Awwward-winning? Not So Much (Pt. 2)
Let's take a look at website judged by the good folks at www.awwwawards.com as having an excellent navigation system. Does it stand up to a detailed UX analysis?
Read MoreAwwward-winning? Not So Much (Pt. 1)
Let's take a look at the site of winemaker Chateau Yquem, a website judged by the good folks at www.awwwawards.com as having an excellent navigation system. How good is it?
Read MoreOnline Persona, a Wikipedia Entry
Sometimes Wikipedia doesn't cover the topics you need to have defined. I think this is the case with personas as the term is understood in the web communications world. Here's my attempt to rectify that.
Read MoreIcon Labels: the Good and the Bad
As the concepts that we try to symbolize through icons become more complex, the harder the designer has to work at finding an easily recognizable image. The best solution is usually to pair icons with a brief text label. Some designers solve this problem better than others.
Read MoreYou Don't Need a Website
You don’t need a website unless you have something to say. If your job is to build websites, you’ll often be asked to build them before there are any words or images to carry on them. Sometimes, there’s nothing to say; the client simply knows that they want a website. Everybody has websites now. It’s standard. Your client thinks that they need one. But do they really? Your first step as a web designer is to help them figure out what they have to say.
Read MoreI Can't Be Bothered
I used to pity the older adults in my life when I was a kid. They simply didn’t understand the way the modern world worked. My grandparents didn’t own a VCR and they didn't seem to care. They didn’t have cable service, no longer listened to music (in any format), and had no VCR, nor did they want any of those things. Decades later, I get it.
Read MoreTwitter: It's Not About Sandwich Reports
I've read that “Twitter is full of people talking about the weather, what they had for lunch, and their indigestion.” Maybe that’s so, but if it is, I don’t know much about it. Here’s what I see on Twitter: people offering their opinions on brand strategies, new software releases, logo redesigns, live speaker quotes from conferences attended, and other musings related to the profession of Communications. If that’s not what you see, it’s because you’re curating a different set of Twitter users than I am.
Read MoreWonders of the Internet
It’s all different now. That the Internet has fundamentally changed our lives is a well-worn truism. But if you’re a younger member of society–say, someone born in the 1980s–you probably don’t realize just how big that change has been. We were once islands of interest, alone in our peculiar fascinations. If you liked to sew dresses for dogs, it was easy to feel unique, imagining that no one else had your kind of creativity. Surely, no one else had the foresight to fill a niche for canine haberdashery.
Read MoreOf Librarians and Architects
The librarian and the information architect are more similar than they are different. They both practice their craft with the intent of efficiently connecting people with the information that they seek. But only one is going to shush you for talking too loudly in the stacks.
Read MoreSingle Labels for Diverse Content: an Impossible Task
In website redesign projects that I've led, I've often encountered the problems associated with ambiguous organization schemes. While there are other organization schemes, it's almost impossible to rely on a single solution. A combination of approaches is often best.
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