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Although I spilled the beans in an interview yesterday, I wanted to formally announce a personal project called Bootswatch. It’s a collection of themed swatches that you can download for free and drop into your Bootstrap site. You can check it out at bootswatch.com. Continue reading »
I recently spent way too much time trying to find a domain for a project. Every good .com, and even most of the terrible ones, had long been claimed by squatters.
This got me to wonder how startups are dealing with this. From reading the news, it seems as though more and more are going with alternative TLDs like .me and .us. Many are even using domain hacks to turn this weakness into a strength. Are we reaching a tipping point with alternative TLDs, given their increasing visibility and viability? Continue reading »
Today our attention is divided among many apps on many devices, networked and constantly updating. Given this, status badges are used more than ever to help users maintain awareness. They’re used everywhere from operating systems to applications to websites, to varying degrees of success.
What makes a badge well-designed is that it communicate a bit of timely information in a punchy way. This is accomplished through consistency and contrast. Consistency helps users to recognize a badge by sticking with a standard look and position. Contrast helps users to notice a badge by choosing a color and shape that stands out from the content. Continue reading »
Here’s a quick guide to multitouch gestures on Kindle Touch, since Amazon doesn’t provide documentation and some commands are less than obvious. Gestures include taps, holds, swipes, and pinches. Let me know if there are any I’ve missed. Continue reading »
Over at 99designs, businesses can hold contests to get logos designed for them. To provide better direction to identity designers than “I’ll know it when I see it” or “just make it pop”, each business is asked to create a design brief that includes a description of their business, the type of logo they want, and the values that their logo should communicate.
The values are dubbed manliness, maturity, bling factor, ageness, fun, volume, complexity, and in-your-faceness in the source code, and they’re input via sliders on an integer scale from -5 to +5.
The sliders seem like a good idea, but I began to wonder about them. To what extent do contest holders really use them? What values do businesses wish to communicate? Are they useful to designers?
All of the design briefs on 99designs are publicly accessible, so naturally the research side of me took hold. To get at the questions above, I ended up scraping slider data for the last 999 contests1. Continue reading »
