essentials
- Fish tacos FTW nom nom nom
If Twitter is a medium for text-messaging, then content such as “Dude, where are you? We’re in the mezzanine” is perfectly appropriate, and “Fish tacos FTW nom nom nom” is practically overachievement. If it’s micro-blogging, then you may be obliged, like any writer, to consider your reader’s need for value. I look at it as the world’s smallest magazine, published by me.
- Content precedes design
Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.
- Stick out your tongue
While employed at a famous New York advertising agency twenty years ago, a partner and I created a TV commercial touting an over-the-counter medicine client’s revolutionary new cold and flu remedy for young children.
Only when the shooting and shouting was over did we learn that the product did not, in fact, exist.
The commercial [...]- The vanishing personal site
Our personal sites, once our primary points of online presence, are becoming sock drawers for displaced first-person content. We are witnessing the disappearance of the all-in-one, carefully designed personal site containing professional information, links, and brief bursts of frequently updated content to which others respond via comments. Did I say we are witnessing the traditional [...]
- The SXSW Diet
A minute later she came back, revolving them a few inches from my lips.
- Happy fourth birthday, real world semantics
Four years ago today, Tantek Çelik and Kevin Marks gave a presentation on real-world semantics. Working backwards from HTML extensions like XFN (created by Tantek, Matt Mullenweg, and Eric Meyer), the paper showed how designers and developers could add semantics to today’s web rather than starting from scratch or waiting for a “purer” markup language.
- Usability problems with .Mac sync
I’m afraid this is another of those entries outlining bizarre design decisions and perplexing usability quirks in the otherwise brilliant world of Apple computers and phones
- Self-publishing is the new blogging
When you’ve flown this far from Gutenberg, the only place to travel is back.
- Re: CSS Unworking Group
Proposing change when the change makes sense is good. Proposing change because you are disappointed and frustrated isn’t good enough.
- Facebook Considered Harmless
I design interfaces so I’m supposed to know about this stuff. That’s the rationale behind my spending hours of billable time adjusting my Facebook preferences. The real reason, of course, for all this stuff, is that it provides a way to blow off work you should be doing, while creating the illusion that you are achieving something. At least in most offices, you can’t masturbate at your desk. But you can Tweet.
