I love the redesign projects where Andy Rutledge just takes an existing webpage and redesigns it to demonstrate how much better it could be.

Here is the new one: WhiteHouse.gov

Sometimes you just need a little Icelandic Pop. And their cover art’s not bad, either. They’re playing the Schnitz May 4th. I just bought tix.

I think this is a good technique for finding colors, particularly if you are doing something with a lot of photos. I used this technique on the Twin Cities site that got shot down, starting with a nice sunset photo.

I also usually check out Return of Design’s Color Palette blog when I am starting somethign new, which hasn’t been updated much lately and keeps going down.

The guys at Firewheel also have a color palette widget.

I usually try to have a balance between warm and cool colors first and foremost but I try to do layouts in a color-agnostic way, just getting things down on the page first, then adding/tweaking color.

I don’t know much about Color theory, other than the usual complementary color deal. Sometimes I think ignorance is a good thing. Eat the rich.

Virgin Mobile spreading the good word, just in time for Arbor Day.

If only there were something quick, that I could microwave. Something that would keep indefinitely, poised, fresh, but ready anytime. Something bleep.

Lesson: In death as in life, make it special.

The Great Jakob

I’ve been amused by the hype and excitement over the Origami device pioneered by Microsoft. Microsoft and its adoring fans want it to be great, but that won’t make it so.

3 CEOs demoing the Origami struggle with the usability of it

“Usability is a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal.” Wikipedia (April 2006)

When working on a website or web application project I often find myself defending usability as something that is a top priority of the project. To me, usability is a given. I believe that usability is what makes the list of features usable, understandable, accessible, and intuitive (needing little or no outside introduction or explanation - help pages or a manual). This is my belief and one that is not often shared.

When working within a limited or finite budget, usability becomes a bit of a bothersome topic for many. It is not easy to measure and the benefits are not immediately perceptible. Why would someone give up a feature just to improve the usability of the overall application? It also becomes somewhat of a intelligence “test”. This is a paraphrase of a common reaction, “You don’t need to waste time on usability for me, I’ll just figure out how to use it. Instead, put that effort into more features.” Generally, the only time that someone asks for usability, is for a proxy that is perceived not to be so smart like a general audience. As long as usability is perceived as a feature, it will continually be one of the “features” that are first to be cut. However, not creating something with usability in mind, is creating something with the opposite of usability. As far as I know, there is not a term for that so I would like to coin this term as “frustability”. Frustability is often mistaken for other attributes like buggy, complicated, slow, or lack of documentation.

Usability is not a feature, it is an attribute of the whole website or application. If you decide against it to save money, time, or to add features, you are asking for frustability … and frustabililty never quite goes away.

Hello All. I just thought I’d tell anybody who is interested about the Maya Learning Edition from Autodesk. You can download a special version (fully featured, but it watermarks everything) and walk through some great tutorials on 3d animation.

Click here to learn more.