I didn’t post once in the month of April. So here is a photo of a yeti and a stormtrooper.
Checking in
The Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny
I wasn’t planning on linking to anything involving SXSW this week since every going-on there will be blogged and tweeted to death without me, but I liked the premise of this: Three dev teams were tasked with producing a website to uniform design, content and technical specifications within 100 hours, each in a different CMS: Drupal, Joomla or WordPress. My friend Tom Boutell provides session notes (and better backgrounding than the Showdown site provides).
Ultimately, the result is not a proof of any platform’s superiority, but that there’s sufficient functional overlap of the low and high end CMSes to make specifying a platform a considerably less nervewracking experience than it was a couple years ago.
Incidentally, Tom just announced Context at SXSW today, a brand new CMS based on the Symfony framework.
The Cute Cat Theory
Any sufficiently advanced web technology has three things in common: Cat pictures, political action, and porn. Ethan Zuckerman provides a fascinating rumination not only on what a successful network technology needs (uptime and usability, of course) but on what the hallmarks of that success are. In the case of activism, access to the media in many countries is a matter of getting in, through, and around sometimes draconian controls; the service itself has to operate fluidly, quickly, and broadcast as broadly as possible or it will be replaced with something cheaper, easier, and more effective. The most successful web platforms (such as YouTube and Twitter) become vital channels of communication in ways that are sometimes only obvious in hindsight.
This is the best essay I’ve read in the past week.
New York Times article skimmer
This looks like a skunkworks project within the New York Times. It’s very nice: The grid scales to the window size, all the navigation can be done through the keyboard, and holding the shift key down can enlarge a story preview. It seems elegant to me in part because I figured out most of the keyboard navigation before checking the help prompt. Some of the keyboard navigation is relatively awkward (and won’t work on the iPhone), but doesn’t get in the way of simply using your mouse (if you’re using one). Via waxy.org.
Edit: Just noticed that articles’ foreground/background contrast converge to grey as they age. Check the Fashion & Style section to compare articles across a range of two weeks: Anything over six days old is considered fully stale.
Look at this cat!
Cats are nature’s way of saying “hey, cats!”
What’s Your Suggestion?
Derek Powazek’s been writing a series of things-I’ve-learned style posts. This one struck a chord because it elaborates on how the culture in design school that fosters nonstop criticism from all angles doesn’t translate so well into the business world. It makes me wonder why more art school grads with the appropriate technical aptitude aren’t using that discipline to useful effect in software and UI design.
The Black Triangle
The most significant accomplishments in programming, the signs that tells you the foundations are good and the systems work, rarely come with impressive visual displays.
I’m in the final stages of a major project right now so posting will continue to be light. The project itself should be good for a couple posts after it goes live, as it’s doing things in Joomla that I haven’t seen elsewhere yet.
YMCK interviewed
One of my favorite chiptunes artists, in part because their music manages to be both sunny pop and more complex than most 8-bit bands. Start with the retro-style music videos and stay for the interview.
More new bigger typography
Jason Kottke recently redesigned his popular website, getting rid of the yellows, playing with some funny decoration positioning tricks and changing the typography, making everything considerably larger. The new specified default font size is 16px, roughly the same size as the text you’re reading now and on sites like Wilson Miner’s. Score another one for aging web users whose vision is getting worse with time.
About namedrops his font of choice: “Whitney by Hoefler & Frere-Jones.” This comes through in the design: Whitney is the first font specified in the stylesheet, followed by Myriad Pro, Helvetica, Helvetica Neue, Arial, and then falling back on whatever the designated sans-serif may be.
The site’s unlikely to look like it does on Jason’s computer for more than a couple thousand people, possibly dozens of whom visit his site regularly. For most Mac users and a rare few Windows users, Myriad Pro will be used, followed by Helvetica (for many Windows users and the Mac users still using versions of OS X more than four years old), Helvetica Neue (It’s a rare computer that would have Helvetica Neue installed but not Helvetica or Myriad), Arial (for the remaining Windows users and the Linux users with the Microsoft Core Fonts package installed).
So he’s using some odd font specification rules: The circumstances under which a computer would have Helvetica Neue but not Helvetica are rare at best, and Verdana strikes me as being a closer match to Whitney than Arial is (although the metrics are probably less alike). Linux is accommodated in the breach, but there was room for him to specify Liberation Sans (for something Helvetica-ish) or Vera Sans (for something Arial-ish).