On the trail of a unique Wordpress engine theme, pt. II

So, following on from my last post, we’ve already concluded that colour is an essential part of any design for conveying messages and ideas instantly in the eyes of the reader. It’s a subconscious reaction, to perceive autonomously, and comprehend before we’re even told anything.

But… what good is colour when the other elements its combined with hinder it? It’s pretty useless to put so much work into your colour aspect and completely forget the rest of the design. Sure, colour is useful, but ultimately it’s only one piece of a really big final picture. Simplicity is the easiest thing for us to grasp, geometric and organic shapes and interactions, because we’re used to being surrounded by them in our environment and our day-to-day lives. Squares, circles, rectangles… all of them make perfect candidates to serve as elements on a webpage’s layout. That’s something I feel a lot of designers are guilty of forgetting when building

interfaces for new media, and instead opt for incredibly complex shapes and unusual orders. I’m all for stepping outside of the box, but why step outside of the box to somewhere that isn’t helpful? It doesn’t make a lot of sense. There’s more merit in working within boundaries to create something functional and unique than there is to create “eye candy” that doesn’t function for the purpose it’s ultimately intended.

It’s for this reason I’ve opted to stick with hard-edged boxes for this layout, which helps not only in adhering to KISS, but also in not needing images or scripts to generate corners and other assorted trickery. In fact, the idea for me has been to keep the image usage to an absolute bare minimum, and instead rely on a combination of (X)HTML entities and CSS to create a similarly dramatic effect. Kind of a challenge for myself, I guess, to be able to produce workable end results on the absolute bare minimums of what the craft has to offer. Hell, the intended usage for it is gonna be a portfolio of stuff anyway, why on earth would I want the layout taking away from the work? Doesn’t seem too intelligent when it’s laid out like that.

One thing I will be using extensively throughout, however, is a half-liquid design. That is, for the newly introduced or non-versed of us, a design which features elements of both fixed position and width, and ones which resize freely with the size of the browser window to utilise the available real estate to the best way possible. [When the time comes, I’m going to be putting up a section on one of my domains dedicated to various layout formats in their most basic form, no frills stuff to teach the new kids on the block] The advantages this holds over the more traditional fixed-width or full-liquid design is that it allows not only elements to resize freely with their content without breaking the layout, but also that it gives the freedom to put solid “runners” in that remain the same size, resolution-independent. That means more consistency across a range of resolutions, and ultimately, the browsers and platforms too. Plus, I’m slack and can’t be bothered working completely in percentages or pixels to do stuff. Really, it’d be nice to use the max-width: and max-height: syntax CSS Level 2 offers in some of the more modern browsing platforms [that I wish some of the older ones supported…], but the pipe-dream aspect of it makes it stupid to have to put work-arounds in for those that don’t support the syntax. This way just side-steps it a little bit.

Ahhh, it’s nice to outline the progress of a project for once, even if it is only for my own sake to look back on. It’s always good to have solid documentation.

On the trail of a unique Wordpress engine theme, pt. I

So, as I sit here in my newly remade bedroom watching Ace Ventura across my other screens, pondering over getting more food, it occurs to me that during my holiday from work, I’ve got a lot of coding ahead of me. Coding, you ask? Yes, coding. That code, while I’m not going to reveal the entire working process of it until it’s unveiled, is what I consider to be pretty unique and somewhat “revolutionary” in terms of the modern new media environment.

I will, at this stage, reveal that it involves colour. The current web trend of a lot of big names of late seems to be using colour as a unique identifier for certain aspects of the site; for instance, Shaun Inman uses colour to dictate the age of his posts, using intensity and hue to illustrate things such as age and season; Dave Shea is another of the big names who uses different aspects of colour to denote “groups” of posts, based on colourschemes sampled directly from the associated images. Mine is in a similar vain overall, but relies on a more post-level approach and the psychology of colour. I’ve actually gone so far as to research people’s connotation with various hues, which is something I will be using extensively throughout the new theme.

Why is colour so important in creating something unique? Because colour, more than anything else immediately tells us the tone something should be taking. It gives us an idea of if something is happy, sad, humorous… it just tells you everything right away without needing to read anything.

So… colour, a portfolio, and a shitload of code. Can you guess what it is yet?

An Open Letter to Myspace

Dear the eponymous, “Myspace Tom”, myspace developers, myspace users, and Fox Interactive Media,

Right off the bat, let me make it known that I’ve been a regular myspace user since 2004; I’ve held several accounts over that time, and made use of a lot of the features available to members over my tenure. I’ve made some incredible friends over that time, and found some really wonderful music as well. I’ve seen the site flourish from its infancy into the at-least-US$580 million empire that it is today: a conglomerate that is known internationally as a hub of online community. They say that once the name of your product has been introduced into international lexicon, you’ve made it. To this end, I’d say myspace had quite firmly rooted itself in the history books as being an eponymous name for an online community.

That being said, there is still the flaws that we are all haunted by: spam, account break-ins, usability, and functionality. For a site with [conservatively] 100,000,000 registered accounts to go unnoticed to this end is absolute insanity. However, I still feel the way things are being solved is the completely wrong way. To hinder the user experience to combat a [comparatively] isolated issue is going about things the total wrong way. Think of it as Gun Control. Admittedly, controversial topic to make comparison to, however, when in perspective it offers a sufficient level of clarity to the matter. Let’s say spammers are the equivalent of fatal shooting instances, and user accounts are the total amount of guns. In perspective, the amount of the aforementioned “guns” (user accounts) responsible for the “shootings” (spam) is considerably low. Then, logically, isn’t it a little bit of overkill to try and eliminate the instances of “shootings” (spam) by completely hindering the possession of “guns” (user accounts) to a level that is both impractical and overall ineffective at fighting the cause it aims to? In my humble opinion this is.

Let’s put this into the real-life application of myspace. Phishing is a known nuisance on the site, attributed to the majority of users being extremely novice to not only the internet itself, but computers in general. To combat this, the development team have came up with an algorithm that turns any link contained in a profile into a “myspace link” as “Tom” informed all accounts through a notice earlier this year. For those not in the know, this involves all URLs being changed on-the-fly to http://www.msplinks.com/[hash], where the hash is a generated string of letters (uppercase and lowercase), numbers, and the occasional typographical symbol (as far as I can gather, this is the = normally). This happens to every link posted, regardless of whether or not it is an internal myspace link. This makes it extremely impractical to know where you’re clicking to without the visible feedback offered by regular URLs in the status bar of the modern browser. This is not only a huge bandwidth consumer, but also a massive timewaster. For working individuals who have bandwidth limits, this is not impressive. In fact, it’s quite infuriating. The biggest problem is one of reliability of those labelling the links, and the ability to trust the accuracy of where their links are pointing.

This is kind of like putting a garbage bag on in place of a condom because it doesn’t feel “secure enough”. Sure, I can understand what the intent was, but really, for a site with such a financial backing behind it, the coding team must be at least remotely okay. And nobody came up with the idea of using regular expressions to root out internal myspace links? There is a definite structure to links on myspace, as I’ve personally verified by writing numerous userscripts to fix some of the things that bug me most. Because of this definite structure, writing a regular expression function would not be hard. I’ve never written ColdFusion at length before [I personally find it an inferior coding language, but that is neither here nor there]; however the simplicity in any language should exist.

What does this gain? It saves time (and not to mention, money) for the end-user, saves frustration, and provides a level of trust-control over the links you click. As it stands, blind-linking makes links less attractive to click because you have absolutely no idea where they lead. See what I’m getting at? Not really community based.

Uhhhh… what? Now you’re just clutching at straws, guys. For a multitude of reasons, actually. First and foremost, how does a CAPTCHA aid in stopping phishers? CAPTCHA may HELP (key word here is HELP) in detecting computers from people; however it is critically flawed in a number of ways. First being that it’s not impossible to beat a CAPTCHA with a computer. This has been proven several times against a number of high-end CAPTCHA systems. What makes yours so different from this? Nothing in absolute honesty. Second problem here is accessibility. CAPTCHA in itself is basically designed to block anything (or indeed, anyone) without the ability to read the image. This means, anyone who is blind, using a screen reader, or incapable of loading images is cut out. Not really very conducive to community feeling, is it? Having worked extensively with people with disabilities (and yes, being disabled myself), I know just how frustrating it is to deal when someone has not catered to your condition adequately. Also while on the thing of CAPTCHA, why do I have to fill out a new one every 30 seconds when I change 2 letters in my profile while testing it? That is the biggest annoyance of all. If I’ve filled one out a minute prior, one can fairly well assume that it’s still me using the computer. It’s more than easy enough to implement user idle time (there’s a primitive system of it for the online check), why not exploit that to judge whether or not the user is still at the computer? Say, no page requests for fifteen minutes would dictate a user being idle, or something similar to this effect. Once more, it’s wrapping the site in cotton wool for fear of a scratch.

And finally, when customising profiles, why oh why can’t we move the ad around to somewhere less obtrusive? On the same note of regular expressions, it’s pretty easily to tell when a CSS rule has moved something out of the window of view or changed its size. All I ask is the ability to move where it’s positioned relative to a page. Hell, even a selection in the profile section enabling a few different options for where it is placed in the page. For instance, different format ads, tower, long, wide, top, bottom, left-hand, right-hand, all that jazz. It’ll still be there, the revenue will still come, it just makes it less god-awful for those of us who actually have some mild knowledge of aesthetics.

There will be more, don’t you worry.

Thank you,
Benjamin “newklear” Alldridge.

When Logos Go Horrifically Wrong

Logos are good fun. Really good fun. They also tend to be pretty cool when well done, showing off individuality and creativity in the best instances. However, it doesn’t always go quite so swimmingly, and sometimes, in fact, it goes absolutely horrifically. To add to this, sometimes these horrible things are for major products or brands; and even worse still is when they cost inordinate amounts of money. Thankfully, it’s been a decent amount of time since I’ve seen one that really made me cringe, but earlier I was given a link by a friend (hat-tip: Tory) to one that made the already free-flowing bile ride to my mouth once more. Take a look:

See anything wrong with this picture? I hope so, because I see plenty (And evidently so do a lot of others; “more than 83% of the first 16,000 votes gave the logo the lowest possible rating.”—BBC Internet poll). Now, I wouldn’t be quite so disheartened by this logo if not for three key factors:

1. It wasn’t a design for an Olympic (underline it and point some fuckin’ fingers at it) venture


2. It wasn’t something I had to look at for at least the next 5 years


3. It didn’t cost £400,000

That last point there is a really important one. £400,000 is a lot of bread (in the ballpark of $AU1 mill), especially when it’s coming from the pocket linings of the citizens it’s meant to represent. Surely, for half a million quid, there would have to be something that could’ve been produced, particularly in the over one year it was slated to have taken the Wolff Olins firm to come up with it. So far, this is what I’ve been able to come up with as possible ways to read it after staring at it for a bit,

• A cataclysm of semi-geometric shapes combined with outrageous colours


• Someone taking a drink from a fountain


• A poor attempt at imitating a Cubist painting


• An even poorer attempt at imitating the graffiti stylings inherent in London


• Some kind of strange animal

and perhaps most concerning of all,

• Lisa Simpson administering fellatio

Now, the company has stated that the intention of this logo was to represent a stylised 2012 and engage the modern youth (perhaps this explains the ridiculous colour variations?) with something bold. Okay. I can see it. Actually, let me rephrase: I can see it now after a) staring at it for a while, and b) actually being told what it’s meant to represent. Though, I must say, I can’t really see any ties to London, at all, especially with that horrific choice of type used to sorry the city’s good name.

London is viewed internationally as being refined and dignified; perhaps actually trying to emphasise that would’ve been a better option. Let’s just hope the next few years go quickly so I can stop seeing it already.

Oh, and here. This image seems to tell the story pretty damn well, I’d say:

The Ridiculous World of Advertisement

Ahhh yes. While it’s not really “design” in the most traditional of senses, TV advertising is a type of consumer art that really does give the people in charge a lot of creative control. And with that control comes some incredible things. Everyone’s seen advertisements over the years that just stick out and scream innovation; while they tend not to specifically sell the product, they do an incredible job to sell the idea of the miniature narrative with that company’s name on it. I’m sure there’s a large number of these we all recall. For instance, the original Sony Bravia ad with the bouncy balls flooding a suburban street with colour. And the Citroën ad with the dancing robot car, a-là Transformers. Point is, you don’t have to be constrained with what you can sell your product with on TV in the new millennium.

On that same note, check out the latest Kia commercial. It highlights the point that you can sell a product and still have a hell of a time doing it. Hats off to the agency that made it, they’ve done an incredible job to sell it.

Ongoing Discussions

• When Logos Go Horrifically Wrong  6
  designgirl, designgirl, Benjamin [...]
• On the trail of a unique Wordpress engine theme, pt. I  1
  jameswillisisthebest
• An Open Letter to Myspace  2
  shelly, Tara McInerney
• The Ridiculous World of Advertisement  1
  Lewis

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