There’s a recent trend that’s started really bugging me. Infographics. Not all infographics: I love websites like Infosthetics.com that show case some inspiring and beautiful ways of visually presenting data. What I’m hating is cheap blog infographics like this example on Mashable. It’s a time line; is the best way to present a list of events on the web a 700kb image? Really? There have been web development wars over using tables for layout vs nice clean semantic HTML and we’re now using fucking images to store information? Stop it. Now. It’s not big, it’s not clever, accessible, indexable or anything but shit. Calling it an infographic does not make it OK to through all web standards out the window. The web design and development community needs to make it clear that this is not acceptable.
Archive for the ‘webdesign’ Category
Infographics – please stop!
Tuesday, July 27th, 2010TinyMCE Show Structure plugin
Thursday, July 15th, 2010This is an update on my project to style WYSIWYG interfaces to help the users get an understanding of the HTML they are creating. Read the original post here.
First of all, here’s the new demo page.
Changes since the original experimental version:
- It’s been packaged up as a TinyMCE plugin – it was just a stylesheet before.
- There’s a button to toggle the stylesheet on and off (with it’s own little icon).
- All error reporting removed – his will be tackled in the next phase.
The limits of wireframes
Sunday, June 13th, 2010I love making wireframes. I love the speed and flexibility of using tools like Balsamiq Mockups or Visio to knock up low-fidelity wireframes. You can print them out for paper prototypes, iterate or bin them and start again. It’s fun (for a web designer). But occasionally I find myself struggling to present an idea in a wireframe. This is because I’ve got to the point where the metaphor of the wireframe breaks down.
Wireframes work because we understand how they represent the finished product. They use an simplified, abstracted, visual language that we understand represents the final interface. When we see a wireframe our knowledge and assumptions about web interfaces allow use to fill in the details of how the final design will look and work.
Useless Usability.
Friday, April 9th, 2010Before I get started, let me say I’m not a designer offended by usability testing thinking it takes something away from my “art”. (I’ve done the art thing in a previous life) This post is about poor thinking taking away from what could be interesting usability findings.
Jacob Neilson it’s fair to say is Web 1.0, much like IE6 he made a significant contribution but has possibly not moved quite enough with the times. And much like everybody’s least favourite browser he is also still used be a lot of people. So I keep up to date on what he says in his Alert Box columns; sooner of later someone will quote them at me (and to be fair they often do have nuggets of decent information).
The make up of article pages
Friday, January 22nd, 2010This image was created by colouring and then overlaying the content areas from article pages from the UK’s biggest news websites. (It’s quite tall, so please do scroll past it to where I’m actually saying something).
Key:
- Grey = Global navigation/branding
- Blue = Article content
- Green = Links to related content
- Turquoise = Share content functionality
- Dark Green = Links to content
- Red = Adverts
- Orange = Internal Marketing/Links to advertorials
The sites I looked at are: