The other day I went to see what seemed as an interesting round-table-like event at the Museum for Design and Architecture. It ended up being pretty interesting. I imagine that it must be difficult to avoid “the Kindle question” when setting up a debate about printed publications. And no doubt it did come. No one had anything good to say but the local designer Ajdin Basic. His thoughts sparked up some of my own. During the conversation I actually realized that I don’t hold the typical distinction between printed books/publications and everything else that is digital. To me, the Kindle is closer to a book than a tablet or laptop.
It makes more sense to for me categorize these mediums by: things that glow in the dark and things that don’t. What is mediated by them is “content” and should be represented respectfully. It’s up to designers to solve that problem.
Does that make sense?
Also, I really like this comic.
Get it? Chrome bag? Get it?
There’s quite a few of us who bike to work and we all seem to share this small segment of the road on Celovska road. Right when you cross Tivolska there is a small stretch of the road that drops slightly and then turns back in to a slow climb, just enough that you have to pedal your heart out to get to the finish line. It’s pretty safe to race here. My best time is 33 seconds now, but I’m sure that will improve tomorrow.
This morning I woke up incredibly tired due to compensating the lack of sleep I missed the past week. As with every morning I checked email and twitter, but today I did it on the phone. It only takes one hand and I get to have the screen so close to my face I don’t need glasses. So I browsed through my twitter feed and clicked a few links. Three of those were links to articles of local media houses like Delo, Dnevnik, Mladina and Siol.net.
I didn’t read any of the articles. I couldn’t even see the text.
The thing is, none of them have mobile versions of their websites. So I got frustrated and browsed through the pages of all Slovenian news sites I could think of to see if any of them served a responsive version of the site. I found one: zurnal24.si — and it works great!
But let’s get back to those who don’t. We recently redesigned our blog at work and I wanted to learn using media-queries in CSS so I first explored the way the blog could respond to different widths of the devices people use. I checked what the most popular devices were on Google Analytics and experimented with three layouts. After a day of pasting code around I got impressive results, tested on a variety of devices, fixed some of the issues and it was ready to go out. And I’ll even say I’m slightly proud of it!
Now, our blog doesn’t really get that many clicks and we do not make any money off of it. The whole design is pretty simple so it was easy to figure out which parts are essential for a viewer on a smartphone. But the more I thought about it, these websites that make money off of ads are not really serving a good experience to mobile users. I wonder if advertisers these days even think about how their overpaid banners look on mobile devices? Or are they not being charged for those? Who knows. But I’m pretty sure they don’t.
Zurnal24.si did this so they serve one ad before the content starts, and the same one at the end of the article/page. It looks good and it’s not really that obtrusive. However on the desktop version of the site they only serve one ad once. But wait, that’s on the landing page. Every page deeper — background ads appear and banners that put content second or even last. On the mobile version, one extra ad appears beneath the one already served. Interesting choice. But damnit if advertisers knew how their ads were being displayed on phones. They alone should care enough to demand a responsive implementation of the site they are advertising on.
I’m sure I don’t know enough about this whole business to have a say, but media-queries are really easy to implement. When you’ll be poking around and doing research you’ll also have a brain-widening experience when you see all the things you can throw away when you’re establishing a hierarchy of importance on your whole site. If you’re not designing “mobile first” this is something you should really do.
For years I worked in various places where information designers would work away, headphones on, uninterruptible, and then drop a hundred or so wireframes on my desk. Depending on the information designers, these wireframes would be in several states of fidelity, from pencil sketches, to fully fleshed-out page mockups. They would then disappear into their next project. This is known as “waterfall” development.
Because you’d want to put them in a barrel and throw them over a waterfall.
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Design is a Job, by Mike Monteiro (amazing book, get it!)
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The more I observe myself as a blogger, the more I learn that most inspiration comes from reading books. Often it’s reassuring to read a famous writer’s words almost exactly overlay your own. It gives us hope, I think as we find a common language.
Last week I again read something that baffled me. The story was about two coworkers who have sat together for a number of years and rarely spoke. After one of them had moved away they kept in touch through email where they shared stories and thoughts about their work places. Over time they had become very personal. The narrator then made a point about how different forms of communication sometimes make way for closer relationships. And that’s weird, right?
Microserfs by Douglas Coupland (credit: Wikipedia)
Real life. What does “real life” mean today? I often find myself using the acronym “IRL” but when I think about it, the reference is gone. I remember high-school where some of us in class were marked by other as nerds for spending more time on the computer. Back then, when you talked to a girl on MSN Messenger, you could use the term IRL as in fact, there was a border between the two. A short time passed, a cold breeze and I think there is no distinction anymore. Computers shape our lives as much as other people do. Technology has become such an integral part of life that we don’t really jump between two states, modes of operation, but one increasingly blurry one. The transitions are a bit jagged, but we’re getting there.
And I completely understand that thought about email sometimes being way more personal than actual face time (no no, not the product). I’m just having a hard time deciding if this is a good thing or not.
- C32 flyer about closing doors
1.
