DiaLOG

February 27, 2004

Cruising Next Week

It has been more than four years since my last cruise and that week has arrived again for me and my wife Sheila. I will leaving the snow and cold of Utah to go on a vacation all next week. My destination is the western caribbean, specifically, Key West, Grand Cayman, Cozumel and the waters in between on the Royal Caribbean cruiseliner. It has been heavily anticipated for me and my family. So while I am gone you can play this fun litte game, The Retail Alphabet Game. Good luck, I only recognized four of them.

February 26, 2004

The designer’s dirty little secret

I recently finished designing a mailer for Array Express. The design is based on a wallet with the tagline “Feed your wallet”. It was difficult finding the right photo of a wallet from any of the stock photo houses, so I decided to shoot one of my old wallets I have. It was the perfect old worn-out leather wallet. The photo turned out great and I was able to get exactly what I needed for this design. I thought others might want to use this photo sometime. So I uploaded it to istockphoto.com.

If you haven’t heard of istockphoto, “the designer’s dirty little secret,” than you are missing out. iStockPhoto.com is a the “premier royalty-free stock photography community.” It is a community stock photo library where you can upload your own photos and earn credit to download other’s photos. The upload process is pretty strict, which allows for good photos to be uploaded. Also if you are a member you get one free photo a week. You can’t lose, just don’t tell anyone else about it, it’s a secret.

February 20, 2004

The rule with the horizontal rule (<hr />)

The other day my fellow co-worker, Cameron, and I were discussing what the best way to style the hr tag was? I usually try to use a div if I just need a line for presentation. But what if I need to style an hr that is used on an existing site. It is certainly easier to apply a simple style to the hr tag in the style sheet to make the change. However, each browser, as you can guess has a different way to render them. At first I thought it was Mozilla and the rest of its crew that was rendering the styles incorrectly. However, surprise surprise, it turned out to be IE that did it incorrectly in the end.

How it is done »

February 18, 2004

Sen. Kerry on Episode II of Star Wars?

While I was sick a couple of weeks ago, my daughter and I were watching Star Wars Episode II. There is a scene where there is a council of the “Confederacy of Independent Systems” on Geonosis. San Hill is one of the newly joined members of the organization and I thought he sure resembles Senator John Kerry. I wonder if they are one in the same, both are involved in politics. I guess we will have to wait and see.

February 13, 2004

Get a grip on your design

If you enjoy cooking as I do, you will recognize name OXO Good Grips. OXO is an award winning manufacturer of small cooking appliances. Their innovative design and attention to how a product is actually used by someone is what makes their products a success. For example, I grew up using the traditional potato peelers that always ended up rusting and always as dull as a microsoft application interface. Well, when my wife and I received an OXO peeler for our wedding there was no denying that this was the best dang peeler ever. It was sharper than a samurai’s sword when you peeled with it. It was easy to handle with its large handle and the tip had a little easy-to-use digger tool to dig out those potato eyes. We have since then upgraded most of our small kitchen appliances to OXO.

In web design it is important to pay attention to the same types of details like OXO does. How does a user use the product? What are their annoyances or problems with the product and how can you correct them? Finally, make it look attractive to the user. It takes time to develop these solutions but it will result in a good product and a loyal customer. Take a lessen from OXO and get a grip on design.

OXO’s latest series in small cooking appliances.

February 02, 2004

What’s with all of those AOL Top Speed superbowl Ads

If you watched the superbowl, I am sure you didn’t miss the excitment on and off the field. Anyway, I am sure you saw at least one of the AOL ads where they teamed up with American chopper guys to introduce the new “Top Speed” AOL. Now go to their website and you will see that AOL certainly has made there site top speed with a CSS design. Their CSS validates and looks clean. However the HTML still needs work and there are some tables used on a couple secondary pages. Congratulations to AOL’s web team and making the move to a more standards compliant website.