a designer & developer living in Columbia, SC with my motorcycle, a backpack, and an xbox.

This site is a collection of design, front-end development, apple, motorcycles, hiking, and other unrelated subjects.

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