The business card that never was
Posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 10:46 am
This is my ill-fated business card for Jaguar Design...the company that I'm leaving next week for a better-paid position in San Francisco.
Jaguar is a really small company, so my ability to wear many different hats was indispensable. One day I would be their print master, then I was their web master...so we decided my utility should be expressed on my business card.
Three check boxes for my most frequent titles, and a blank line for anything else that might come up.
Goofing off with AS3
Posted on Sunday, December 9th, 2007 at 4:59 pm
I have a weird relationship with AS3. As a designer, I hate how different it is, but, as a developer, I love how much easier it is to work with:
A Quick FAP
Posted on Sunday, December 9th, 2007 at 4:55 pm
To help inspire growth on FAP, I've released A Quick FAP. It's kind of like how people share videos on YouTube, now artists can share their works on their blog.
Eyetracking points the way to better design
Posted on Sunday, December 9th, 2007 at 4:42 pm
When photos do contain people related to the task at hand, or the content users are exploring, they do get fixations. However, gender makes a distinct difference on what parts of the photo are stared at the longest. Take a look at the hotspot below.What have we learned? Know your audience. If you're designing for men (especially straight ones) show lots of crotch shots.
Although both men and women look at the image of George Brett when directed to find out information about his sport and position, men tend to focus on private anatomy as well as the face. For the women, the face is the only place they viewed.
-From OJR
Colour by Complex Math
Posted on Sunday, December 9th, 2007 at 4:42 pm
The hotlinked error images are now mathemagically coloured with random, complimenting or high contrasting tints.
I was busy geeking around with the graphics processing powers of PHP...when I became suddenly inspired and discovered a solution to a very difficult colour processing problem I had been having!
One of the new features I've been working on for FAP2 is the ability to search by colour. Currently, artists can tag colours themselves, but I would like to automate it so that the server calculates the colours upon upload and adds the correct tags for you.
Writing a program that evaluates colours quickly has been...difficult. But! I think I discovered a faster method tonight:
So, like, it creates a list of the 9 most frequently occurring colours, then compares to a limited list of colour tags (eg, black, white, orange, red, pink, purple, blue, etc...). Awesome.
I need to release the new fap, like, now. So I can play with these features on a larger base of art...grumble...
Preventing Hotlinking, the sexy way
Posted on Sunday, December 9th, 2007 at 4:40 pm
Recently, a lot of FAP's bandwidth has been going towards hotlinked images. This isn't very cool. But, instead of slapping down an ugly 403-image...like...
...FAP sends a polite, eloquent, beautiful little message to the person trying to take our bandwidth.
Sacrifice design to get there first
Posted on Sunday, December 9th, 2007 at 4:38 pm
"You can establish yourself with a typically bad interface, if you're early and lucky or if you have the market power to force people to use your product. See Myspace, Amazon, MSN, Windows, QuarkXPress. Once you get to be market leader with a typically complicated interface, you actually have a good shot at keeping your users, as they're that traumatized that they wouldn't want to go through another painful learning process. Nowadays you have a better chance to become successful though, if you go for simplicity and usability. And you have a good chance to develop a strong brand by just doing that."
-From Information Architects, Japan
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