Five Lessons From FOWD ‘08
A few weeks ago, Jim and I got the chance to go to New York for a day and see some great speakers at Future of Web Design 2008. This was the third FOWD Carsonified has held (read Jackson's notes from the first one), and their experience in planning tightly-scheduled, well-organized conferences definitely showed.
There were too many talks and impressions to really go through'em all, plus there are already great in-depth discussions out there, so I just wanted to toss out my top five takeaways. There were a lot of good talks (Powazek, Mall, Swedberg) that don't get mentioned here, not because I didn't learn anything from them, but because they didn't fit neatly into these five points.
Colds. Remedies. Web Designs.
So I've had a nagging cold for two weeks now, and I'm one grumpy Crumpy. I might write up my persona as: thirty-three year old web designer, tired and a bit on the cynical side, coming to pharmacy site hoping to find a good cold/flu product via some effective design. I'm overly touchy (because of a 2-week cold) and I'm overly analytical (because I'm writing a blog post).
I recently visited 4 sites:
Here were my generally subjective evaluation questions:
- How do I respond to the overall visual approach (layout, colors, typography, hierarchy)?
- How appropriate does the home page feature area feel? Does it inform or annoy?
- Does the main product page make it easy to get a comparative overview of what's available?
- Are the tools for narrowing my remedy search effective, focused, and fast?
Using the Flickr API: We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Badges
Earlier this week Flickr posted on their blog that the three billionth photo had been uploaded, so I thought this would be the perfect time to promote Flickr's services some more. A while back I wrote about pulling Flickr images using jQuery, but in that example we were using feeds provided by Flickr's services. Feeds are great because they don't require an API key, and with response formats like JSON, its become relatively easy to parse out the information coming in. The downside is that you can only work with the information within the feed you're pulling. Plus, that post was mostly about using jQuery and may have been a little much for most people who just want to simply pull images from Flickr. In this post, I'll show you how to easily use the Flickr API to display pictures on your site.
The Easy Way
Flickr offers a free badge creator because anyone with a Flickr account wants to show off pictures on their website. After answering some questions about how you want your badge to look, you get a tailored JavaScript include that you can just paste into your HTML and have pictures display on your page. This is really easy for anyone that just wants to show a couple photos on their blog, but doesn't feel like learning about the API (which as you'll see later is super easy). For example, here is what a personal badge (from Flickr user "vigetinspire") might look like:
Continue reading "Using the Flickr API: We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Badges"
Overcoming Inspiration Overload
We've all heard of information overload, and most of us recognize that too much data overwhelms rather than educates. It kills our efficiency and distracts us from important tasks. With so much information at our fingertips, even small decisions become difficult. I can lose hours of time on Good Reads sifting through reviews trying to decide what book I should read next. It's fun and interesting, and my choice is well-informed, but I used to visit the library and choose something off the shelf in 5-10 minutes. Is the trade-off really worth it?
Lately I've been noticing a similar phenomenon while designing. The explosion of great CSS galleries and design blogs out there has made it impossible to feel "caught up". There are so many cool things out there to discover... and the possibility of missing something eats at me.
Recent Comments
Great review!!!
Very important information.
Thanks for sharing
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