Posts in Websites

Display is a curated collection of important modern, mid 20th century graphic design books, periodicals, advertisements and ephemera. Documenting, preserving and providing public access to these original materials will raise the profile of Graphic Design as a source of educational, historical and scholarly analysis for teachers, students, designers and independent researchers. [link]

This is one of those sites I’m hesitant to blog about because I’m afraid you all will go there and buy all the books before I can. Of course Display is more than just a store: their collection is a terrific source of inspiration and history. I’m really impressed with how thoughtfully put together the whole site is; extremely well curated. Seriously you must visit this site — I am having a terrible time picking images for this post because they are all amazing.

OpenIDEO is a web platform for facilitating social innovation. It launched this past Monday and was developed by IDEO. It is designed as a collaborative creative space where everyone (designer or not) can come together and participate in the design process, through inspiration, concepting and evaluation. It is based around design challenges which start out as simple questions but tackle significant global challenges. Watch the video above to learn more. To really get a sense for the site, sign up on OpenIDEO and start adding inspirations!

The first challenge is for Jaime Oliver, the winner of this year’s TED prize and flag bearer of the Food Revolution in America. The goal is to find ways to raise awareness about the benefits of healthy and fresh food, especially for children. You can watch Jaime introduce the challenge in the video above.

I’ve been working as an intern at IDEO for the past 2 months and was able to participate in the first OpenIDEO internal challenge: to design the logo for the site. It was a really exciting process and I cannot wait to see these other challenges get put through the same paces. By breaking up the design process into these three easy phases, it ensures that important milestones are accomplished. I found the inspiration phase especially helpful, even for projects unrelated to the logo development.

I’ll be at IDEO through mid-September, when my master’s program begins again.

I don’t know how I haven’t posted on this sooner. It is basically the best internet tool that has ever occurred in the universe. TeuxDeux is a mega-simple web based to-do application. I’ve been using it since it came out and it is now a permanent part of my workflow; not just for business, but also for laundry concerns, In-N-Out runs, and whatever else I have to DO. And it’s free. Boom goes the dynamite as they say.

You can watch the video above for a quick description, but just about anyone could figure this out within seconds. Basically you write in what you have to-do under the day you have to do it. Cross it off when it’s done. View is seven days wide but can be scrolled through if you are the kind of person to plan ahead (do they exist?). There is also a Someday area for things to-do in the undetermined future.

The iPhone app version has been in development for what’s seemed like ages. But! I just read this morning that they’ve submitted it to the iTunes store, so keep an eye out for it on their site.

On a side-note, I love and hate the “Someday” bucket provided at the bottom of the list. It’s great because there is a ton of stuff that I don’t have time to do during a given week that I plop down there. The reason I don’t like it is because I am constantly reminded how many things I would like to do “Someday”. This can be discouraging if they stay down there too long. Conversely, crossing something off of the ‘Someday” list is very cathartic and replaces any discouragement you might have felt with a sense of accomplishment.

TeuxDeux is a result of the collaboration between swissmiss and Fictive Kin.

The Mid-Century Modernist has remodeled their website with a new and refreshed look. A few new features were added, one of which is gallery displaying a nice grid of vintage designer furniture that can be purchased from eBay. I find this feature particularly cool even though the price tags are pretty hefty for most of the items.

Dribbble is a place to share little snapshots of what you’re working on. It’s kind of like Twitter, except instead of being limited to 140 characters, you’re limited to 120,000 pixels. Better have a good eye for cropping!

Dribbble is show and tell for designers, developers and other creatives. Members share sneak peeks of their work as “shots” — small screenshots of the designs and applications they are working on. It’s also a place to talk design, give and receive feedback and iterate toward better work.

They exited private beta about a month ago and are in invite-only mode right now. I’m very impressed with how solid the site feels overall. Seems like they spent a really long time finessing all of the details. I haven’t had a chance to ‘dribbble’ any of my own projects, but I really like the concept and I think it could be really fun to use. If you want to try it out, you’ll need to be drafted.

After being “almost done” for the last couple weeks (months?), the newly redesigned Dropular has been released into the wild. Dropular, like FFFFOUND and vi.sualize.us, is a social bookmarking site for images. I used it a fair amount when it first came out; I liked how clean and streamlined the design was. It was also very easy to tell how images got to the front and what the “top” image criteria was (unlike FFFFOUND, which is a complete mystery to me). You could organize the content by “most dropped” of all time, the month, etc. You could also roll over images to see quickly how many people had added it to their collection. And if I remember correctly, there was an infinite scroll, which increased the likelihood that you would spend an inordinate amount of time browsing the backlog.

I haven’t really had a chance to play around with the new site too much yet, but it’s here and ready for testing. Everything looks OK to me thus far — it’s definitely still under development, so it’s kind of hard to judge whether or not things have improved. At the moment, most of the features I loved and mentioned above appear to be gone. Hopefully they are still to come (they have stated numerous times that features will continue to be rolled out as the release progresses).

It looks like registration will soon be open for new users, so keep an eye out if you didn’t have a chance to get an account last year.

Image via Olly M (was the first thing I Dropped when I signed up last year. Perhaps an apt motto for the Dropular development team…)

I’ve written posts on Content Management Systems before (Cargo Collective, Indexhibit) and I figured it was time to round out my overviews with a look at Squarespace. My personal site runs on Cargo, but I’ve built a few client sites with Squarespace and find it to be a really enjoyable and extremely easy way to design a website.

Squarespace is a fully hosted, completely managed environment for creating and maintaining a website, blog or portfolio. Since its inception, Squarespace has blossomed into a product that powers tens of thousands of sophisticated websites for businesses, bloggers, and professionals worldwide and currently serves hundreds of millions of hits per month.

Noteworthy Features

-Building a site with Squarespace is very intuitive. You can easily go through the whole process without ever catching a glimpse of any code. Like Cargo, if you know even the slightest bit of HTML/CSS you can easily tweak the site to look unique and not easily identifiable as a Squarespace template etc. The basic design view allows you to edit everything in real-time; so if you change the point size of the “body copy”, you will see it update immediately after you slide the little font-size slider. Feels a lot like Firebug in this way, except you aren’t manipulating code, you are manipulating clearly laid out values for all of the page elements. You just have to remember to hit “save changes” after every change you make. I constantly forget to do this.

– Fully functional blog platform. Like many CMS sites, Squarespace works really well as a blog or portfolio site. It’s very easy to post entries, edit old ones, etc, everything you would expect. Once you have the design of your site locked in, it’s just as easy to maintain and update as it was to build. The interface for blog editing can feel a little clunky sometimes, though I think this is because I’m used to WordPress where each open entry gets its own page. Squarespace editing happens as an overlay to the page which feels slower (whether it actually is or not I don’t know).

– The backend of a Squarespace is very well done. Not only do you have access to just about every statistic you could hope for, you are also able to edit some of the more tricky part of your site design. Things like search engine parameters, meta data, and security permissions are all easily editable. It also looks nice, which is a plus.

– Helpful forum. I’ve had many issues (usually due to my own failings with attempts to customize my weird CSS) which I’ve posted to the forum and in each case, the problem has been solved quickly and correctly. I’m always pleasantly surprised.

– They have a slick iPhone app that allows you to post blog entries and check out site statistics (among other things) on the go. And it’s free!

– One important difference to note is cost. Many CMS platforms are free, Squarespace is not. They have a simple pricing structure, but like many sites, the cheaper options are essentially useless. For example, any option where you can’t use a custom URL is immediately off the table in my mind. I’ve found the “Business” option to be the most useful (the form builder is the main reason for this). The crucial thing to note is that Squarespace is hosting your site, so you’re not just paying for the CMS, you’re also getting server space. When you look at it like that, it’s a lot easier to justify a monthly charge. (Of course, you will also have to pay for domain name registration elsewhere. Kind of annoying to have to split this up.)

My Experience

As I mentioned, I’ve built a few sites with Squarespace. The most recent of which I hoped would be finished in time for this article, but unfortunately we are waiting on some of the final content to come through before launching. The one I will mention instead is aeolas.net, the website for the fake/real aeronautical research firm Aeolas International.

Basically I needed a quick site that could host a blog and quickly display information about the company. The construction of this particular site took about 6 hours. I attribute the speed of the creation to the ease of the Squarespace interface (as well as low page count and small amount of total content). I didn’t move terribly far from the initial template, but I felt like I was able to give the site a unique feel. The most fun aspect has been the contact form; I would have had no idea how to actually make one of these with code. The fact that I could just insert it into the site with the click of a button was pretty cool.

There were some hiccups here and there early on, but nothing too frustrating. The need to ‘save changes’ after every alteration you make can get pretty annoying, but you get used to it after a while. Usually if I had an issue, it was because I was trying to do something either A) impossible or B) the completely wrong way.

I’d highly suggest taking Squarespace for a spin. They offer a free 14 day trial, so at least get in there and muck around. Take the tour here.

The University of Brighton has a nifty website up displaying the work of their Spring 2009 design and illustration graduates. I’ve placed some of my favorite pieces above, but there is a lot of impressive work to be seen. I think it’s great that the school puts this together for the graduates. While each student seems to be very web-capable (at least in terms establishing an online presence), this kind of collective resource allows each student to benefit from the aggregate buzz of the project. This institution-sponsored online portfolio presentation is something I think we will be seeing more and more of (in conjunction with, or probably as a replacement for, the onsite end-of-semester shows).

The work above is by the following designers, in this order: Kirsty Hole, Richard Carey, Edd Harrington, Kyle Bean. Those old school phones remind me of some of the work by Dan Mcpharlin.

via The Strange Attractor

Cargo is a terrific web publishing platform built with creatives in mind. Like many content management systems (Squarespace, Indexhibit, Joomla etc), Cargo provides a backend that allows you to quickly publish and maintain a website without ever opening Dreamweaver. What distinguishes Cargo is a focus on simple and effective design. Consistent in all Cargo templates is a layout that is clear and simple; allowing the work to speak for itself without a complicated interface getting in the way.

Cargo evolved out of the system that runs the SpaceCollective community. We found it remarkably successful and efficient in creating visual content on the web, placing a strong emphasis on design, layout, image quality and typography. Our goal is to dramatically increase the accessibility and exposure of creative individuals on the Internet, while aspiring to build a networked context that will contribute to the culture as a whole.– Cargo Collective.

Noteworthy Features
– Free hosting with the ability to set up a custom URL. This is awesome. I have also played around with Squarespace, but their hosting costs are a little frightening — especially if you are also paying URL registration on top of that.

– Multiple template designs to build off. Each one starts with a great layout and it’s really easy to apply your own brand. Simple manipulations of color, font, and header images etc quickly distinguish your site from the skeleton template.

– Follow feature, similar to Tumblr or Twitter — allows you to keep tabs on your favorite Cargo pages.

– Developer forum. I had a small issue which I posted to the forum — received a response within 3 hours. Not bad!

– Slideshow and Fullscreen features for viewing images. This is exceptionally easy to incorporate (just a matter of clicking the buttons) and is a really great feature. Works flawlessly and adds an extra touch of unique functionality.

My Experience

I spent the last few days migrating my portfolio to the Cargo system. I had done a lot of the preparation work a while ago, when I put a portfolio up on Behance, so I didn’t have to spend too long sourcing my images and writing description paragraphs. I was thrilled to be moving to a more personalized portfolio space — as much as I love Behance, sometimes it can feel a little too much like a design Myspace.

The set up process was quick, easy, and remarkably enjoyable. All in all I would say it took about 6-8 hours from start to finish. Most of this time was spent designing the look and feel after the content was uploaded. Once I got familiar with the CSS at work, it was just a matter of figuring out exactly how I wanted to look — altering fonts sizes, small layout tweaks, and making sure everything worked properly. I only hit one or two speed bumps, all easily solved by a quick Google search.

I think it’s important to note that I am not a “web guy” by any stretch of the imagination — if I can handle it, this is a good sign for anyone intimidated by the words “CSS” or “target blank”. Having a basic understanding of CSS/HTML helps, especially if you are planning on tweaking the template significantly, but it is not completely necessary. Even with my limited knowledge, I was able to make the adjustments necessary to create a site I am happy with. As mentioned, the important part of a site like this is the work, and I didn’t really feel like I needed to brand the site too extensively.

As of now, Cargo is in the pre-release stage. I am really excited to see how this system evolves as more and more people get involved. I would highly recommend it to anyone debating which CMS to choose. If you would like to apply for an account, use the contact address on the website.

Favorite Cargo Sites
but does it float
superfamous studios (aka Folkert Gorter)
The Office of Feltron
Avant
Jory Dayne

Ya heard 'bout me?!

I just wanted to say thanks to Adobe for having me and to everyone for checking out the articles this week. I had a great time writing for Inspire, be sure to keep an eye out next week for guest blogger Joshua Davis.

And now for a few selections that didn’t make the Inspire post: