Tag: design

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It’s been a while since I changed the look of this site, and I had a desire to get away from the wasted screen space of my previous theme on a desktop browser, so today, I flipped my theme over to the understated and clean Velox.

There’s a lot to like, and it adds a few things that I really appreciate, such as a time-to-read and a progress bar for people reading single articles. It’s also block-editor-friendly.

At the same time, I’m also going to try something (yet again) that I have attempted previously for my writing: I’m going to split my content a bit between two of my sites and see how that goes in terms of focusing audience.

This site will continue to host my writing on life things, events work, general technology topics, work and remote work, and customer support and success.

My guides, resources, and other writing on games and video games will start to be published over on my streaming homepage, located at backlogathon.tv. I’m not going to move anything from this site over there to start, but instead will begin writing there, with a possible focus on Final Fantasy XIV and Destiny 2.

I will probably write about various games here on this site when they are significant enough that they have entered my general attention, or have been super-significant. I owe this site a post regarding FFXIV at some point, for example.

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John Carey at 50 Foot Shadows:

All in all it seemed obvious to me that whoever at Apple was working on the effect found the ideal amount of give to the parallax panning to get a natural feel and set the dimensions of new desktop images to fit this ideal down to the pixel. Therefore, to get the most natural fit for your wallpaper images in accordance to their current programming I highly recommend you crop iPhone wallpapers to 744x1392px and iPad wallpapers to 2524x2524px.

So there you have it: the ideal resolutions for wallpapers that will appear properly at whatever rotation and with the right kind of parallax scrolling.

Speaking of, John has a fantastic collection of wallpapers available that you can purchase for both form factors combined for just $10. I recommend them because they are awesome.

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I have no idea if this is true or not (I suspect it is), but this video from Apple regarding their design philosophy is a beautiful thing.

And the music is perfect.

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After months of having the image files sitting on my drive I finally updated the header of this site to be what I had originally planned it to be.

CSS3 backgrounds are fun. :)

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Chris Sauve:

I wondered: how have Mac developers with existing apps, who had been able to let their design talents loose on the open canvas of OS X, handle these limitations on their icons? Would the beauty of their icons wilt or would the frame sharpen their loveliness?

This is a really cool look at icon design and the different approaches various developers have taken in creating them for iOS. Lots of images and examples.

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It’s telling that even within the Gmail team, there is a basic, fundamental, deep-seeded inability to put things together in a contextually graceful way that makes sense to actual (non-Googler) users—in other words, to deliver a great user experience.

[…]

Understanding how users want to navigate around the application, which tasks to show as buttons versus which to hide in menus, which features should be left out completely, and so on . . . those seemingly minor decisions are often the difference between good software and great software, and the reason great product managers and interaction designers are always in demand.

This is very true. I didn’t understand how true until I began working with these things a few years ago. It’s fascinating to watch how hard my colleagues work every day to provide and continually improve excellent user experiences.

You should read the whole thing. (via TechCrunch.)

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Colleague Kevin Conboy on why coding skills are important for web design:

Your first instinctual reaction (as mine would be), is of course going to be that learning HTML is not learning web design. And of course – of course – that’s true. Just because you know Flash or HTML does not mean you’re a designer. I would never be brain-dead enough to suggest such a thing. The visual and strategic aspects of design are always more important than the technical ones – it’s just that the technical skills should exist alongside all of that to effectively uphold your decisions. This has been true of design as a discipline for decades.

The full article is on Alternate.org.

Vote for Kevin’s panel proposal for SXSW here.