Samantha Warren, ON THE TOPIC OF Trends

There is social media popping up everywhere and sucking data out of our heads (and hearts) propelling it into the vast wonderment of The Internets.  We’re bombarded with locations, opinions, emotions, hometowns, and photographs, and even our deepest darkest secrets ... all of which is massively being compiled and sorted.

The web is an immense and wonderful resource that can be tapped for so many purposes; the trick to leveraging it will be establishing interesting and useful ways to navigate it. At one point, I was certain it would be the future of the web.  I have blogged about interactive information design and social media before. It is something that holds a place deep in my heart; however—contrary to my previous blog post—I am beginning to wonder where its place on the web will be.

Visualizations, which are a fantastic marriage of design thinking and badass technology on the web today, can enrich the user experience by creating an environment in which the user physically interacts with data. Invigorating my infatuation with this concept is http://twistori.com, a site that extracts adjectives in Twitter‘s tweets, displays them by color, and allows the user to view tweets grouped by similar feelings. Twistori led me to revisit and rethink Jonathan Harris’  "We Feel Fine," one of the most spectacular blends of social media and interactive information design on the web. 

Continue reading "Data Visualization: Is it the Future of the Internet?"

Leave a comment ( 5 )

Doug Avery, ON THE TOPIC OF Development and Tips and Tricks

When we decided on the new strategy for Viget.com, a few technology options were considered for the relaunch. We needed a platform that:

• Could accommodate the types of content (five blogs, five blogrolls, Flickr feeds, team member pages, work pages, careers) we wanted to add to the site
• A designer could build without in-depth programming knowledge
• Allowed us to manage the structure of the four sub-blogs

ExpressionEngine was the clear choice, with powerful customization options and a great community behind the scenes. Still, with EE's depth of possibilities, we had to figure out a few tricks along the way in order to get what we wanted out of it. In this post, I'll talk about creating multiple blogs with common structures through variables, losing the nefarious /comments URL, and setting up a preview option so your bloggers can see how their posts look before publishing them.

Continue reading "Building Viget.com In EE (Part 1)"

Leave a comment ( 9 )

Samantha Warren, ON THE TOPIC OF Opinions/Reviews

Since college I have been slowly building my own library of design resources. The explanation behind design fundamentals are inconveniently scattered over several volumes on my bookshelf. Over time the practice of using all of these elements can become second nature to a designer, sometimes making it a challenge to verbally break down the thought-process behind a piece of work. For me, this is when I turn to my design library for assistance.

There are a lot of great design books out there that debate the fundamentals of design, but many are confusing, complex, disorganized, and dated.  I am happy to add Ellen Lupton’s new book, which is co-authored by Jennifer Cole Phillips, to my bookshelf.  Yes, Graphic Design: The New Basics is officially my new design fundamentals go-to guide.

Continue reading "Book Review: “Graphic Design: The New Basics”"

Leave a comment ( 13 )

Samantha Warren, ON THE TOPIC OF General

No she doesn’t, well… maybe she does (I know assuming makes an ASS out of U and Me) BUT… the likelihood that you are beyond the age of 25 and your mom truly has a grasp on what you do, exactly, is pretty slim. I have spent a remarkable number of hours explaining blogging to my mother to no avail. But it’s not nearly as fun as watching my mom’s face as my sister described her top 10 MySpace friends during my father’s birthday dinner. Neither of these two conversations held a match to my 89-year-old grandmother inquiring about my occupation ... a woman who is as sharp as a tack but has never even touched the mouse of a computer. I struggled to compare the Internet to TV and advertising and newspapers—even books—and yet I feel as though I still fell horribly short.

I ask: How do YOU describe what you do on the Internet to someone who has no concept of it?

Leave a comment ( 46 )

Doug Avery, ON THE TOPIC OF Tips and Tricks

While working on the Odeo relaunch, we kept running into a frustrating problem: When we saved out the slices, the awesome Odeo pink flattened to a dreary "light coral". I'd seen the problem before, but never so pronounced: The color, through no fault of its own, was obviously changing, and we were at a loss for a way to prevent this.

Fig. 1 : Dastardly!

The usual suspects get knocked out pretty quickly in this issue: It isn't a Mac/PC thing, it isn't a monitor thing, it isn't because the color profile is somehow set "wrong". Fellow designers: Somewhere between PSD and JPG, Photoshop is draining our colors of their life, like some horrible, RGB-stealing vampire.

There's a lot of confusion on the web over why this is, and a lot of solutions being offered. Everything I found fails the acid test, though:

Testing for Perfect Color Translation

If I "Save For Web" an image from Photoshop, open that image up in a browser side-by-side with the original, I should see identical colors. I can then take a screenshot, open the screenshot in Photoshop, and test the color accuracy with our friend the color eyedropper, to show that nothing has shifted even slightly from the original image.

Fig. 2 : Checking for color shifts.

I've attached a JPG with some more indepth instructions at the end of the post. The testing process is a little painful, but the end result is worth it:

The ability to see, perfectly, how the colors in Photoshop are going to appear in your browser.

A Warning

What we're doing here won't make your colors look the same on all monitors or machines. Macs will display lighter (by default, at least), and monitors themselves will experience crazy color shifts based on age and settings. Reassure yourself: This is not your fault. The key is to calibrate your monitor as close to the center as possible, use Proof Colors (we'll get to that) to make sure details aren't getting blown out on other platforms, and be prepared to gently explain to clients why your green looks like aqua on their friend's 1992 Trinitron.

Okay, here we go: Three Steps to Color Perfection.

Continue reading "The Mysterious “Save For Web” Color Shift"

Leave a comment ( 141 )