Frank Chimero: Horizontalism and Readability

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Frank Chimero appears to be advocating that designers investigate more aggressively the horizontal dimension in creating online reading experiences, as this blog attempts to do with some nifty landscape scripting. However, he cautions: “We may be able to kiss our scroll bars goodbye, but only if the implementations are seamless and better than the existing paradigm.” Very true. I think horizontal scrolling in desktop experiences is probably a nonstarter, but the idea has more than a fighting chance on the iPad.

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Adding Up Basic Maths

Since last November’s release of Basic Maths — the commercially-available, Subtraction.com-based theme for WordPress that I designed and developed with Allan Cole — I’ve been asked from time to time by friends and acquaintances how well it’s fared. My answer is usually that sales have been healthy but not spectacular, that I’m satisfied with the revenue that the theme has brought in, but also that it’s hardly enough for me to quit my day job.

As soon as I started having these conversations I began to realize that very few people really have a sense of what makes for a successful commercial theme, at least not numbers-wise. This included me, too, especially at the outset of my foray into the market, when my most specific ambition was basically ‘to sell a lot.’ Now with a little bit of experience under my belt, I certainly have a better idea of how to define success, but it’s based exclusively on my own personal experiences selling Basic Maths, with the benefit of very little if any intelligence from other commercial theme developers.

With that in mind, I decided early on that, when I had a sufficient amount of sales data logged, I’d try and share it so that others might benefit from it. Basic Maths was released on 14 Nov of last year, so there’s just over four months of records available to me; not a tremendous amount, but certainly enough to draw some early lessons regarding how theme sales work.

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Burn-on-Demand Movies

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Did you realize that a score of classic (and some not-so-classic) MGM films can be purchased on a burn-on-demand basis as of right now? The so-called “MGM Limited Collection” is available at this Amazon.com page. This seems like a fairly noteworthy innovation, though I’ve heard very little about it. That this collection brings back to light some obscure and little-seen films is a good thing, but unfortunately, the on-demand nature of the selection seems to preclude any of these movies from being rentable at Netflix or other sources.

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Interview with Typographer Panos Vassilou

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

The type site MyFonts poses questions to the man behind the Greek type foundry Parachute, and the creator of the wonderful formal script typeface Champion Script Pro. Big surprise: I very rarely find myself in need of the rich flourishes of a formal script face, but in the event that I ever do, Champion Script Pro would be at the top of my list; it’s gorgeous. Read the full interview.

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Weeks without Tweets

Have you ever had that feeling of nagging guilt, the kind that slowly simmers inside of you when you know you haven’t been keeping up with something you really should be keeping up with? Like bills piling up on your desk, or your office email left unchecked for days, or medicines not taken daily or as prescribed by your doctor? That’s sort of the feeling I have right now.

I took most of this month off from posting to this blog, but it’s been at least four or five weeks since I’ve logged into my Twitter account. At first I welcomed the respite, the break from posting updates regularly or coming up with interesting things to say. Then I began to miss it a little as I started accumulating a little backlog of ideas and links I wanted to tweet. Somewhere in the middle of the month though, it turned to a kind of dread of the unanswered queries and unrequited mentions, and now I have outright anxiety over wading through whatever awaits me there on the other side of that login. Urgh. Social media is too much work.

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Creative Director Mark Porter to Leave The Guardian

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

An unfortunate loss for a great newspaper. Porter has at least two distinctions of which he can be very proud: first, he was responsible for the stunning and justly praised redesign of the printed newspaper in 2005; and second, he rolled up his sleeves and with great humility and earnestness learned how to design for the Web in order to helm the design direction of Guardian.co.uk for the past several years. Under his direction, that site has been a continual source of inspiration to me, and it’s still well worth studying for anyone interested in publishing design. For my money, he may have made one of the most successful transitions to the digital medium of any print designer ever; there are scant few print-trained designers of any caliber who can match his canny grasp of what it means to design for the new century.

Read the full farewell note here.

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The League of Moveable Type

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Not a British fan society for SixApart’s flagship blog engine, but rather a clearing house for completely free typefaces available for download. At first glance, I was a little underwhelmed at the originality of the typefaces on offer, but at closer inspection they’re of commendably high quality. The first and most prominently displayed in their gallery, Matt McInerney’s Raleway, shown below, is quite nice on its own and quite amazing when you consider that it costs a total of none dollars. See the whole collection here.

Raleway

Thanks to Gong Szeto for the link.

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Why Can’t the World’s Best Architects Build Better Web Sites?

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Writing for Fast Company, design journalist Alissa Walker argues: “Architects are the original interactive designers. They’re skilled at creating navigable structures. They specialize in designing rich experiences for their users. But if architects designed their buildings the way they designed their Web sites, they’d all fall apart.”

I might say that the truth is that architects design sites that fall apart because they can’t design buildings that fall apart — and that they secretly yearn to do just that. Well, they don’t yearn to make unstable structures, but they do yearn to indluge their more fanciful ideas about spaces (albeit virtual spaces) free of the constraints of making them physically accommodating to real people. The Web is their opportunity to do just that, partly because a lot of these architects, in my estimation, just don’t take the Web that seriously, or at least seriously enough to really understand it before building for it. Read the full article here.

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