Jeffrey Zeldman's Blog, page 110
March 4, 2010
Van Damme, that's good design
Web designer Tim Van Damme, founder of Made by Elephant and blogger at Max Voltar, has skyrocketed from relative oblivion to comparative fame in little over a year. Before you succumb to jealousy, consider the man's work. Consider, for example, his spanking new redesign of Gowalla, Austin-headquartered AlamoFire's nifty, location-based social networking game for iPhone, Android, and even newer Blackberry devices (kind of).
Launched as a public beta in March 2009, Gowalla "uses ...
Digital books: the medium changes the message
"Content with form—Definite Content—is almost totally the opposite of Formless Content. Most texts composed with images, charts, graphs or poetry fall under this umbrella. It may be reflowable, but depending on how it's reflowed, inherent meaning and quality of the text may shift."
—Craigmod, Books in the Age of the iPad
March 2, 2010
March 1, 2010
Model Site
Web designer Joshua Lane, currently best know for doing fancy web stuff at Virb.com, has overhauled his personal site in ways that are aesthetically pleasing and visually instructive.
Like all good site redesigns, this one starts with the content. Whereas the recent zeldman.com redesign emphasizes blog posts (because I write a lot and that's what people come here for), Lane's redesign appropriately takes exactly the opposite approach:
There is a much smaller focus on blog posts...
New Franklin in Town
There's a new Franklin in town. It's TeeFranklin, designed by Tomi Haaparanta for T26. Haaparanta specializes in what we used to call grunge fonts, but you'd never know from his Franklin, which is classic and pure. In terms of available weights and styles (not to mention fanatical attention to detail), Haaparanta's new font can't compare to Font Bureau's ITC Franklin, but TeeFranklin is a nice and clean, and comes in 14 weights, which may be enough. Better still, according t...
February 28, 2010
February 27, 2010
Betting on the web
Must-read analysis at Daring Fireball anatomizes the "war" between Flash and web standards as a matter of business strategy for companies, like Apple and Google, that provide best-of-breed experiences on lowest-common-denominator platforms such as the web:
It boils down to control. I've written several times that I believe Apple controls the entire source code to iPhone OS. (No one has disputed that.) There's no bug Apple can't try to fix on their own. No performance problem...
The First Time
A friend's young son had just used the toilet and wiped himself for the first time.
She congratulated him on being a big boy.
To which he replied:
"Mother. Surely you don't expect me to do this for the rest of my life."
February 26, 2010
Doctorow on Pricing
In Publishers Weekly, blogger, novelist, and bon vivant Cory Doctorow discusses price discrimination("the idea that you make more money by segmenting your customers based on how much they're willing to spend") and demand elasticity ("the straightforward idea that new customers will come into your shop if you lower prices") and the roles played by hardcover and paperback, Kindle and iPad, Amazon and publishers in the future of book publishing.
