Interesting commentary from a designer who left Google, on the dangers of letting engineers drive design decisions:

Without a person at (or near) the helm who thoroughly understands the principles and elements of Design, a company eventually runs out of reasons for design decisions. With every new design decision, critics cry foul. Without conviction, doubt creeps in. Instincts fail. “Is this the right move?”

When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.

More at: Goodbye Google

I’m currently working on an upgrade of one of the web sites I manage.  The current site is a collection of static pages with PHP includes, while the new site will be powered by the latest version of Wordpress.

I’ve enjoyed using Wordpress as a content management system.  The new templating system is relatively easy to use, and gibes well with what I’ve learned from my professional experience with web sites.  I think it’s a great lesson in CMS development as well – determining what’s dynamic vs. static, what’s styled in CSS or structured in HTML code, and what the various colors and fonts need to be to make the site readable.

Advantages of using Wordpress vs. static updates include:

• Word-like text editor to enter and edit content, without the need to know HTML.
• Automatic ability to push new pages to multiple news feeds.  Write a post or page, tag it with keywords, click “submit,” and it automatically goes out over Google News.
• Fancier functionality.  No more manually updating the right column; I click “post” and all the links update.
• Individual pages.  Let’s say you Google “Pray for Priests magnets” – you get http://www.serraboston.org/news.php, but you have to scroll halfway down the page to get to the relevant content.  With the new site, each page of content should appear as its own web site, with links to similar articles.
• Fancier functionality than my current blog, which also needs an upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress.

I’d post a preview, but I hope to have the fully dynamic site online in a few days.

Jon Tangerine offers a clean and incredibly well designed site and blog.

What I like:

• His About page is near perfect – enough information to give you a sense of who he is, with compact clusters of information bunched around the page.
• The Blog – it’s centered and simple, with little “asides” on the left and right.
• The dates and tags appear as small links on the top.  I’ve been wondering about this for my blog – as of this writing the categories take up a huge column on the right side of the page.  I much prefer his centered column which puts the content front and center.
• The search is awesome – I like the subtle effect that happens when you click on the text box and it turns black.
• Great use of fonts. The explanation of his logo serves as a great example of what CSS can do, and what he can do with it.

I’m not 100% sold on:

• The title appears on the left of each post, so you can’t scan the headings vertically.  I must admit it’s easy to scan the page and see what each post is about, and it’s an interesting break from almost every other blog design on the internet.
• The white space gets a bit overwhelming (I still like gray backgrounds to focus the eye) but the centered blog design works well with the “calligraphy” theme he has going on.
• The footer at the bottom of each page is a bit wonky, but since he seems to be involved in so many web 2.0 groups it’s probably inevitable.

What the – Okay Samurai just switched to a gray background.

Odd, because it better matches Chris Glass’ blog as well as an upcoming redesign for this blog.  I chose a gray background because I think it makes the content pop better – your eye gets drawn to the images and colors in the content, not the background of the blog.  I also like gray better than total white, which does use whitespace but makes the content get lost in a sea of white (like Wordpress, in my opinion).

An interesting trend in web 2.0 design, I guess.

The brilliant Chris Glass has a simple comparison chart of cars he’s looking to buy.  I love the fact that it has no “key” to explain it, but the eye is quickly drawn to the pros/cons and can obtain enough detail to make a choice.

One ridiculously minor issue – the indented bullets give the columns an off-kilter feeling, instead of being left-aligned.  This chart was clearly created for his own benefit but the left-aligned columns could be easily fixed if one were to present it to someone else.