Webmercial

Douglas Bowman, Design as Standard (program). Douglas Bowman er en af mine helte. Fordi hans webdesign er så sprødt, ganske enkelt. Manden bag Wireds redesign (link 1, link 2) for et par år siden.

• Design is a standard. What makes beautiful design?
• Standard benefits those who build the tools/build with the tools
• The Bourne Supremacy on DVD: What if there were an error message: “This DVD is not compatible…”. It works because of standards.
• Screendumps from Vodafone website: Change browser. We have the tehcnology to avoid this today.
• The idea of beauty: Parallel with nature.
• Maybe there were beautiful designs five years ago: but it was messy under the hood.
• Structure must be beautiful all the way from the inside. The technologies that use standards create an ecosystem.
• Standards based design is often bundled with accessability. A story: after the wired redesign the feedback was negative. A week later Zeldman linked to my businesssite -> a lot of traffic. People started sending feedback on my personal site, it was much more positive. One positive mail: ‘congratulations bla, bla, by the way I’m blind‘. That hit me like a ton of bricks.
• Many more benefits to accessability than servicing disabled: Search Engines | Rendering speed increases | Simpler code | Greater flexibility | One version
• First reaction to Wired redesign: “Commercial Suicide”.

First goal: Do the right thing. Inspired by blogs, alistapart etc..

• Screendump from the old code. Only one line in the CSS-file.
• Cinnamon Interactive -> beautiful, especially the source. Others: espn.com, pgachampionship.com, fastcompany, macromedia, adaptive path, disneystore.co.uk, gassweiler media AG, yahoo
• Wired news redesign: Saved 730 terabytes/year (Over a million CD’s) | One change, immediate results on thousands of pages
• Check CSS Zen Garden
• CSSvault.com and many other CSS gallery sites
• Upside: More awareness | purified data and content | Proven viable in different sectors | reduction of file services | Accessability on the radar | modular thinking
• Expectations: Bar set higher | Know and understand multiple technologies | Lawsuits and legal requirements | Faster, better, cheaper
• Mistakes: Over-reliance on the box model and making the box visible | Image replacement | Presentational class & id names (use semantic names that describe content instead of appearance) | Imitation has lead to stagnation.
• CSS is not the magic bullet: can’t turn bad design into good design. Won’t make us better designers.
• Types of tools: creating | building. Don’t start too early with the building tools. Focus on the creative process early on.
• Dynamic templates. Allows change of entire layout or structure of page by changing class or id.
• How the Blogger CSS is functioning…can’t take notes of that. Changing color schemes
• Wired uses a pure color.css
• Sliding doors: illusion of one image that expands and contracts
• Rounded Corner boxes
• Remote Rollovers
• The single image theory
• Looking ahead: portability and templatization

That went fast…