Well, since I guess I’ve finished this site and now I have a blog, I guess I should start posting some of my work. American Strong is a clothing line started by a friend of mine. He had a lot of products to sell but other then a Facebook and Myspace page, he didn’t have a web presence. We spent some time coming up with a few simple goals for the site that we wanted to acheive, and created the design for the site around that.
I decided on creating a Wordpress backed website and Big Cartel for the storefront and shopping cart since both of those provide dead simple edibility. I also made the storefront the homepage so that any visitors to the site see the goods right off the bat. Click here to view the site.
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Now don’t get me wrong, I love lists, but most of the time authors cloak a list as a helpful and informative post, and they hardly ever are. You can look at any ‘big-time design blog’ (Smashing Magazine and any of its off-shoots and clones) and find more lists then you can count and less actually useful information then you’d hope for.
- A good list should be short and concise. You can go into detail later.
- If you are ranking or comparing things, show a summary at the bottom.
- If the title of your ‘article’ contains any of the following words, you’re wasting my time: awesome, rocks, best, great, fresh
- You aren’t doing anyone a favor if you aren’t providing links.
- Bring something new to the table. Just a list is not enough.
- You are not the top most resource on the subject. Don’t act like you are. Your post is an opinion.
- Don’t post about something that you haven’t actually used or affected you. It’s how you separate garbage from quality.
- No matter what, it’s been done before.
- You aren’t an author if you’re just curating.
- It’s usually way too long. I’ve got time for 10 bullet points at the most.
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The lines are movement, the black spots are areas where my mouse was stopped. This was one day at work, 9-6.
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I just read an interesting article tonight titled Are Homepages Dead Or Are We Missing The Boat? over at Drawar, which looks like a nice site I might add. I find it funny because I’ve had to talk through how to design a website over the past few months to a couple friends and the point the article makes was the exact way I explained to them what a good homepage design should be.
A homepage should summarize any information that will make the user stay on the site. Using my website as an example, there are two distinct sections of my site that I want people to see. My portfolio and this blog. I also wouldn’t mind more twitter followers so that is the third column but besides that, those two sections are what people are going to be coming to my site for, to see my work or read what I have to say (thanks for reading this by the way.) While I am particularly proud of my about page, I’d have to be pretty popular for people to come to my site and want to know more about me before seeing anything I’m spitting out.
To relate it to print design, a homepage is not the front cover. On the internet, no one has time or cares about the front cover (that’s why you always hit skip on flash animations). It’s about getting in, finding the content you want to see and leaving. The homepage is the table of contents.
If I get linked to a page on a website, and I liked it, I want to be able to hit the home button, figure out what the site is about, quickly decide if I’m interested in it and move on. I don’t want the homepage to be paragraphs of some silly marketing jargon or some long-winded grandiose bio. That doesn’t tell me anything about the website. I want to see what content this website will provide me.
Of course I’m sure there are successful exceptions to this rule. Not everyone has dynamic content flying in all the time (or at all) that they can just feed into the homepage. Not everyone has a blog (although they probably have a Facebook or a Twitter account, which serves the same function.) Some websites are meant for wordy intro paragraphs that don’t really tell me anything, but I guarantee I’m not on those websites for very long.
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Earlier this month, Pantone announced the color of the year for next year to be PANTONE® 15-5519 Turquoise, as seen above. Get ready to see a lot of websites change around their color scheme to match, just like with last years Mimosa.
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I’ve been working on this site for the past couple weeks and today it went live. I used a Wordpress install as a CMS for them to be able to update their site quickly and easily, without having to dive into the HTML. I also created a simple javascript slider for their gallery images.
They have some great work up on the site so you should go check it out.
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Since the decade is three weeks away, give or take, from ending I figured it’d be a good time to start thinking about what I really enjoyed during the last decade. There’s a lot of albums I couldn’t put on. There’s a lot that I could have put on to get cool points. This is what I really enjoyed though. These albums are the ones I had on loop for better portions of a year or longer. These are the albums I can associate with a certain age or time in my life.
I also threw in the runners up, but kept them out of order. It’d be too hard to arrange. I actually also think my runners up are kinda the safe bet, can do no wrong albums.
A little note: This is completely based on what I listened to during the time. This is not what albums I think deserve to be there. That’s too subjective a subject for me to write about. I’ll leave that in the hands of those capable like Pitchfork.
- Arcade Fire – Funeral
- Interpol – Turn On The Bright Lights
- Bloc Party – Silent Alarm
- Russian Circles – Enter
- Broken Social Scene – S/T
- Beirut – Gulag Orkestar
- Animal Collective – Strawberry Jam
- Death From Above 1979 – You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine
- Yeasayer – All Hour Cymbals
- The Dodos – Visiter
Runners up (in no order):
- Arcade Fire – Neon Bible
- Battles – Mirrored
- Explosions in the Sky – How Strange, Innocence
- Iron & Wine – Our Endless Numbered Days
- Maps & Atlases – Tree, Swallows, Houses
- Radiohead – Kid-A
- Regina Spektor – Begin to Hope
- Sigur Rós – Takk…
- Spoon – Gimme Fiction
- The Shins – Chutes to Narrow
If you notice, I’m kinda biased against music released in the last year or so for this list. Merriweather Post Pavilion, although a completely solid album, I haven’t had a chance to let it settle like everything else has. Same goes for Veckatimest. Great albums, I just can’t tell their lasting factor like these others.
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I was having trouble sleeping last night so I started thinking about this issue. For those of you who don’t know, designer Dustin Curtis posted an article back in May targeting American Airlines and the horrible user experience that their website has. He’s gotten a bit of flak the last few days after posting an update on the issue, stating that a user experience architect that responded to his article was fired from American Airlines within an hour of Dustin posting the response. There has been a lot of negativism from the comments on his site and blog posts being written about this. Whether it’s that Dustin was naive for thinking that a giant corporation can change directions as easily as mocking up a new design or a man was fired, most people are missing the point. American Airlines as a corporation only cares about the bottom line.
John Gruber said it well:
The point is that American Airlines is clearly a failing company. They’re losing hundreds of millions of dollars every quarter. The experience of traveling on one of their flights is terrible. Their website is terrible. These facts are not unrelated.
American Airlines will not spend money to make money. In order to please people, they need to improve their customer experience, which in turn would make them money. They are too worried about cutting costs rather then making their flights worth the price. They are hurting everyone in doing this; Us, the potential customer, by making it a lot harder and more frustrating to not only book a flight but enjoy a flight and also themselves because, well, they are losing money.
If a corporation is going to treat us like that, without respect, I think we have all the right to criticize them, as Dustin did. It is not our fault that American Airlines can’t get their machine to publish a decent and usable website (not for lack of talent, mind you). It’s not our fault that they have built a corporate culture that cares more about the bottom dollar then it does about their own product. It is our fault that we put up with it.
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