Archive for the ‘Design’ Category

The rise of ‘Share’ & ‘Follow’ on the web

Posted by in Design on June 23rd, 2010

This paradigm of large social media sites being omnipresent (even on other people’s sites!) is still a fairly new one, so it’s not surprising the design community doesn’t have it completely figured out yet…

Read More

The goings on at the UX Book Club Chicago monthly meetings (3/31/10)

Posted by in Design, News, Reviews on April 1st, 2010

If you’re not already familiar with the UX Book Club’s Chicago chapter, let me get you up to speed. It’s a small group of passionate design folks who meet downtown to talk about things in the industry. Such as our jobs, our roll as designers, and what is going on in our professional spheres. We praise each other’s triumphs, as well as bitch about other designers, clients, educators, etc. We also digress into joking about current events, or corporate drug testing, or Battlestar Galactica, or whatever happens to pop up organically throughout the evening. Oh yeah, and there’s books too.  Every…

Read More

SXSW 2010

Posted by in Code, Design, Findings, News on March 29th, 2010

SXSW

Being involved in the web industry, one event always comes to mind when talking about big conferences, South by Southwest. One of my New Year’s resolutions was to attend this event to see what it had to offer and to experience what all the commotion was about. I have to admit, SXSW was my first real conference, so I don’t really have anything to compare it to, but from what I have heard and what I experienced, it’s hard to compare it to anything in the first place.

Before heading to the conference I did not really know what to expect.…

Read More

What I’ve learned: Time for the ad industry to catch up.

Posted by Ryan Nasipak in Code, Design, Inspiration, Usability on March 16th, 2010

Ok, everyone take a deep breath. I’m not going to go on an endless rant on why I think more companies need to modernize their approach to rich media ads……or am I? (cue evil laugh) Ahhhh-ha-ha-ha-ha.

What I will say is that a little more progressive thinking would help cut out a lot of the senseless number of versions required for some companies running rich media ads and also (potentially) increase your margin for success. So how did I come to this conclusion? Through recent conversation with some ad partners and also jumping through a technical hurdle or two.

We recently…

Read More

Abstracting the web, the iPad, and print media coming full circle.

Posted by in Business, Design, News, Usability, browsers on February 15th, 2010

In another blog post, I brought up the topic of how the web is being “abstracted” into new mediums and devices such as Rich Internet Applications, netbooks and tablets (e.g. the iPad). After pondering this topic a little more, it hit me that that this concept might be a lot bigger than I initially thought, and deserving of an individual posting.

RS_SurfTheWeb

As I already mentioned, there are new mediums and devices coming out that are abstracting the web and displaying the content in other more unique forms. Instead of the typical user sitting down at his/her work station and loading up…

Read More

Awesome Dev+Design Playground

Posted by in Code, Design, Findings, Inspiration, Uncategorized on January 28th, 2010

Every so often I come across a company or community of developers (and designers) who put out great, inspiring, innovative work…for free.

I believe a big part of being an active member of any community, such as the “people who build websites community”, is to give back and provide people with the opportunity to learn and grow.  On top of giving information and showing how things can be done and built, every now and then you come across work that is a notch above the rest.

Recently, I was browsing a popular design/dev website and came across this playground, built and maintained…

Read More

A perspective on rating systems

Posted by in Design on January 7th, 2010

It seems that there is a lot of talk that ’5-star’ rating systems are on the way out (or at least proving themselves to be less valuable than previously thought). You see them everywhere recently, but some data now suggests that they are not as effective as they could be. This may not be due to the system being flawed however, but rather how and when they are implemented. Studies are indicating that often times people will click on either 1 or 5 with an overwhelming tendency towards 5. Check out this techcrunch article on how youtube users tend rate videos. For…

Read More

8 things Ushering in the “New School” of Web Development, Part 1

Posted by in Code, Design, Inspiration, Reviews on December 29th, 2009

In the grand scheme of my profession, that being a Web Developer, I would still consider myself to be a rookie.  I have been developing web sites and getting paid for it, for around 3 years; however, I would probably say that I have been doing it “professionally” for around a year and a half.  Even with my “rookie” status as a web developer, I do consider my talents to be very respectable, especially for the relatively short period of time I have been doing it.  One thing I have noticed since I began my career is the difference between,…

Read More

A “new era” of web design…poster design

Posted by in Design, Findings, Inspiration on December 8th, 2009

I can’t really put a finger on when it happened, but at some point in the not so distant past, web design broke through a pretty major glass ceiling.  Up until this point web design was bound and constricted to what web ( and physical ) technology would allow it to do.  Web technologies started with table based layouts, web friendly fonts and tiny display resolutions.  It then progressed to CSS, web standards and the integration of application and interaction design.  Now, with HTML5, CSS3 and new javascript methodologies, we are able to build creative and inspiring websites that are…

Read More

Nike ‘Delicious Is…’ Contest launches today!

Posted by charles in Design, News on November 18th, 2009

Nike Delicious Logo We’re excited to announce we’ve completed work on the new Nike Women’s Training ‘Delicious Is…’ Contest and it is set to launch today! The micro-site is loaded with interactive features that allow young female athletes the chance to upload photos and text, vote and review all other entries. We also handled all creative and copywriting too!

You can check it out here: http://www.highschoolsports.net/nike-delicious-is-contest/

Read More
Shiny Things