John Maeda on Simplicity

Filed under: Design, Development — Micheal on March 11th, 2008

I am always on the search for like-minded “Hybrid Minded” individuals. One such individual is John Maeda, an amazing designer/programmer with a focus on simplicity. This presentation is both informative and hilarious. John Maeda is a professor at MIT, read more about simplicity at his blog.

Planning, Mockups, and the Lack Thereof

Filed under: Design, Planning, Rants — Micheal on November 8th, 2007

The mockup period during a project is very important. This is the time in which all of the ideas originally discussed during initial planning (which should have been turned into a brief) will be incorporated into either design or call to action documentation. During this time interaction design, usability and information architecture are taken into consideration. Overall concepts are presented to the client. Revisions occur. There is a decision before going to production.

Again, the mockup period is very important.

I question why some think otherwise. Why do people skip roughly 20% of the entire project and wonder why the end result is nothing like the brief? This is no new problem.

Mockups can be used in all sorts of projects, from print to application development. This can also be considered prototyping or comps. Short list, but I recommend the following reading:

http://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/mock-ups.html
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/method

Dealing with IE 5.5+ when using PNG Transparency

Filed under: Design — Micheal on October 12th, 2007

Most modern browsers support PNG transparency quite nicely (IE 7 still has problems). There has been a large migration to Internet Explorer 7; however, there is still a large amount of people using IE 6. I still get about 30% of IE 6 users. Depending on the purpose of the site, I see no problem in using transparency in PNG’s. I am not a fan of mixing JavaScript with design, but the following solution works nicely. Keep in mind that there can be small delay inbetween the time the page is loaded and the JavaScript is applied, ussually only noticable if the images are large. In CSS, all that needs to be done is to call a behavior attribute that points to the .htc file containing the JavaScript. The “behavior” attribute needs to be applied to whatever element containing PNG’s with transparency. This can be as easy as:

img {
  behavior: url(iepngfix.htc);
}

If you are anal like me, you are going to want your CSS to validate. Due to the behavior attribute being proprietary to IE, it is recommended to split off the CSS so it is only seen by IE 5.5 and IE 6.

To download the iepngfix.htc and to view an example, go to: http://www.twinhelix.com/css/iepngfix/demo/

For individuals that care
I enjoy pushing my skills to the edge and always trying to approve upon what I know. HybridMinded.com is a good example of my love for patterns, gradients, and transparency. While the background attribute in web design is sometimes overlooked or given little thought, it can be a very powerful when used correctly.