Web Design – Adobe v HTML5
The story of the Internet has always been a battle between the old guard corporations and the new guard users.
So, Microsoft has had to battle against Free and Open Source software, IBM had to battle against the PC clones, Apple had to battle against the PC, proprietary Unix had to battle against BSDs, and so on. remember DEC? The Digital Equipment Corporation once ruled the computing world with the PDP and the VAX throughout the 1970s. But time goes by and progress marches on.
What’s bizarre is that corporations don’t seem to learn from history. Adobe, which has already had to fight for its survival when the free image-editor Gimp has risen to challenge Adobe’s flagship cash cow Photoshop, now finds itself at odds over its second most-lucrative business, Flash. HTML5 is coming, inevitably, and there’s very little that Adobe’s proprietary Flash platform can do that HTML5′s canvas element can’t.
Ajaxian covers the whole story better than most. It’s funny that Adobe felt the need to have a seat at the W3C standards table in the first place. But anyway, the prevailing wisdom is that Adobe has been blocking HTML5′s standardization right and left, a charge which they adamantly deny.
In fact, HTML5 aims to reduce the need for all proprietary plug-ins, be they Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, Apache Pivot, or Sun JavaFX. Interestingly, the HTML5 editors are Ian Hickson of Google, Inc. and David Hyatt of Apple, Inc. Hmmmm, can we think of two companies which have locked horns with Adobe in the past?
Peter Brittain
Web Design Perth
Web Design – RIP IE6
We never thought we’d be typing this in our lifetimes, but it looks like everyone’s finally serious about killing off Internet Explorer 6. YouTube should be pulling the plug on IE6 support about now.
They’re giving IE6 a very nice funeral. Many web developers, who have had over eight years of torture trying to design for the thing, will probably say “nicer than it deserves.”
Also, we have one site campaigning to bring IE6 down and another one begging to save IE6. What do you want to bet, they’re both run by the same outfit?
The problem is, how to convince the last diehard users to upgrade? Only 6% of web traffic is IE6. As we have seen, large companies with vast stretches of cubicle maze are often the most conservative computer users around. They plug in a Windows box, and as long as it still lights up, they aren’t upgrading. Scripts like this one are the best we can do to help it along. Some IT workers have posted to forums lately asking how they can explain to their manager that they have to upgrade.
How about this? “You want look at keyboard TV. But keyboard TV no work. Why no work? Got to make new magic. Old magic too old. New magic make keyboard TV work again. Old magic all use up. Use clicky blob thing to hit this blue word. Blue word make new magic.”
Too long?
Peter Brittain
Web Design – The Irresistible Draw of Mashups and APIs
It’s worth checking in over at Programmable Web once in awhile just to see what they’re up to, with their API discoveries. Google, Twitter, Flickr, and all, the defining mark of a popular Web 2.0 service is whether people do things with your API.
Notable developments from just one recent week:
- Comedy on Spotify – A directory of comedians and their albums, with video clips for sampling, mashed up out of Freebase and Last.fm. Just dive right in and look for the wit who tickles you the right way.
- Today’s Special – A Google Wave bot serving up quotes, words, horoscopes, sports scores, and whatnot.
- Tickets Suck – A Twitter and Twilio mashup that reminds you to move your car so you don’t get a ticket.
- Quote Relish – A real-time news ticker using the Freebase and Moreover APIs.
Mashups and APIs are an exciting tech trend that’s worth keeping track of, because new gizmos are getting invented every day. This is something we couldn’t do only a decade ago. But even more fascinating is the potential that mashups have; they represent evolution at a lightning pace. Ideas build on ideas, just the way innovation is supposed to work!
Peter Brittain
Five Web Design Trends That Are On Their Way Out
In 2010 and going forward, we start a new decade. It’s time to shake things up a little, so here’s a list of web design trends which got overused in the first decade of the 2000s, and so have become tired and cliched:
- Grunge – Splattered, sloppy, gritty, urban, and looking dirty. Grunge looked great for about six months because nobody else was doing it. Now that we’re drowning in the stuff, we would like to see our last paint splatter sometime in the immediate future.
- The wet floor effect – Where you have text “standing” on a reflective surface, so the mirror image of the text is seen faintly below. It looked impressive the first ten times we’d seen it, but now it’s “meh.”
- Computer stuff – Your business is on the web or about technology, so why not use photos of mice and keyboards in the header? Gee, I don’t know, how about “Because it shows you have all the imagination of a stone?”
- Cute vector mascots – Yes, those adorable, spunky beavers and chirpy birds gives your business a cuddly personality. Once in a while, they’re original and refreshing. But nobody is fooled. You’re in business to make money, no matter how many chunky, freckled kids with glasses you have in the upper left corner.
- THE GIANT RSS ICON – Alright! We get it! You want people to notice that you have an RSS feed. But it’s about time we all learned that there are people who know how to use RSS and there are people who do not. You will not reach that latter audience even if your RSS icon jumps out of the screen, blows up to the size of a house, and slams them on the head yelling “I have an RSS feed!”
Peter Brittain
Seven Unusual Creative Motifs For Your Next Web Design
Rather than the run-of-the-mill designs we normally see, what if your next design came from someplace… unexpected? A brilliantly contrary motif that makes sense in retrospect? Here are our picks for some themes you might not have thought of, but should:
- Hand drawn – Example It always looks brilliantly original, because it’s your own hand! Stick-figures and elementary-school drawings are getting really, really big this year. Try to look as untalented as possible!
- Factory – Example Industrial designs are great for developers, producers, and artists. It makes the customer anticipate that you’ll have a strong work ethic.
- Retro ’50s – Example Maybe it’s nostalgia, or maybe the classics work best, but we haven’t seen a single web page done in retro that goes wrong. If you readers can, please show us in the comments.
- Steampunk – Example For those who don’t know, “steampunk” is a school of art that takes its inspiration from the era of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. Think steam engines, dirigibles, clockwork, wind-up robots, and lots of polished brass and tin.
- Psychedelic – Example Another retro trend. While it can quickly get tiresome, it’s an absolute knock-out for music and club themes.
- Isometric – Example There’s way too few isometric themed websites out there, and we’d like to know why. Visitors will never forget you!
- Two Tone – Example It’s the new monochrome! Still minimalist, while presenting a balanced look where one color doesn’t overwhelm you. Pick two colors that go great together and draw everything in that.
Peter Brittain
Web Design – You Can Never Have Too Much Minimalism
It seems that minimalism is never going to go out of style. Latest exhibit: Minimalist Web Design: When Less is More. A long tutorial on what exactly it is that makes a site design minimalist, and some excellent examples at the bottom.
One thing that we notice is that designers often spoil the effect of a minimalist design. They get the layout and whitespace right, then ruin it by cluttering it up with a lot of loud images and flashy elements. You wouldn’t make a delicate, creamy Alfredo pasta dish and then overwhelm it with a lot of Tobasco sauce, would you? Studying the examples on the article and thinking it over, here’s the best images to use with a minimalist design:
- Origami – Note the one example in the showcase that has a folded paper crane. Perfect! Minimalist art form goes with minimalist design.
- Big fonts – Large type accentuates the typography, making visitor focus on the words and not look for distractions.
- Black and white photography – Always should be simple subjects and light grays, unless you want to go for impact and drama, in which case, darker grays.
- Clean vector art – Simple, large drawings of gentle objects (butterflies, clouds, flowers) rest the mind when they’re drawn in delicate shades. making people feel good to be there is a key to getting a lower bounce rate.
- Geometry – Almost goes without saying.
Peter Brittain
Web Designers – Tablets Are Underrated
We cheer when we see posts championing underdog technology, like this one on Why Designers Should Ditch The Mouse And Use A Tablet. Now, true, tablets aren’t exactly “underdog,” but they could stand to gain more mind share than they have, particularly with designers who started out in the ’90s.
The difference with a tablet has to be experienced; you can’t describe it. With a tablet, you’ve forgotten about the interface in minutes, and then you’re drawing naturally just like you would with a pen.
A good one to recommend is the Wacom Bamboo. It retails for around $40 USD – fancier tablets really aren’t that much of an improvement, and in fact your hand will be more comfortable on a small surface. These can be programmed so that different functions will happen depending on which end of the pen you’re using – so you can draw with one end and smudge, erase, or whatever you want with the other. Added buttons and dials on the board itself make it a very customizable interface.
Should You Host A *Chan On Your Site?
Get ready for the newest trend: A “*chan” is any image-board ending in the suffix “chan.” The most famous example is 4chan, but there’s a host of *chan boards out there – so many that directories are popping up. Here’s a comprehensive one. (And be warned, many image boards host indecent, NSFW, shocking, or downright pornographic content. You’ve been warned.)
Image boards exist in the underbelly of the Internet, and yet they set a surprising amount of the standard in web culture. Remember “rick-rolling?” They started that. They started LOLCats, too. As UK paper The Guardian put it, image board culture is “lunatic, juvenile… brilliant, ridiculous and alarming.”
But since image board software is easy to set up and use, and is really nothing but a bulletin board with image uploading, it’s a good fad to jump into. It’s an economical way to add content and fun to a site, provided you can moderate things so they don’t get out of hand.
Will We Ever Fix the Weak Password Problem?
Any website developer knows the drill: you put up anything requiring a login, and people are usually going to pick the laziest possible password. As documented in Ars Technica’s lament on the failure of the password model, this problem has existed unabated for 30 years. Users are still just as sloppy about password security as ever.
Future web application designers might need to start thinking beyond the password. For instance, what if we tried some other methods of user authentication along with the password:
- A CAPTCHA field right by the password box, to stop automated brute force attacks.
- An additional field requiring some piece of data, such as year of birth.
- A drop-down menu of icons. Along with a password, users could select their favorite icon/avatar when they log in.
- A password suggestion feature. When picking a new password, users could enter their choice, then if it doesn’t pass the strength test, the feature could suggest stronger related passwords. For instance, for the dog’s name ‘Rover,’ the feature could suggest alternatives like 98R0v3R43.
- Just wait for the future when we have biometrics and you scan in using your thumbprint.
We like the last idea.
Web Design: The Trippiest Websites You Have Seen All Year
Web designers, developers, and entrepreneurs, does your world seem dominated by e-commerce web pages? Are you stuck in a world of whitespace, neutral colors, politically-correct stock photo imagery, and 3-column layouts? Here, let’s wake up your imagination again! Visit these sites and bask in the fact that the web isn’t all serious business, and doesn’t even always make sense. May some of these inspire you to loosen up when you build your next site.
- Memory Park – Not a game, but a Flash interaction where you explore an amusement park.
- Sugar Free Ink – A strange artist’s portfolio site, where the presentation and navigation is half the show.
- Hoogerbrugge – A Flash artist like no other, producing pop-art masterpieces such as Spin andFlow.
- Secret Technology – A… uh… a site demonstrating the interactive web experience of one Jason Nelson, whose style is somewherebetween ADHD and schizophrenia.
- Neave TV – Some games, some animation, and just some general weirdness.
- CMart Design – A Russian artist’s portfolio, equal parts macabre and enchanting.
- Absurd.org – The whole website is an exercise in dada art. Don’t give up, there’s poetry and plays hidden in here somewhere.