Monthly Archives: June 2009

The Death of Me: Content in Mockups

Situation: you’re briefed on a site redesign project, existing content is being used.

Up until today I thought being able to use existing concept in a mockup was kind of like winning a contest; having french and english content at the onset of a design is more akin to winning a lottery. It’s much more satisfying to design with real content because it provides a constraint to a design problem; the more that’s known about a problem, the easier it may be to solve. At the very least the solution may be more creative.

Obviously as a designer you’ve got to create a design that is flexible to support varying conditions, particularly if a site is bilingual. At some point seeking to control every scenario that may arise will result in a compromise in design integrity.

With that being said, I learned a very valuable lesson today which completely turns me off of the idea of using real content. It’s a situation where the client becomes so caught up in the content you’ve chosen that it literally skews their entire view of the design.

That was a disconnect I didn’t foresee. Balls.

Sunflowers, Spirals, Flash

Recently a project came up that had the potential to use an abstract sunflower as a lovely motif. After looking into it a bit, there happened to be an equation describing the arrangement of seeds in a sunflower. The equations looked fairly straightforward, but I’m no math wizard and had no idea to figure out the x and y coordinates of the ‘seeds’, but lucky for me I happen to sit across from someone who knows what the hell they’re doing and as a result I have a simple sunflower generator:

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An Abstract Wallpaper (Process)

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This thing is nothing fancy, but it’s one of those things that I think is pretty cool because of how it started out … as a grey background with light grey triangles:

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^ I made a triangle, positioned it randomly, repeated this a couple dozen times.
I had no idea what I was doing at this point.

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^ At some point I got bored of doing that and started selecting (magic wand), filling, and blurring parts of the triangles.

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^ MOTION BLUR! Now we’re getting somewhere awesome.

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^ Added type, duplicated the blur, adjusted the colour.
At this point I decided that grey and easter colours weren’t going to cut it.

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^ Enter vibrant purple-pink!

That’s about it.
There was tweaking to the type (masked bits of it) and added some texture and warmer colours to get the final result.

Oh, People Use IE6. Right.

mint-browsers-june2009

The other day I was looking through my pretty Mint stats and came across a depressing figure: 16% of visits to my site are from IE6. After seeing this terrible number the usual IE6-shock thoughts went through my head: “WHAT IS WRONG WITH THOSE PEOPLE”, “HOW DOES THIS BROWSER STILL DOMINATE?”, “16% OF VISITORS FAIL”, “I NEED AN ADULT”, etc.

Like most things, I let this slip to the back of my mind and didn’t think much of it.

Then I had an eye-opening experience yesterday. Someone showed me an extremely cumbersome web interface for their work and I immediately noticed that they were using IE6. From the conversation that ensued I came to two conclusions:

  1. When you work in a field like web development/design the things you do can brush off on people you know, so that in time friends/family have at the very least heard the term HTML or IE, right? You get so used to this type of thing that it really catches you off-guard when you’re talking to someone who actually has no concept of what ‘coding’ or ‘designing’ actually is or what IE stands for.
  2. There are people out there, under the age of 30 who think everyone uses IE and have no idea that there exists two major versions above IE6.

It was truly hilarious (and frightening) to hear the words ‘everyone uses IE’ from someone using a computer with IE6. It makes me think a little different about demographics and target audiences.

How do you deal with a segment of society that is young, but not necessarily internet-savvy (beyond hotmail, ask jeeves, and facebook)?

Shudder.