User experience expert – John Yesko, gave this latest presentation and the topic was “Rich User Experience Documentation – Beyond Static Wireframes.”
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Haystack is here! Our initial thoughts…
Well, Jason Fried, the President of 37signals, announced the imminent release of Haystack on his Twitter page in October, and now it’s officially here – Haystack. Haystack is similar to a job posting board, but is engineered to allow design agencies to post themselves in a single destination and hopefully get located (like a needle in a haystack) by prospects all over the country or in their city.
This is a good idea for 37signals (the company behind the product) as it potentially places them squarely in the middle of that intersection where design agencies and companies in need of interactive services…
Read MoreAn Event Apart: Chicago 2009 – Web Form Design
I had the opportunity to attend An Event Apart: Chicago 2009 this past week+ (thanks Ted & Charles!) and was fortunate enough to catch Luke Wroblewski’s presentation on web form design.
I was pleasantly surprised that one of the most boring topics on paper was actually one of the most interesting of the conference. I don’t know if that’s a testament to Luke’s work or an indictment on the rest of the speakers (who were, in my estimation, pretty mediocre…save Dan Rubin) but I’d rather not dwell on the negatives of the event (for now).
As a designer, the form page has always…
Read MoreAn Event Apart – What’s the Content Strategy
I recently attended ‘An Event Apart‘ here in Chicago. A conference for web professionals with some of the industry’s leaders delivering messages about cutting edge design and the best practices we should all be following.
The speaker in my opinion who stole the show was Kristina Halvorson, author of the book ‘Content Strategy for the Web.’ She made the observation that content on a website is critical to its success, but is often left neglected until the end of a project. She (accurately) pointed out that many of us spend most of the time designing a website around its content and…
Read MoreBillups Design wins prestigious Horizon Interactive Gold and Bronze awards
Though the official announcement isn’t due out for a few days, we’ve learned that we took home two big awards this year at the Horizon Interactive 2009 competition. markshale.com won Gold in the eCommerce / Sales category and may win more honors. And Hyatt’s hotelvictorsouthbeach.com won the Bronze in the Travel Industry category. Thank you to our talented and brilliant team here at BD. And thanks to our innovative and ambitious clients who inspire us to do our very best work for them.
Read MoreReview: MacRabbit’s Espresso
A couple weeks ago Macrabbit released the much anticipated Espresso 1.0 application. Its meant to rival the feature set of Panic’s Coda by being more or less a one stop shop for editing, uploading, and previewing Web files. Espresso doesn’t take on quite as much as Coda but what features they did do, they did with style.
It’s clear from the moment you open Espresso that the application is meant for web designers that code their own front ends. The sort of people that take good aesthetic design into their purchasing decisions. The welcome screen is a beautiful, albeit unnecessary, illustration…
Read MoreAlternative to TinyURL – I prefer SnipURL
Everyone has their favorite little utilities, especially when it comes to taking long gangly links and shortening them for Twitter and other social apps. I like SnipURL.com best because it has a great cross-browser bookmarks bar button that converts links on-click (gotta love javascript). Here’s what else it does:
- it seems faster than TinyURL (although as of today I noticed 500,000+ snips, and their total is 28 million so they are getting lots of traffic suddenly too with the popularity of Twitter)
- it has tracking and management of snips
- the browser button is great
Is Canvas the End of Flash?
There’s no mistaking it, we love flash around here. However, it’s of my opinion that flash is going out. When you look back at why Flash was created and why it exists today its because designers and developers pushed the boundaries of HTML/CSS/Javascript too far and needed something more. Those standard web tools can’t do enough and thus we throw it all out the window and use flash instead. Well with Safari 4, and the upcoming Firefox 3.1, we’re going to see the beginning of the end for Flash. Why is this? One word, “Canvas”.
The canvas tag is most simply…
Read MoreWeb Design and Development on Ubuntu
For years we’ve supported open-source development and creative commons, building some of the first instances of ecommerce on Linux machines and JRun. Now that we do less hosting and more design/development so we primarily use Linux machines as desktops. One favorite flavor of *ix we like is Ubuntu, both on Windows boxes and many more as virtual machines on MacIntel. Here is a collection of tools we use for web dev and design:
Creative Tools
Wonderful 2D drawing program called Xara Extreme.
Inkscape is similar to Illustrator or Xara.
An easy to use 3D modeling app called Art of Illusion.
Full featured 3D modeling app: Blender.
A…
Kontain
I checked these guys out a month or two ago and they were definitely interesting, mainly because I was surprised someone had the gall to create another blogging application. I just watched their Super Bowl ad and they obviously have some backing. The one thing that makes them unique is that they are 100% Flash in a sea of blogging apps that are built using HTML/CSS like flickr and smugmug or desktop apps like iPhoto and Picassa. They are going after a niche by going with the full-featured framework and range of object oriented Flash, but it’s always hard to tell…
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