Wisdom From The Experience of a Microsoft Employee
Who would have thought that someone could get so much mileage out of being a small gear in such a huge machine? This post on Stuff I’ve learned at Microsoft details the discoveries of one Sriram Krishnan, veteran of a mere five years at Redmond.
It is a long document – you’ll want to bookmark it and come back when you have time, because this article is worth all of your attention. In it, he shares tips on how to maneuver in a huge corporation, how to handle both underlings and overlings (is that even a word?) alike, tips on programming Zen, and some good ways to cultivate a mentality of personal growth. We’ve known 20-year senior managers who haven’t learned all of this.
Peter Brittain
Are You Ready To Babysit Kids On Your Website?
CNET picked up an interesting scoop about media usage in the youngster’s demographic. Kids pack in nearly 11 hours of media use daily. Now, pause and consider that: If you count 6 hours per day in school, this leaves 7 hours per night for sleep! We’ll assume this is averaged out from where the kids have weekends off from school, but still it’s a daunting figure.
What this means to the e-commerce world is that the next generation is the biggest potential customer. It only takes a few years between “junior is old enough for his own laptop” and “junior is now off to college, has his own bank account, and is ready to make purchases of his own.”
You should also think twice about making your website kid-friendly. Doubtless, having the occasional swear word in your text isn’t the first time a kid will encounter it, but there’s no sense in contributing to a bad image if you can’t help it. And on the other hand, doing everything you can to stick in the mind of a young teenager has the potential to influence their future online buying decisions. Are you ready for this?
How To Use Passion In Web Marketing
When we spotted the post In Praise of Passion over at Boing-Boing, it got us thinking. As Internet marketers, we all know that our digital strategy should include website design, search engine optimization, advertising, and so on. But how many of us think about whether we’re inspiring passion?
Some ideas for generating passion around your business:
If your service solves a problem, state how devoted to solving that problem you are. Talk about it a lot! Explain how it’s the central driving force for you being in business. If you run a graphic design agency, you can make your motto something like “Ending Ugly Web Design, One Graphic At A Time!”
Your business does good with a blog. A blog is a place where you can be looser and casual. You can be funny or you can whinge a little! Most of all, you can dump your soul into sharing your passion with the world. It’s not just a business, it’s a mission, and you’re the general inspiring the troops…
Your advertising, marketing, and email newsletter can be designed to convey just a touch more drama. Remember, your audience is exposed to more media content than it can digest every day; to stand out, you need to grab some attention!
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.
Web Hosting: Some of the Biggest Names Behind Linux
Some clients, upon encountering Linux website hosting, tend to remark that they’re surprised to see a big company running Linux.
Being a Free/Open Source Software system, people get the idea that it’s all done by volunteers. Right away they picture some hippies in sandals and tie-dye shirts, flashing peace signs and saying how they’re going to “stick it to the man.”
This is a ludicrous idea, because in fact, Linux *IS* “the man!” Linux’s desktop market share is still in the low single digits as far as end users are concerned. The place where Linux has won is the enterprise. See if you recognize any of these corporations:
IBM
Has long been involved with Linux. They host the IBM Linux Technology Center, install Linux on many consumer and office machines that they sell, have partnered with Linux brand names such as Canonical (makers of Ubuntu), and routinely install Linux on their mainframe computer line. The current top of their line in mainframes, the IBM zSeries 800, sports a Tux sticker on every unit sold.
Google
Not only has the world’s most dominant search engine run on Linux servers since its foundation, but Google rolls Linux into many of its products. The most recent is their Android operating system for mobile devices, and their Chrome OS, soon to be released, which has Linux at its core.
Intel
The PC microchip maker is actually on the development team of Linux! that’s right, they contribute programmer hours to the Linux project. They have also worked with other open source projects such as the BSD project and the MIT X-Windows graphical toolkit.
Oracle
The giant database and middleware corporation not only contributes to Linux development and ensures that their software runs on Linux, but they actually release their own Linux distribution! It’s called Oracle Unbreakable Linux, designed to work with their enterprise stack.
Cisco
The world’s biggest networking and communications technology company runs Linux on much of its router hardware, and sponsors “Cisco’s Application eXtension Platform,” a contest in which new developers are introduced to Linux in the scope of hardware programming.
Pixar
What, the makers of 3D-animated films such as “Toy Story” and “Finding Nemo?” Yes, as a matter of fact, open source software and computer animation run hand in hand, since Linux as a server also makes an excellent choice for a powerful and speedy “render farm” (a bank of machines generating the individual frames of a 3D film). In fact, 95% of Hollywood visual effects studios now run Linux.
Now, if all of this isn’t enough Linux involvement, all of the above mentioned companies have something else in common: They are all members of the Linux Foundation, and you can see their logos on the member page at http://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members.
Additional major Linux deployments include:
* Union Bank of California has standardized on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
* Virgin America uses Linux embedded in its in-flight entertainment system.
* The Chicago Mercantile Exchange uses an all-Linux computing infrastructure.
* The United States Army is the single largest customer of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
* The New York Stock Exchange runs its trading applications on Linux.
* Amazon.com, arguably the largest online retailer, runs an exclusively Linux-based shop.
So the next time you download an Ubuntu CD and run it on your system, and somebody suggests you have an anti-establishment mentality for that, just grin and think to yourself that you’re in good company with all of the other “hippies” running Linux.
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.