Category Archives: Web Design

Board to Death

phpBBFor several months, I’ve been working on and off in my free time on developing a small Web site for a shareware developer, and part of that process has, recently, entailed trying to construct a reasonably attractive user forum using phpBB. This free community software is impressively powerful, but after having spent several hours today trying to make sense of its template construction, I have to say that it’s a mess. Have a look at the source code on a phpBB board and you’ll see a soup of embedded styles and nested tables that is mind-numbingly confusing to get through, to say nothing of the style sheet, which raises organizational distraction to an art.

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Forum Follows Function

AIGA Design ForumIf you have something to say about design and you’re looking for a place to say it online, you now have the added option of saying it at the new AIGA Design Forum, which just launched today and is vastly improved and much easier to use. At least, that’s my humble opinion, as it’s yet another project from your friends over at Behavior. I first alluded to this major undertaking about a month ago, which is some indication of how long I’ve been excited about getting it launched. We actually started talking with the good folks at the AIGA about this when the weather was still warm and before the leaves completely abandoned the trees, so it has a relatively long history. A little bit of which I’ll go into here.

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Sliders and Buttons, Oh My

Nice Little ArrowHerewith, a few of the user interface widgets that I’ve been tinkering with lately for a Behavior project; only sliders/scroll bars and buttons here, but I’ve recently turned out four or five entire interface comps that wouldn’t look particularly conspicuous alongside most any Aqua-friendly Mac OS X application. Well, that’s my humble opinion, anyway, because I’m still getting comfortable with working in this aesthetic.

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Foxy Bird

Mozila FirefoxA new version of the resurgent Mozilla project’s Firebird browser was released yesterday under the new name “Firefox,” which seems to me to be an even dodgier moniker than Firebird, but I guess they had a good reason for the switch. I downloaded the Mac OS X version and played around with it a bit today, and it seems buggier than previous versions of Firebird that I’ve used; I had some trouble scrolling through a few Web pages, troubles that seemed caused by the application’s user interface, rather than the rendering engine.

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Beautiful Girls

RonyShram.comFor no good reason, I neglected to write about RonyShram.com, a site that Behavior launched about two weeks ago. It’s an online portfolio that we built for an old colleague that we knew in the dot-com boom, who went on, somewhat surprisingly, to build a career photographing beautiful women. (And all I got was this lousy LLC!) The site was authored in Flash, which is practically de rigeur for photographers’ sites, but the back-end uses some clever PHP to make administration dead easy; all that’s required to reorder, replace or remove photos is simply moving JPEGs in and out of directory folders.

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The Road Runner Ahead

Road RunnerWhen the first previews of Mac OS X’s “Aqua” interface made their way around the Web, I remember a designer friend of mine pronounced them to be “ass.” This was in the midst of a rage for a pixel-based aesthetic that fetishized jaggy fonts and graphics tied intimately to the display limitations of computer monitors.

Many designers then looked down upon any design element that was anti-aliased, shaded or that cast a shadow of any sort, and yet it’s since become apparent that this is the future of interface design. Soon afterwards, Windows XP copied much of the same aesthetic, and Windows applications like the recent version of AOL and new programs like Picasa have whole-heartedly embraced this direction.

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Ghosts of Dotcom Bubbles Past

Rare Medium LivesThis will be of interest mostly to people who used to work with me at Rare Medium: the company, surprisingly, still lives, and not just in the perfunctory, diminished, managerial-only form in which it’s been limping along for the past two years. The old Atlanta office is actually still in the business of Web development and technology consulting, having bought all of that location’s assets from the parent company (at least, that’s what I understand happened) and adopted the URL RareMedium.net.

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Snapshot of the Photographic Web

My latest assignment at Behavior is developing a portfolio site for a commercial photographer, so I spent a lot of time today looking at various photographers’ Web sites for research. There’s no shortage of these to be found online, which means there is a fairly well-established orthodoxy of ‘best practices’ — slick Flash animation, non-scrolling presentation areas (often in daughter windows, minimal true interactivity, the same three or four major sections — but it also means that many of them are more or less indistinguishable from one another.

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Good Day for Muléh

MuléhNew work from Behavior: this evening we launched a redesign for Muléh, (pronounced moo-lay) a D.C.-area retailer specializing in imported, high-end furniture. It’s certainly not the largest scale site we’ve ever done, but it’s a lot of fun launching smaller sites as well — the path from concept to completion is much less circuitous. Muleh.com is almost 100% XHTML Transitional 1.0-compliant, relying entirely on a simple CSS file for layout; we’ll be tweaking things here and there over the next several days to get it up to code. The site is also driven by the endlessly handy Movable Type, which was the perfect light-weight content publisher for a do-it-yourself kind of client who didn’t want to learn a complex CMS. Now I go to sleep.

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