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'Design' Tag

11/04/09

Design New post, new blog. Design and usability improvements

Finally it’s gone live! The fourth design iteration in my blog.

Basically the highlights are:

  • Readability: dark text over white background. Graphics and color gone.
  • Helvetica, helvetica, helvetica: as much as I love Lucida Grande I found Helvetica to render pages on IE closer to the original than Lucida (blame the usual MSuspects).
  • Large fonts: let’s face it, we don’t read blogs. We read feeds and if by chance we land on a blog we skim over the headlines. So I decided to make them really big to make your life easier
  • Twitter and Facebook killed the blogging star? No problem. I integrated both of them in the blog. Twitter on the homepage and both in the lifestream section.
  • Tweet this: as a Twitter lover (aren’t we all) I usually tweet blog posts I like. Here it can’t get any easier with the Tweet this post link in the header of each post. Look for the birdie.
  • My Web 2.0 persona in my blog: Last.fm, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, my shared items on Google and del.icio.us are all shared in the lifestream section.
  • Related posts: under each post you’ll find a list of 3 posts related to the one you’re reading. It’s impressive how the automated selection algorithm gets it right (courtesy of Yet Another Related Posts Plugin).
  • Categories and tags navigation: at the bottom of each page you’ll find the blog categories. Not 2.0 enough? Click on tags and a nice tagclould will appear to satisfy the folksonomist in you.

Hope you like it.

20/02/09

Design The definition of design by Steve Jobs

Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

16/07/08

Design The 10 Commandments of Web Design (with hall of shame)

Business Week, with the help of Don Norman, John Maeda, Khoi Vinh and Jeffrey Zeldman among others, just published an excellent article with the 10 commandments of web design.

Most of them will sound too familiar to you (content is king, flash abuse anyone?), but when Norman, Maeda and peers write something you’d better read it. Here are the 10 commandments with more examples and comments of my own.

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