September 2002

Lost in Space[r]

I was looking up flights to Miami on Orbitz.com today for an AIGA design conference I’ll be attending in November. I came across this awkward rendering [.gif, 48 KB] of their much-touted “matrix display”. All missing images pointed to http://www.orbitz.com/d.gif, presumably a transparent spacer gif. I think it ironic… continued

link 30 Sep 2002 in Web 44

How to Build a Portfolio

I’ve been debating how to build out my portfolio pages for the last few days. The current pages are all flat files that required a ton of work to create, and have been a nightmare to update. I’d like to create a portfolio section that uses one template and… continued

link 28 Sep 2002 in Personal

Teaching CSS

I’ve been planning out the structure for a CSS workshop we’ll be offering to Lycos designers and developers sometime later this month. I’ll be collaborating with Steve Mulder, a colleague of mine in Boston, who wrote a book on style sheets when CSS was still brand spankin’ new. I… continued

link 27 Sep 2002 in CSS

Measured Accessibility Improvements

Tom, a colleague and IA in our User Experience group in Boston, took the time today to run some Wired News pages through the Bobby accessibility evaluator. For comparison, he tested both the old and new WN designs, along with Cnet’s News.com. As I noted in one of my… continued

link 25 Sep 2002 in Web, Wired

Time for Major Surgery

I started batting around ideas for a redesign of stopdesign.com a few weeks ago. Today, I actually made progress by sketching out some rough ideas and planning a simple architecture. The site has basically remained untouched in the four years since I launched it when I founded Stopdesign. Since… continued

link 22 Sep 2002 in Design, Personal

Well Said

When Eric Meyer visited last week, we pressed him for a quote or two about the Wired News redesign. I was blown away with what he sent back. While his comments were intended for the press release and the story our Editor is writing, I asked him if I… continued

link 21 Sep 2002 in Wired

Issue-based Content

Finally had a chance over the last two days to begin thinking about the Wired magazine site design. The current site is riddled with usability problems, poor architecture, and a very awkward design. I can be brutally honest about it, because I worked on this design over four years… continued

link 19 Sep 2002 in Design, Wired

Versioning

We implemented a secondary version control technique for Wired News images and CSS files this week. Images and CSS files have been moved one level deeper than they were, into a folder named according to the current release date (ie: 20020917). Each major revision or addition we make can… continued

link 17 Sep 2002 in Web, Wired

Missing Style Sheets?

We moved some of our CSS and image files to a different central server today which we can all reference for design and development versions of the site. I almost immediately noticed that Mozilla and Netscape browsers weren’t rendering our pages using styles anymore. A search on Google turned… continued

link 16 Sep 2002 in CSS, Web

Meeting Mr. Meyer

Eric Meyer came to the Bay Area this week to take care of business at Netscape’s headquarters in Mountain View. So while Eric was in town, he and I set up a time to meet each other and talk about the Wired News redesign. He came by our office… continued

link 12 Sep 2002 in People

Success in User Testing

My colleagues in Boston ran some users through the Wired News design prototypes this week. While we were fairly confident that many of the usability problems of the old design had been addressed, we wanted to make sure there weren’t any glaring errors that we hadn’t addressed yet. We… continued

link 6 Sep 2002 in Wired

Relative URIs Within CSS

We made an important discovery today which will help us simplify the maintenance and version control of the style sheets for Wired News. It has to do with importing additional CSS files and referencing images from within any CSS file. Since I’m the original and final author of the… continued

link 4 Sep 2002 in CSS

Labor Day Break

I’m in San Diego for the extended weekend, spending time with good friends, trying not to labor too much. We spent some time last night enjoying phenomenal Italian food at one of our favorite Point Loma restaurants, Old Venice. I’d highly recommend a nice dinner there if you ever… continued

link 2 Sep 2002 in Locations, Personal