The world has become so complex that simple tasks are nearly impossible.
Scott Adams: Complexity (via marco)
Tue 2 Mar 2010 42 notes
The world has become so complex that simple tasks are nearly impossible.
A couple of good posts from Ars Technica about attempts to improve accessibility in gaming, particularly for colour-blind players.
Mon 16 Nov 2009
Khoi Vinh, the CSS grid-master, announces an incredibly elegant new Wordpress theme based on the design of his blog, Subtraction. Fantastic work.
Wed 28 Oct 2009
Everyone’s raving about this new Hallowe’en cover for the New Yorker, and it’s certainly good (I like the touch of all the parents staring into their iPhones as the kids go trick-or-treat) but I don’t get the extremity of the adulation.
Maybe I’m having a slow morning. What am I missing?
Mon 28 Sep 2009
TGS 2009: The worst logo of the show Joystiq uncover a particularly dreadful piece of game logo design. Utterly incomprehensible.
Mon 21 Sep 2009
I love essays about the design process, but given the sheer complexity of the work under discussion, I could have done with something more … book-length.
Incredible technique.
My next step with this redesign is to add Tumblr “notes”, which are a list of who’s reblogged or “liked” an individual post.
Unfortunately the documentation for this feature is a little sparse. And badly copyedited: “Rendered on permalink pages this post has notes”. Sigh.
The slick Notes functionality on sites like this is what I’m after but I’m not sure how much of that is provided out of the box and how much the designer implemented with Javascript. More investigation required.
Lots of stuff breaking right now.
Wishing there was a better off-line design solution for Tumblr!
Update Redesign seems to be going well now.
Sun 20 Sep 2009
Via BoingBoing. Fantastic prop build.
Ouch. I’d assumed Posterous had sought permission from Tumblr to use their theme language. Clearly not. I was impressed when I heard the news about Tumblr theme integration as it seemed like it could be a win for both companies as well as designers who wouldn’t need to learn a whole new template syntax.
Posterous announced their new Theming feature yesterday, which would be fine except that it’s not new. It’s the same one that Tumblr uses. In fact, it’s the same custom syntax that Tumblr wrote. No, really. Go take a look. In their announcement they use the term, ‘Tumblr-compatible’. I like to use the term, ‘theft’.
Anyway, this is stupid on many levels.
The theming format is not based on any standard, it was made up by Tumblr. This means that as Tumblr adds new theming variables and features (which happens nearly every week) Posterous will have to constantly update to keep compatibility. It has the same stench on it as what Palm did with iTunes compatibility.
Attempting to directly usurp a community’s users is desperate. It also publicly affirms that Posterous is Pepsi to Tumblr’s Coke.
The worst part though, is watching a decent competitor is such a small space (with so much room to innovate and grow) act so immature.
Keep it classy, Posterous.
Nick Caldwell is a professional web designer and unprofessional writer who thinks far too much about aesthetics, the contemporary sociopolitical condition, video games, Doctor Who, and spaceships. This is his Tumblelog.
