The Panic office →
I’m already a big fan of Panic’s Mac app Transmit, so maybe I’m a bit bias here. But these offices are gorgeous. Love the multicolored, diagonally striped carpet on the main floor.
I’m already a big fan of Panic’s Mac app Transmit, so maybe I’m a bit bias here. But these offices are gorgeous. Love the multicolored, diagonally striped carpet on the main floor.
Designer Jessica Enders, writing for A List Apart:
The problem is that in the push for simplicity, flat UIs may have gone too far. With content, things like drop shadows, gradients, and borders may well be no more than useless “embellishments.” When we read a multi-page news article, it doesn’t matter much whether the mechanism to move to the next page is a button or a link. With forms, however, distinguishing between a button and a link matters far more.
A thesis that argues for more visual contrast than average for forms may sound a bit simplistic. But it’s not; Jessica goes into some really excellent design examples to show how just a tiny bit more distinction or hierarchy can have significant form conversion effects.
I’m already a huge fan of Scott Jehl’s picturefill responsive images technique. It’s a simple javascript based polyfill that adds the proposed picture element to your site. I’ve used it repeatedly on my professional work and side projects.
But I noticed one important limitation of the base work; because it’s JS powered, there’s a brief moment where the pseudo picture element “pops into” the layout after the initial load. For some pages that effect is acceptable, but for my latest work, I needed more control on when the picturefill effect is activated.
That’s where this fork by developer Tyson Matanich was very helpful. It’s a simple but powerful idea: add an extra method to activate the picture element early before a full DOM load. However I found the rest of the extra options and functionality too much for what my project needed; instead I took the basic gist and forked my own copy of Jehl’s original for actual usage. Works great.
Web developer Louis Lazaris takes a novel approach to extended CSS instruction: spend $7 in the form of an e-book and get 83 solid CSS articles from Impressive Webs. No extra promos, no extra advertising. Smart.
Breaking Bad may have been gone for a few weeks now, but stumbling on this wonderful video essay really drives home how much DP Michael Slovis had influence over the show’s look. It’s illuminating to see a video essay with the original soundtrack removed like we see here; you’re left with nothing but the images and your memories of the original episodes.
Jason Schreier, writing for Kotaku about the final years at famed gaming studio LucasArts:
“It never felt like people at the top cared about making great games,” said another person connected to LucasArts. “A lot of awesome projects never went anywhere because, ‘it’s not gonna make enough money.’”
Take the case of “Star Wars GTA,” for example. During the early days of the 1313 project, some top staff at LucasArts wanted it to be an open-world, Grand Theft Auto-style Star Wars game set on Coruscant, according to two people familiar with that project. It was a fantasy for many on the team, and the thought is enticing—who wouldn’t want to explore and cause mayhem in a world full of seedy bounty hunters and Star Wars crime families?
Looking at their contemporaries at Rockstar and Ubisoft, LucasArts staffers plotted out how many people it would take to build a game like that—hundreds—and how much money it’d cost—millions. That was too much of a risk for the executives at LucasFilm, sources say.
“Of course there was no appetite to make that kind of investment,” said one person familiar with goings-on at LucasArts. “That idea kinda came and went literally within the span of two months.”
Pretty tragic. At least we have the legacy of some amazing games like the Monkey Island series, Grim Fandango, and Tie Fighter. In a way, the best of the indie revolution we’re seeing today reminds me a lot about stellar studios like LucasArts. They take often dormant, forgotten genres and reinvent them in a way that makes them critical and fan favorites (e.g. Spelunky, FTL).
It feels like something’s missing when Sundays roll around with Breaking Bad forever out of the picture. But thankfully the excellent podcast The Ones Who Knock has kept the discussion going for the last two weeks. It’s hosted by Slashfilm Cast head Dave Chen and Pajiba editor Joanna Robinson, both who are uniformly been excellent. This is the podcast’s final episode; it’s a big look back at the last season and the series’ impact as a whole.
I’m a fan of Dan Mall’s design work, but he rarely comments on more tech heavy issues like web performance. Yet that’s exactly his focus on his latest blog post where he talks through the impact of a responsive design refresh. It’s not exactly scientific; Dan mostly is refreshing Firebug a few times to get his numbers, but I appreciated the approach and the thought process. It’s an encouraging read for performance novices.
Some excellent hiring advice from designer Paul Adams over at the Intercom blog. I especially liked his commentary on visual design:
Some commenters put forward that visual design is the primary thing that draws people in and is therefore the most important layer. This is not how I think about it. Visual design is certainly incredibly important, but people are also drawn to something with a promise of value – what the product is, what value it could deliver – in other words the work of the higher level design layers. Time and again we have witnessed ugly looking products succeed (for example Craigslist), and beautiful looking products fail.
I enjoyed this New York Times A1 story on the health care exchange web portal launch; it highlighted a lot of problems that can plague any tech launch.
But Mr. Chao’s superiors at the Department of Health and Human Services told him, in effect, that failure was not an option, according to people who have spoken with him…Former government officials say the White House, which was calling the shots, feared that any backtracking would further embolden Republican critics who were trying to repeal the health care law.
Put politics aside. It’s a classic case of inflexible business requirements smashed up against mounting technical problems. Many of us have been there, and the results are rarely pretty.
Nor was rolling out the system in stages or on a smaller scale, as companies like Google typically do so that problems can more easily and quietly be fixed.
Massive release with little fallback or rollout strategy? Recipe for disaster.
Others warned that the fixes themselves were creating new problems, and said that the full extent of the problems might not be known because so many consumers had been stymied at the first step in the application process.
Sounds like there’s not enough load testing and QA isn’t thorough enough to catch regressions. Yikes.