MeyerBros

Since Eric kicked things off here nearly a year ago by pointing out some creative differences with a web deign firm, I thought it might be time to point out another example of web designer’s web sites gone badly wrong:

aPe Computers

I really don’t feel the need to say much. Just watch their space-elevator-world-shattering-apocalypse banner for a while and “Feel the Quality” while enjoying those fantastic rounded corners.

This video from an Anthropology professor in Kansas takes a breathtakingly quick sweep over the new world of Web 2.0 in a video that BoingBoing describes as “deeply moving and incredibly smart.” I’m not sure if I was moved or not, but watching the video left me with a sense of being part of something new and bigger than myself. Maybe sitting in front a computer 8 hours a day and fiddling with code is worth something after all.

Its enough to make me want to pull out my old Anthropology text book!

GrayBit is an accessibility tool for testing color-blind accessibility of a website. i’ll bet you can’t guess how it works. IT TURNS EVERYTHING GREY.

check out our GrayBros - you can even follow links and try the various styles [style links don’t work, but changing via the Firefox ‘view’ menue does], all in monochrome. what more could you want?

how sweet is this?!?

(i thought you might need the exclamation points to give you a hint. the answer is pretty darned sweet. sweet enough to build a new design around, you’d almost think)

some more about reflections

speaking of cutting edge (if we weren’t, we should have been):

check out this little presentation by tantek. it has some problems, but the concept is fascinating from a css standpoint. Basically he has all the content in one page with valid markup - but only allows you to see it one ’slide’ at a time using CSS to hide everything else.

on the other hand, he has to use JavaScript for the onClick effect - so i suppose the interaction isn’t actually CSS based. it can also a confusing interface - if you accidentaly click on a link you are sent out of the site, so you have to be careful where you click.

so i’m not exactly sure what the advantage is here (maybe loadtime per slide? click-anywhere navigation?), but i like it for the sake of CSS exploration.

Tim has been recruiting people for a new blog, and we just got it all up and running.

If you identify yourself as a young anabaptist radical (or ex-young, ex-anabaptist, or potentially even ex-radical) and would like to get your soap-box on, check it out at http://young.anabaptistradicals.org/ - feel free to register and start blogging!

(also, if you like that polling plugin i used on the sidebar, we could do some polling over here as well)

here’s another design for the meyerbros site. i moved the banner to the side to play with a new look, and to allow the content to flow right to the top. i think this is also the first full screen design.

feel free to comment on the usability of this design. i’ll still be making minor edits to it for a while to get it cleaned up.

i wrote the code for the new world arts site way back in the day, before i knew much about css layout or semantic markup. it includes one table and loads of poorly named classes (several of which should be IDs). while the text-file database system for events is fairly robust (for a text-file events database), the front end isn’t nearly as tightly coded.

today we got a lesson in that - the hard way. our css file was lost and has to be rebuilt.

with the beauty of css i rebuilt the front page structure farily quick - cursing the poorly named sections, the entirely unnecessary table and the general mess of spans serving for strong and em tags - pausing every other line to hack through markup code for the right names to reference. from there i was lost. the back pages use different names and structures and none of the styling markup makes any sense at all.

let that be a lesson to me. this page, for example, i could rebuild to look decent in minutes without even looking at the html code. it’s simple, it all makes sense, and it’s entirely flexible.

i’ve been thinking. why should software users (me) always have to alternate between online and offline apps, importing this and exporting that - switching apps and learning new systems. why can’t i have the advantages of webmail and desktop mail without figuring it out for myself? i want a web calendar that i can look at and adjust off or on line. i want my backpack and writeboards available even when i don’t have web access. why not?

it doesn’t seem like too much to ask, does it? and think of the advantages of all your data being backedup by default within the application.

the more i don’t have to think about when i just want to write a note or check my mail, the better.

37 signals want’s a monopoly on my life. bastards.

I’m already paying $5 per month for backpack which i am completely adicted to. i already use it for lists and links and writeboards, and now they go and add a iCal friendly calendar for no extra cost.

i’m a sucker, but they’re competing with google on this one. I have an online calendar that I am fairly happy with. It seems what they can offer me is backpack intigration and a new level of simplicity - but is it too simple? google calendar can do a lot of nice things…

it comes on the heels of my own idea for a new web calendar system. i would like to see a calendar program stores your calendar locally and online. one program - potentially run within a browser. no more importing and exporting from master calendars and subscribed calendars in various applications with different interfaces and specs. why should i have to think about which calendar is more up-to-date and whether I’m online or off. that’s what computers are for. i simply want a calendar i can access from anywhere at any time without having to worry about it.

The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target. (or, mathmatically, MT = a + b log₂(2A/W + c))

I’ve been reading up on user interface design, and this stuff is fascinating. I’m finding it all through the humanized blog. i had been thinking that google calendars’ quick event entry system was brilliant and now i can explain it. it’s accessed by the fastest/largest target possible (wherever your mouse happens to be) and the options are severly limited for input. works great.

now do that for a wysiwig editor. (and what about that pie-chart menu idea? i think that’s swell and we should give it a try)

the other day i started teaching Michelle code, and from the start I went about it all wrong. “This is a DOM tree… This is a div tag…” i’m sorry. next time around i’m going to work on a new approach involving assignments layed out something like:

• draw your website using whatever medium you feel most comfortable in
• re-draw the same design using only straight lines and solid colors
• re-write the same design content using absolutely no graphics
• i haven’t worked this out entirely…

but really it just makes me want to build a better WYSIWYG editor that is actually user friendly following the philosophies of companies like humanized and 37 signals. An editor that doesn’t assume you want this to be a paragraph and that to be a line break, but makes symantics an intigrated part of the process, and naming and creating styles the easiest thing in the world. Something that treats you more like text edit and less like microsoft word. entirely unlike either dreamweaver or iweb. the one with too many buttons and lists and assumptions, the other with no option to even view the code. i want a program that will do it all for you, and teach you a new way of thinking all without breaking your train of thought. i think it’s possible and i think we should do it.

Adbusters has a provocative article entitled: The Secret to Being as Radical as We Want to Be is to Finance the Revolution Ourselves. It got me to thinking. What if the hypothetical Meyerbros design firm found a radical organisation committed to avoiding the grant-making cycle and offered ourselves as a subsidiary. Just a random idea…

my latest exploration in CSS design: css hexagons. thanks to Tantek. no images were used.

not entirely semantic - you use some empty span and div tags, but…

it does flex well with text-size adjustments…

I am continually impressed with this company’s advice on business and marketing. Their re:Focus blog is quickly becoming one of my favorite feeds.

My other favorite marketing/design blog is 37signals Signal vs. Noise blog.

Both focus on simplicity, clarity and focus - in terms of software design, goal setting and advertising. Know what you stand for in simple terms and stick with it.

(or Blue Heron Web Development, as Eric recently suggested on the wiki page. I like it.)

Business2.0 can tell us How To Build a BulletProof StartUp. To begin, all we’ll need is a T-1 line, 20 employees, and several million dollars in venture capital to burn through. Apparently we shouldn’t expect to break even until we’ve thrown $20 million down the tubes…

But before you waste precious hours of your life reading through their crap, let 37signals’ David Heinemeier Hansson (creator of Ruby on Rails) tear it all apart. Much more entertaining, and way better advice. Hansson concludes:

People often ask us “what should I do to build a company like 37signals?”. I think we finally have a succinct answer now: Do exactly the opposite of what Business 2.0 tells you to.

the styles are now sticky across the site (www, blog and wiki). if it doesn’t work for you, try deleting your cookies and starting clean. i’d also like to take a little style survey of anyone paying attention at all. flip through the main styles (not commandline etc) and talk to me about which is your favorite and why. what would you like to see? what styles could be combined? what haven’t i been doing that i should? how do you like your links? sidebar? browser-compatability (ha)? level of graphic use? color palette? anything else?

Hannah Gerig just completed “Creating for the Web” at Goshen College with this fantastic first site. Much better than my first. Congratulations Hannah, I love it. Hope we can rope you into working with us on Meyerbros.

here’s one idea. comments?

This style isn’t really ready to go, but since you made it live I’ll talk a bit about it. firewheel design has a MAC widget called ColorBurn that shows me a color palette of the day - four web colors that they like together. i’m passing those on to you in my ColorBurn tree. I think right now it is stuck on the May 16th, 2006 palette until Carl gets the back end set up. (Carl, I labled each color in the CSS file /* color01 */ through /* color04 */ so you know what should be what color).