fabulous font!

Just seen a great new font released by Darden Studio: 'Jubilat'

Very pretty! Just wish I could afford to buy it!



Link via the daily report (jeffrey zeldman)

fav favicons

Found an article posted by 'Smashing Magazine', that has 50 great favicons.
I really like these - nice and simple. Inspired me to do the Alternative Context favicon as just typography and very basic.

The article is here.

Creating easy web galleries with Lightbox2

I've been doing a bit of work the last few days on redesigning and actually adding some content to my business website. Part of the website includes some galleries - photography, and also a portfolio of web design and other work I've done.

Rather than embed flash or run something dynamic, I've gone down the static HTML pages route (the most dynamic bit is the server side includes!), and for galleries, I'm using Lightbox2 to generate the 'large' views as overlays on top of the current page. It works really well with my dark 'granite' (as I'm calling it) theme, and kind of mimics the 'lights out' functionality seen in Photoshop LightRoom.

Have a look at it in action on my 'Places' gallery (architecture and various landscapes).

Not going down the dynamic gallery route is causing me a bit of grief, having to type in all those image links, but I could spend months coding something up, which would probably annoy me even more :)

If you've interested in finding out more, have a look at the Lightbox2 site, and check out their examples.

mmm iphone UI

there are a few things from the iPhone UI I'ld love to try to implement on a normal html website. Might have to try them out myself - wonder if Apple would be upset with someone reusing their 'design' (or the concepts anyway) in a different context.

the 'slider' for on/off (boolean) type fields - the iPhone has these pretty 'slider' buttons for yes/no on/off etc fields which could probably be implemented with a tweaked version of the Yahoo UI slider - would need some nice images for the 'background' and the slide image. Would need to be still accessable by keyboard tho for tabbing through - wonder if it's possible.

'flicking' a page up and down. guess the only way to do that in today's browsers would be to embed the site into a control of some kind that could handle the 'flick' and click/drag functionality

dConstruct

d.Construct is another user experience conference i'm considering attending...
7th September 2007 in Brighton

Some of the same presenters i've seen at the fowd conference earlier this year - hopefully it's not too hung up on web design, as that's such a small part of user experience/interface design.

I like the idea of their web design -- if I'm looking correctly, as time goes on they'll update the site to follow the standard progress of a site design - starting at hand sketched wireframes, and moving through the design process to being a *finished* product in August.
Tho if it was me doing this, the text on the page needs to be more hand written (or at least look like it's been cut out and stuck down), lots of red scribble and arrows and unreadable notes, and the logos etc 'taped' on for that really authentic sketched interface look :)

great filler text

so many apps leave blank spaces or boring messages when fields/text areas have nothing to display. kudos to google calendar for making their 'comments' area a bit more interesting :)

Sorry, nothing to read here. Try Google News if you are bored.

good error pages

The technorati 500 server error page is a good example of what to do when your site blows up - a bit of fun and no confusing stack traces :) I like the bloglines plumber too, but don't have a screenshot of that right now.

(Edit: yeah I am bored at work today!)

fowd conference

Details for the future of web design conference in london (april 18th) just got announced.

Looks kinda interesting - lots of talks by designers from websites that are all pretty much 'web 2.0' type stuff (flickr, moo, 37signals). Will have to look through the other speakers sites and see if they are designing for different channels - some e-commercey type sites or enterprisey type ones would be interesting to listen to also.

What would be interesting is designing for intranets - as from what I've seen, enterprise intranets/wikis/CMS type systems/web based interfaces are makin inroads into large organisations, and most that I've seen are pretty ugly! I'ld be interested in hearing from someone who has successfully mixed good design with a usable/friendly UI and yet still integrated with the whole 'corporate' look and feel.

An oldie but a goodie - Taming Lists

First published in 2002, 'Taming Lists' on A List Apart is still the best article on styling lists with css. Everytime I need to style a list I find myself referring to this article.

http://alistapart.com/articles/taminglists/

Radio buttons vs Combo/Dropdown boxes

Something that really annoys me is the mis-use of radio buttons vs dropdown/combo/option boxes in user interfaces.

A lot of the time, people think putting a dropdown in place instead of a radio button is more 'usable' because it takes up less space. I disagree in some situations....

In my opinion, dropdowns should be used when the options in the dropdown follows a sequental pattern of some kind - ie dates, months, placenames, counters, booleans, phone number type (mobile/home/work) etc.

Where they shouldnt be used is when each option doesnt nicely fit a sequence, or the user can't 'guess' straight away what option to select - ie when selecting different 'states' (I can't come up with a really good example right now!) which will ususally require the user having to select the dropdown and reading through each option before they can determine what to put in.

I guess my reasoning here is if the dropdown contains options that aren't obvious what they will be, everytime someone hits that page, they may have to select the dropdown anyway to be able to scan the available options, and make sure they HAVE got the right one.

I must see if anyone has some data on this already...

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