esses designs

optimizeLegibility

esses — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 06:31:38 +0000

Typography is more than just selecting a font. Design geeks know there are issues of kerning and ligatures, and that these effect how hard or easy your text is to read.

You can typically find the most frustrated web designers slaving over Internet Explorer or Windows in some form. Browser bugs, text-rendering… it’s no wonder most designers and developers hack it in an Apple-rendered Mac environment.

Enter a little CSS trick that doesn’t work on Mac OS X (largely because it doesn’t need it).

text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;

BOOyah. Know it, and love it.

Honda NSX by FORMAT67

esses — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 06:11:23 +0000

An inspiring quote, an attractive blonde pianist, a killer soundtrack, and stunning cinematography. Whether you’re an automotive junkie or not I am sure you can appreciate these things. Throw in a Formula One Champion tuned chassis, a symphonic V6, Ayrton Senna sound samples, and hot laps around the Nordschliefe and you get a petrolhead’s vision of heaven.

FORMAT67 via StanceWorks.

AppSumo.com – TypeKit Personal and More For $12

esses — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 01:13:11 +0000

If you haven’t heard, AppSumo.com is like woot! for WebApps. The brainchild of Noah Kagan, AppSumo features limited-time sales on Software-as-a-Service products and more.

Today they’re promoting what they call the “Designer Awesomeness Bundle”. First up is a one-year TypeKit Personal subscription, worth $24.99 all by itself. TypeKit is an Open Type web font provider which you lets you easily spruce up the typography of your website, without worrying whether or not your viewers have your fonts installed. Toss in online scrapbooking tool Ember, design feedback software Notable, and a half-off coupon to site mockup software Balsamiq and you’ve got yourself a heck of a deal. w00t!

Media Temple WordPress Sites Hacked

esses — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 01:47:27 +0000

If you’re running WordPress on Media Temple’s Grid Service, there’s a good chance your blog has been compromised. I at first figured that my virus scanner was going haywire, but after looking at source code on a couple of sites I have hosted over on the Grid, I realized my database had been plagued with some script injection attacks.

http://ae.awaue.com/7

http://ie.eracou.com/3

If you’re finding the above references in an injected script in your source at the end of every post you have the exact same problem. The script has been appended to every post you have in your MySQL database. Luckily the fix is quick and easy. Here’s how to get rid of the WordPress hack:

1. Log In to your Media Temple Account Center

2. In the domain Admin Panel click ‘Manage Databases’

3. Log In To Admin which will take you to phpMyAdmin

4. Select the database of your WordPress installation from the left sidebar

5. Choose the SQL tab on the top

Copy in the following:

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, ‘’, ”);

The command there basically replaces the script with nothing, but it assumes that your database tables have the default suffix wp_. You may need to edit the command or malicious script accordingly. Now hit go and phpMyAdmin should tell you the number of instances of the script it removed. You can also check by viewing any previously posts in phpMyAdmin.

The next steps are to figure out what to do if you’ve been hacked. There’s a great post on the WordPress Codex for that here. @mediatemple also sent me this link on twitter. (thanks for the quick reply mt support).

I only host a site or two, none of them client sites, on the Grid Server. These recent security issues are one of the reasons why I have moved away from the (mt) Grid. Unfortunately, the affected blogs were my Dad’s so I really do have to notify the “client” in this case. Good luck with your own site!

Coherent Web Design – Step 276: Print Your Site!

esses — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 05:21:20 +0000

Cha-ching! You can hear it now. Your customer’s final payment is almost coming and you can actually pay for that iPad you bought on credit before you started this project. You know, the one you said would change your entire design process. (It did. You now spend way too much time playing tower defense games).

Whether we’re refugees from the paper-pushing world, digital purists, or tree-hugging environmentalists, we web designers seem to have an unreasonably strong dislike for “hard copies”. But maybe printing your final revisions is just what you need.

Permanency

Are you REALLY done? Something about putting pages to ink gives you a mental signal that you better have dotted all your t’s and crossed all your i’s. (eh?) Printing out that final version helps you to pause with a subliminal gut check that you’re DONE done.

Change of Perspective

Whether you’re a designer or not, in this day and age chances are good you spend the better part of your day staring at a computer screen. Sometimes it helps to look at a design off-screen to catch inconsistencies and to re-do odd designs you dreamed up at 3am.

Consistency

Lay all your pages out on the floor or pin them up on a wall. The spread helps you take a look at your entire site at once. Wow! You really did all that. Take a step back and look to see if your site wraps itself in to one coherent design. Is there a page that now just looks terribly out of place? Better open that text editor back up.

You’re done! Don’t forget to recycle.

PadMapper : Making Apartment Hunting Suck Less!

esses — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 20:29:58 +0000

I stumbled upon Padmapper a few months ago just in time for my fiance to receive her rent renewal notice, accompanied with an 8% bump. BOOOO!

Padmapper is mostly a Craigslist and Google Maps mashup, with a few other online services added in for good measure. Every apartment hunter I’ve introduced Padmapper to has been unreasonably grateful. All I did was send a link! Enjoy.

Dieter Rams and the Art of Web Design

esses — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 07:30:48 +0000

Dieter Rams is one of the most well known and successful industrial designers, known for his brilliant work at Braun for over 30 years. Rams followed the approach “weniger, aber besser” which translates to “less, but better”. To give you a deeper understanding of that philosophy, Rams is quoted as saying that Jonathan Ive and the team at Apple are the only company today that still follow what he believes are the core values of design.

At the age of 78, Rams says he doesn’t own a computer, but his Ten Principles for Good Design certainly apply a great framework for web design:

1. Good design is innovative.

Gone are the days of geocities websites. Thank God. Innovative web design evolves with and is developed with the latest in web technologies, such as semantic HTML, CSS3, and JavaScript libraries, with an eye kept on future technologies.

2. Good design makes a product useful.

A good website design serves as a purposeful portal. Whether it is a social portal or an information portal, good web design focuses on the usefulness of a site to an end user, while excluding any elements that may detract from the user experience.

3. Good design is aesthetic.

A site can be tremendously useful, but to keep traffic coming back, it needs “the look”. Even the extreme simplicity of a site like craigslist holds in itself an aesthetic beauty.

4. Good design makes a product understandable.

Good web design explains itself. Easy to use navigation and straight forward user interfaces are at the core of any good design.

5. Good design is unobtrusive.

Good web design is, for lack of a better word, moderate. Hot pink, 144pt article font certainly won’t keep your visitors coming back.

6. Good design is honest.

Hidden pay-per-click links and multi-page articles to increase pageview counts do nothing for the user, and certainly have no place in a good web design. A good web design does not manipulate users for the gain of the site’s owners.

7. Good design is long-lasting.

Good web design is timeless. A trendy design may bring a repeat customer back sooner for a web designer, but a long lasting design focuses not on fashion, but builds and helps carry on the legacy of a brand.

8. Good design is thorough, down to the last detail.

Web designers and design recruiters love to talk up “pixel-perfect design”, but there is some enduring truth to these industry buzzwords. Sharing a common canvas with comparable work from other artists, the little things matter big in web design. The right color for a checkout button or the proper use of white-space can turn a great site in to a horrible site.

9. Good design is environmentally-friendly.

The web is its own eco-system. From cutting down on bandwidth use, to preventing visual pollution, a good web design is web environment friendly. Clean code, cross-browser compatibility, and minimal resource requirements. That’s green web design.

10. Good design is as little as possible.

That 3 minute animated-Flash splash page to your website might be pretty cool the first time, but does it add to the experience of your site’s users? “Weniger, aber besser”. Less, but better. Words to live by.

“If you can’t feed a team with two pizzas…”

esses — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 16:19:52 +0000

“If you can’t feed a team with two pizzas, it’s too large.”

-Jeff Bezos. Amazon.com

Via StartupQuote

Browser News You Can Use… Someday

esses — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 08:18:57 +0000

IE Beats Chrome?!?!

At a recent HTML5 meetup, Microsoft Evangelist Giorgio Sardo held a vigil for Internet Exploder 6. IE6, long the bane of web designers everywhere is getting flipped upside down in the form of IE9. Turns out IE9 is kicking some major tail, specifically that of my Windows browser of choice, Chrome.

Sardo tells us that the IE team is working hard on hardware acceleration of web features. With today’s ever increasing computing specs, hardware acceleration certainly makes sense. For the daring among us, you can get the IE9 Developer Preview now.

FF4 Top Tabs

Not to be left behind, the folks at Mozilla are really thinking through UX/UI for their next release of Firefox. Alex Faaborg walks us through the process of designing tabs in Firefox 4.

Via @besologic

WordPress 3.0 Is Go!

esses — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 07:49:30 +0000

As WordPress users already know by the trusty “please update now” link at the top of their admin dashboards, late last week, the WordPress team released WP 3.0. While the name suggests it’s the 3rd version of WordPress, WP 3.0 is actually the 13th version of WordPress.

There are a couple of key things to note about the latest major revision…

WordPress Multisite – WP and WPMU have merged to allow multiple sites to be managed from just one installation of Wordpress. (‘Bout time you start that blog network you’ve been meaning to start.)
Twenty Ten – WP 3.0 features a brand new default theme which shows off many of the new features. In fact, if you have installed the new version you may have found the original “default” theme strangely absent. If you’re building a theme, make sure you have all the types of theme pages covered.
Selectable Username – WP 3.0 prompts you to enter a username and password on installation, whereas before you would be defaulted to the user: admin and an impossible to remember default password. This is a good chance to remind you to keep your passwords strong as you setup WP 3.0. The original created passwords were pretty complex, and thus secure. 1Password is a great tool to generate secure passwords and keep them all organized without having to remember them.
“Blog” to “Site” – the options panel has changed the word “blog” in the general settings to the word “site”, indicating the WordPress team’s desire to push WP as more than just a blogging tool, but a bonafide CMS.

The full list of changes can be found in the WordPress Codex. In just 5 or so years, WordPress has attracted an 8-digit user base, and a micro-economy of designers and developers. Instead of getting straight to work on WP 3.1, as the WordPress team has done in the past, they’re moving to work on things for the WordPress community. As a designer, I’d say that’s a great decision and I’m looking forward to the forthcoming WP ecosystem updates.

Thanks to all the contributors to WordPress 3.0 and their excellent work!