It would seem that it’s often a tall order to build sites in a way that will work without Javascript as the baseline, but instead going straight for the all-singing, all-dancing full-blown AJAX rich-media awesome experience. I tend to think you can have your cake and eat it too. That’s if you’re epically brilliant.

I love all the new bells and whistles we’re able to roll out on sites these days, just using native browser technologies. But bells and whistles shouldn’t come at the expense of a functional base

I do believe I just quoted myself there. Slightly weird… But anyway, if that’s your kind of thing, do have a read and feel free to share your thoughts.

“‘Post-digital’ is a term coined by planner/blogger Russell Davies to describe the way in which smart digital and online behaviours have begun to make their presence felt in the real world, on real, tangible objects. It’s not hard to see the appeal of this concept after years of flash-heavy microsites, and of ‘traditional’ vs. ‘digital’ silos: a distinction rendered increasingly obsolete by the swelling ranks of a younger generation for whom such boundaries are meaningless.”

– Most Contagious 2009 - Contagious Magazine (PDF)

Gritty, grainy, rustling old newspaper.

Now to get some people and content together…

“Good business is the best art.”
— Andy Warhol

Pop Life explores a newer generation of artists that have made use of the media to capitalise on their art and indeed their own names. There was a fairly large section devoted to Andy Warhol’s entrepreneurial leanings in the 80s, at a time where he continued to court celebrity, and made all sorts of unlikely appearances, like in Aaron Spelling’s The Love Boat, as well as randomly taking a stroll about in the back of a late 80s pop video.

There was a wall dedicated to the 80s cover art of Warhol’s magazine: Interview. This was compelling evidence of his part in unleashing that certain 80s style of commercial art on the world.

Also on show were episodes of Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes, which were a series of laid back chats with celebrities, made for MTV. I managed to catch a few minutes with Jerry Hall and John Oates (the follicly superior half of Hall & Oates).

Upon further exploration, I was pleased to find that there were works of artists other than Andy Warhol being exhibited. Damien Hirst had his False Idol on display - a preserved calf with gold feet. Funny thing about Damien Hirst, I’m yet to meet someone that likes his art. Personally, I take a morbid interest in dead things in formaldehyde. And if they’ve got bling, more power to them.

Jeff Koons had some of his particular flights of fancy included, notably Made in Heaven, discreetly tucked away in one of the “adults only” rooms. Here we get an intimate glimpse of Jeff and his wife, Italian blue movie star and politician “La Cicciolina”, celebrating their special kind of adult love in a highly colour-saturated, Garden of Eden themed series of photos, along with a somewhat generously proportioned sculpture.

The last room in the exhibition featured the very chirpy and only slightly twisted art of Takashi Murakami, where we were inundated in illustrations, sculptures and toys to perfectly compliment the well endowed lactating cartoon lady we saw in the first room. As a nice cheerio, we were treated to a big screen playing Turning Japanese, as sung by a nice blue-haired cosplay Kirsten Dunst.

All up, Pop Life was interesting and provocative, and a good excuse to get yourself over to the Tate Modern. Pop Life will be there until 17 January.

E-commerce mavens (and benevolent employers) Snow Valley were lovely enough to send a couple of us along to dConstruct 09 down in Brighton last week. This was a good thing, as dConstruct was a quality conference with lots of food for thought.

Hopefully slides or videos of the talks will be put up soon. I’d particularly like to revisit the talks of Adam Greenfield, August De Los Reyes (from Microsoft’s Surface team) and Russell Davies (who I enjoy reading in Wired UK these days). Those presentations were especially entertaining and insightful.

The general theme was “designing for tomorrow”, and what really came through was the idea of taking what we have learned from building online experiences and applying those approaches and user behaviours to the physical world and the urban landscape. Or as Davies put it, going from representing the world on the web to representing the web in the world. I’m totally on that wavelength, and have been keen on the idea of doing creative projects of a more tangible, physical nature. It’s all about the “post-digital”.

Good to catch up with some web peeps and have a few drinkies too - good times. I’d put it up there with SxSW Interactive as far as interest and inspiraton goes, so definitely money well spent.

Now that the dust has settled on the launch of TurnTubelist a bit, not to mention Mr Speaker’s awesome continual improvements, I thought I’d share some thoughts about a few possible next steps, at least as far as user experience goes. If you haven’t had a play, go there now.

None of these are set in stone, it’s more of a rough to-do list for improving TurnTubelist’s user interface:

• Improve playlist and playlist management
  The playlist controls (loading, info, delete) that appear on hover are a bit weak. Going to rejig the interactions there, they’re just a bit finicky to use and not obvious enough at the moment.
• Simplify playlist publishing
  The new publishing functionality is pretty cool, but the positioning needs tweaking.
• Increase video size
  We want to do more stuff with video later, but at the moment, it’s not the focus. BUT that doesn’t mean we should necessarily limit the video players to such a small size. If at all possible, we want to make them larger so you can use TurnTubelist as a cool way to watch your favourite YouTube vids.

• Improve messaging
  We want to improve the way message dialogues are presented when the app needs to tell the user something, such as an alert or error. There are still the odd Javascript alerts appearing too (…eek!)
• Make forms better (and bigger!)
  Tiny forms aren’t generally a lot of fun, so we want to find a place to put forms in such a way that lets us make them bigger.

In general, we want to use the available viewport space more effectively. I’m planning to use funky overlays that use the whole viewport, rather than being constrained to small containers and such.

User feedback has been really helpful, and the ease of which users can submit feedback is also something I want to improve. Always interested to hear people’s thoughts, so feel free to leave us comments using the feedback form on TurnTubelist, or of course here.

Twitter is:

• Pithy, straight to the point.
  140 Characters. That’s it.
• A good networking tool
  Yes, yet another one, but probably one of the better ones
• There are better ways to Tweet other than the website
  Its API means you can use Twitter lots of ways other than the website. I don’t like to use the Twitter website very often, I much prefer to use Tweetdeck (an Air desktop app) on my lappy and Tweetie on my iPhone. There are lots of other apps for using Twitter on your PC or phone. That plus support for good ol’ SMS make Twitter super convenient. You usually get better features on the other platforms too (like re-tweeting, URL shortening, and linking to images via Twitpic.

Why Twitter and not Facebook?

Twitter is:

• Open and public, like a blog (unless you lock your updates);
• Able to reach and network with people you don’t already know.

Twitter and Facebook do different things. Facebook is brilliant for keeping up with my friends and family all over the world, seeing their photos, videos and updates. I don’t use Twitter for that.

Why Twitter instead of blogging?

Twitter is:

• More conversational, not so much one person writing long passages of text followed by comments;
• It requires less time than blogging. 140 characters does not allow for lengthy research and background information.

However Twitter doesn’t replace blogging, it’s the more frequent little brother of blogging. They go quite well together. If you’re marketing yourself or your business, it’s another useful channel and quite helpful in driving further traffic to your site.

In general, I find Twitter a great source of information (as well as entertainment). I get as much or possibly more news and information via Twitter as I do via my RSS feeds. Twitter is a great tool, as useful and enjoyable as the people you follow.

As an aside, I plan to shuffle a lot of things around this site in the upcoming redesign. Seeing I’m on Twitter more I’m going to try to simplify this site a bit. A bit less emphasis on the blogging (seeing as I’m not doing it regularly anyway) and just more of a landing page aggregating feeds from Twitter, Delicious, Flickr, etc. The blogroll (”Elsewhere”) column will be deactivated and replaced with Delicious for ease of RSS subscription (and ease of updating for me).

UPDATE 2: TurnTubelist is now LIVE. Go now and play with it and let us know what you think. We are still tweaking it but we decided to get it up and out there. More details to come soon…

So Webjam 8 was the biggest and best so far by all accounts. There were brilliant presentations and competition was as tough as ever, but it was to Mr Speaker’s and my absolute delight to win first prize for TurnTubelist, a little pet project we’ve been mucking around with in our spare time. Props where due, Mr Speaker (aka Earle Castledine) presented brilliantly as always in his own inimitable style, not to mention his JavaScript prowess in turning a beer-idea into something well cool. When it’s available, I’ll also put up the vid of the presentation hereThe vid is now at the end of this post.

Mr Speaker at Webjam. Photo by Halans

TurnTubelist demo. Photo by Halans

Sneak-peek at TurnTubelist

TurnTubelist is a web application that lets you crossfade YouTube videos and build your own playlists for continual YouTube fun. It currently works entirely on the client-side using HTML, CSS and lots of JavaScript (mainly jQuery). It’s not up yet but we aim to put a beta up on the web really soon.

Earle has come up with some neat wizardry that hooks up to YouTube via their API, does some nice AJAX to search for YouTube vids without interrupting playback and stores your playlists in a cookie. Not to mention, the sliders, keyboard shortcuts and a whole bunch of other stuff.

I worked on the graphics, the user interaction design and got my hands dirty with some jQuery for a lot of the user interface bells and whistles. There’s still a lot of work and testing to be done, but I think it’s just about time to put it out there to get some feedback.

Stay tuned for when we launch the beta, this thing is a hell of a lot of fun to use if I do say so myself.

In the meantime here’s the presentation video:

• Finally got a new UK Work permit visa! An incredible amount of preparation and bureaucratic delays, after which I had to travel to Australia. In the end it took a couple of months to finalise! I can now live and work in the UK for a couple more years. It was great to catch up with everyone while I was back home, thanks to all who generously shared their time with me.
• Work is going crazy, have been working feverishly on T.M Lewin and Lipsy’s sites at full steam…
• Mr Speaker and I have been spending every spare hour on a side-project. I’m very glad to say that Mr Speaker will be giving our prototype a test run at Webjam 8 later this week! More news on that very soon…

Subsequently, my site redesign has taken a back seat, and now I’m thinking I want to redesign my redesign.

More news soon!

This was very timely as the topic of data visualisation, though by no means a new concept, seems to be pretty hot right now and has certainly piqued my interest. I’ve previously linked to a favourite project, On the map, by Stefanie Posavec where the artist has mapped out patterns and structures found in selected literary works.

• Digg Stack - a real-time interactive visualisation of what is currently getting Dugg.
• Newsmap - a map of what’s in the news as listed in Google’s news aggregator. Nicely illustrates patterns and bias in the world’s news media.
• Gapminder World - an animated graph of world progress using various indicators such as income per person, GDP per capita, CO2 emissions, etc.

Elsewhere, Viget Inspire has written about interactive data visualisation and social networking, Smashing Magazine featured a big data visualisation round-up and Coolinfographics is an entire blog dedicated to the subject.

Adobe have launched the service with Buzzword, an online service that lets you share and collaboratively edit PDF-style documents (think Google docs but schmicker), and ConnectNow, a web-based video conferencing tool. There’s also some file sharing and online PDF creation tools there too. Like Photoshop Express, Adobe have again opted for the full Flash interface. I’ve gotta say, it really is impressive what you can do with Flash these days (other than animated splash pages). ConnectNow lets you see the host’s desktop and (with their permission) you can even steer, all the while chatting via text and video conference.

Take a look for yourself and see what you think.

More info at the Acrobat.com blog.

This week SitePoint published an article entitled Design contests made me a better designer and tell their side of the story with the help of a designer who has done well for himself through contests. You’ll notice healthy doses of promotion for both 99Designs and said designer throughout the article.

In the end, the whole editorial angle on this article amounts to a load of spin and is quite telling of the defensive stance SitePoint has taken on the issue.

Other links

• NO!SPEC
• Spec work in the Internet age
• Andy Rutledge on re-design contests
• Zeldman: Don’t design on spec

Once you start getting a few such libraries going on a site, you can end up with a whole pile of script includes in your header for minor user interface enhancements here and there. This can be a hassle to deploy over various page templates/master pages/etc, particularly if you work with large sites. More importantly, you want to minimise requests to the server if they’re not necessary - it’s been shown that reducing HTTP requests can reduce response times and improve server performance.

There are various ways you can reduce HTTP requests from the front-end (like using CSS sprites to reduce image requests, aggregating CSS and JS files), but the tip I want to share is to not include multiple javascript libraries (eg. jQuery plug-ins) on your pages but having your main JavaScript file load the relevant libraries on demand, as the need arises.

JQuery has a handy method for dynamically loading script files: $.getScript()

But you don’t want to load all libraries on $(document).ready (thus when each page loads), instead you only want a plug-in to load when it’s needed. You can do this by testing for the existence of the relevant element(s) first. You can’t do this (as I found when I looked at Firebug’s console) by saying:

if ($(".tabs")) {
	$.getScript(URL, callback function)
}

This will work in other helper libraries like MooTools (as it’s just short form for document.getElementById), but jQuery will return an array of all matched elements, so even if that array is empty it will never return false. This is actually a good feature of jQuery as you don’t have to test for the existence of anything before applying behaviours.

There’s an easy way to get around this (which wasn’t obvious to me right away). Make sure the array length is greater than zero, of course:

if($(".tabs").length > 0) {
	$.getScript(URL, callback function)
}

So a more complete code snippet would look like:

$(document).ready(function(){
	if($(".tabs").length > 0) {
		$.getScript("/scripts/jQuery.idTabs.js", function(){
			$(".tabs").idTabs();
		});
	}
});

Basically, if you include that snippet in your main JS file, then whenever you have an element with given the class “tabs”, then it will load idTabs.js from the location specified and then initialise Sean’s neat script, and you’ll have yourself nice easy tab behaviour.

Thanks to my co-worker buddy Nick at the Valley for introducing me to the $.getScript feature in jQuery.

Update 23/06/08:

It seems in Firefox 3 and Safari Webkit, objects loaded via $.getScript() aren’t instantly available when called via the callback function. Adding a setTimeout of as little as 100ms seems to get around this like so:

$(document).ready(function(){
	if($(".tabs").length > 0) {
		$.getScript("/scripts/jQuery.idTabs.js", function(){
			setTimeout(function(){
				$(".tabs").idTabs();
			}, 100);
		});
	}
});

It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.

BusinessWeek, May 25 1998

So you can’t go out and ask people, you know, what the next big [thing.] There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, ‘If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me “A faster horse.”‘

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These are really insightful quotes, especially if you work in creating anything for a consumer mass market. The big point here is that you can and should design for users but you can’t expect users to tell you how to innovate. What you find when you read more about Apple’s ethos is that the big innovations in design come from when you design for yourself. Make something *you* would want to use.

There are big advantages to designing for yourself. As a designer for the web, I know my strongest designs come about when I fall directly into the main segment of the target audience. I immediately know when the design is solid, and I can easily justify design decisions when they are questioned.

Joshua Porter’s Bokardo.com featured an article earlier this year entitled personas and the advantages of designing for yourself, which went into some detail about the use of personas (personae?) For those not in the know, personas are fictitious user profiles created to describe different typical users of a website. He talks about how this process is unnecessary when you are designing for yourself. In the end, it really just boils down to working on projects that you feel passionate about. Or at least (in my case) owning a part of a project for which you can develop a passion over. I think I’ll call this a “creative enthusigasm“.

I look forward to and really get into design projects where I am essentially designing something that is aimed to appeal to me, and that I have some level of ownership over. If I love the end product, then it would hopefully follow that there will be users out there who feel the same way.

The interface is really easy to use and it looks as though this is aimed at your average non-designer web user, with easily navigated albums and photo editing interface.

This is really setting a new benchmark in rich web apps. The beta is available for a test drive now.

Any web developers that spend any time using CSS would be familiar with the Firebug add-on for Firefox. (If you don’t have it, get it. It is the best web development and diagnostics tool out there.)

Having become completely dependent on this tool, the first thing I noticed when I upgraded Firefox a while back (well, it upgraded itself) is that it no longer worked for inspecting links and images (a and img elements). I had a bit of a search around and found that there was a problem with something called dom-utils in the latest Firefox.

The temporary solution I came up with (until the next Firefox release hopefully) was to reinstall Firefox 2.0.0.11. I did it straight over the top without uninstalling and everything went fine (Windows XP Pro). I found somewhere that also said installing the latest Firebug beta would also solve the problem.

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Related links

• Bugzilla.Mozilla.org - Bug 416896
• Firebug
• Firefox 2.0.0.11

Naz Hamid has written about perfecting your designs by paying attention to all the little details. I wasn’t hugely impressed by this article. I echo some of the comments made in that the article didn’t offer a lot of original insights (”less is more” and “take a 15-minute break now and then”), but I guess the importance of an eye for detail and getting all the little finishes into your designs is worth the reminder.

On Creativity by Andy Rutledge sparked a lot more interest from me. What creativity is, and what being “a creative” means, needs clarification within the context of the business of design. Particularly relevant is his discussion of constraints being the source of creativity and not its enemy. Creativity being technical and analytical, and not merely self-expression also rang true.

Creativity is…

…never having to say you’re sorry. Creativity is precious; it is a glowing light that resides within each one of us, making us special and unique…

Well, not really.

Explaining creativity as the process of understanding in detail, problem-solving and qualitative discrimination that comes from a specialist extends beyond design and into other disciplines and business in general. In a nutshell, Andy is saying that creativity in the design and business world is about having a disciplined and intelligent approach to solving problems, then using your specific skills to deliver what clients are paying you for, and not just sharing your innate uniqueness with the world.

While on creativity, I recently came across this video of a talk by Sir Ken Robinson. This entertaining talk (in an old-academic-dad kind of way) discusses how our school systems are completely skewed against creativity and in fact are geared towards drumming the creativity out of people. It’s worth a watch (or listen) if you have 20 minutes to spare. In fact those TED talks have some interesting presentations by some pretty big names.

So the web awards winners have been announced. The very talented mob at Preloaded took out the game category as well as best of show with Launchball, a great time-wasting (and educational) puzzle game for the Science Museum. Congrats!

The winner of the art category was Viscosity, a neat flash toy that lets you create cool abstract pieces at the stroke of a brush (er, mouse). It’s a shame Wolff Ollins didn’t get their hands on this tool when they were designing the London 2012 logo. Might have come up with something a bit nicer… (Oooh was that bitchy / unoriginal / hackish? Do I care?)

So, as far as a redesign goes, I’m at the sketching stage at the moment, but I’m thinking even cleaner while improving the visual hierarchy, less cruft around the edges and more focus on typography and a very strict grid structure. I also plan to post more design-related bits and bobs.

Now I know I’ve promised a few people some more travel stuff so I’m going to mix it up a bit and keep posting photos up here. I particularly want to put a few more shots taken in Mexico and South America as well as the other stops around the place.

I’ll leave yas with this fun little piece of motion graphics - What if the opening titles of Star Wars were designed by Saul Bass: