timoni.org

Timoni Grone is a web designer in San Francisco. This is her blog.

Read more about her here, or follow her on Twitter, Flickr, or other places around the internet.

Posts about web design
August 5th, 2010

Daniel Bogan’s interviewing the Flickr staff with the same questions he uses for The Setup. You can read my entire response here, but my favorite question is “What would be your dream setup?”. Here’s what I said:

We’re at a really fascinating point in hardware development right now, which makes it difficult to answer this question. My knee-jerk answer is that I want the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer combined with an iPad combined with the Cintiq combined with, you know, a Cray supercomputer or something else equally powerful.

The problem is, really, handwriting recognition; if you’ve ever tried to use the iPad with an external keyboard, you’ll know exactly what I mean. Switching from typing to writing or drawing and back is a fucking pain. Regular notebooks allow you to draw and write without changing your hand position, which doesn’t seem like a luxury until you try actually working on a tablet and then find you need to input text.

SJ may think that styli are inelegant, but the fact is, using a pen to write or draw on paper is both comfortable and easy; it’s just not as fast as typing. Most people are content with inputting data via a keyboard, and this makes sense for a lot of jobs: marketing, business development, finance, and programming, for example. But for the designers, there’s a big gap between starting the creative process and executing the product design *because* it’s much easier to sketch out your ideas on paper, with a pen, than a computer.

And this is unfortunate; in the future, we should have computers that allow us to keep contexts for different stages of product development. The iPad and ThinkPads are steps in the right direction, but they’re still awfully clumsy, which is why, in part, people criticize the iPad as a product for mere consumption.

I want a Moleskine that is a blindingly superfast computer. That’s my dream setup.

—Timoni

web design web tools
February 11th, 2010

read write where

Yesterday ReadWriteWeb’s post on Facebook Connect was, for a while, a top google hit for “facebook login” and as a result of this—combined with RWW’s Facebook Connect button—the site got a lot of negative comments* from confused Facebook users who thought they were looking at the new Facebook redesign.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the whys and whats and wherewithals, and ReadWriteWeb wrote a summary of things they had taken away from the experience. It’s unfortunately easy to extrapolate beyond what actually happened (“Users don’t read your copy or look at your branding”, for example), but we can take away some really fascinating truths from this debacle**:

  1. Facebook did a great job annoucing their redesign. Almost every confused commenter knew that Facebook was redesigning and had clearly been expecting it.
  2. These users don’t trust Facebook to maintain any UI consistency. This is the part that I find truly mind-boggling: aside from ignoring the ReadWriteWeb logo in the corner, aside from commenting on how much they didn’t like the red, most confused commenters genuinely thought that the changes they saw were the result of the redesign. Their expectations for brand consistency were so low that they didn’t realize they were on a completely different site even though quite a few of them had clearly clicked around in a fruitless attempt to ‘log in’.
  3. Perhaps less surprising to those who have come across this user mistake before: URLs mean nothing to certain types of users—specifically, any user that mistakenly commented on ReadWriteWeb today. It’s impossible to tell how they all came to RWW, but Google seems to be the most common path—which means they didn’t use desktop shortcuts, browser bookmarks, or address bar autocompletes.
    One of my coworkers anecdotally mentioned that his mother had accidentally removed the address bar from Safari, and had been happily (and obliviously) using the search box for everything for the better part of a year. This is not entirely surprising, since address bars and search box often look alike and can be used exactly the same way in a lot of browsers.

Beyond that, there’s not a lot of points we can glean that aren’t speculative or specious. Here’s an excellent point from filthylightthief:

Even at work, around people who use computers every day for their jobs, get beyond the basic functions and it’s a foreign language. Follow the steps you normally take, and you’ll get to the end. The path doesn’t matter. But I think the same can be said about anything that is sufficiently complex: if you can make it work for your normal tasks, most people will be content with getting from A to B, even if it takes you past Q and Z. Computers just have a lot more options for detours.

*Example: “Can we log into face book? This is crazy I want to get all my info off and be done with this. I recently moved from MN to SC Myrtle Beach and facebook was a great way to keep in touch with family and friends but this is getting to be to difficult.”
**This hilarious, hilarious debacle.

—Timoni

readwriteweb ui facebook login confusion web design
February 5th, 2010
This is very simple to use… So if you can’t figure it out, well… That really sucks for you.

http://tumblrcloud.icodeforlove.com/

Why make your own web products? Because you get to write copy like this.

ui ux web design usability ftw
February 1st, 2010
Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. If you look at it to admire it, you are lost.

— Samuel Butler, via boranikolic.com

Indeed. It’s much easier to fix your designs when you let them sit for a while, and come back disagreeing with them.

design design philosophy ui web design
January 15th, 2010
Pong, by jess3

Pong, by jess3

web design design inspiration the eighties 80s pong
October 1st, 2009
Articles

Really nice example of Helvetica + grid web design.
web design
September 2nd, 2009
Designing for the social interactions of people using social and communication applications, however, is complicated by the fact that the interaction is mediated. Social interactions online are not the same as they are offline. There is less “there,” there online: people aren’t together, so it is impossible to describe “what’s happening.” Often times, people aren’t interacting at the same time, so it is difficult to observe a temporality or duration. And in the absence of a sense of shared space or location and shared period of time, we lose our ability to refer to a “situation.” It becomes difficult to observe, let alone describe, what’s going on.

We may then be tempted to describe interactions using what can be seen on the screen: posts, messages, ratings, votes, and so on. But that would be to miss out completely on the relationships, the intentions, motives, communication, symbolic interactions, and other aspects of social interaction which transcend empirical evidence. Not to mention time, which is such a critical dimension to social interactions. For all social interactions involve references to past activity and create opportunities for future activity. Relationships are nothing if not the orientation we take to others over time, moreso perhaps when we are absent from each other than when we are present.

Social Interaction Design: Beyond Use, from Gravity7

id interaction design social web web design
September 1st, 2009
SXSW DESIGN / Panels for Designers

Very handy. There’s a roundup for UX as well.
sxsw ux web design
June 16th, 2009
Things about Web Images I Just Learned, from Gabriel Weinberg's Blog

Handy notes about dealing with images in browsers.
design the internets web design
May 13th, 2009
How to recreate Silverback’s parallax effect

Nice tutorial on how to create the sense of motion on page resizes. I’d really like to use this sometime.
design interaction design web design
Graphic Design: The Forgotten Web Standard

Nicest slides I’ve ever seen. Each one is a little type experiment.
inspiration design web design
May 12th, 2009
Opinionated

Not a huge fan of the whole life-sized-face-and-hands holding the web page, but the layout here is really great.
inspiration design web design
April 30th, 2009
Social Patterns

List of social patterns from the upcoming O’Reilly book.
design user interface web design
Creating really small icons

Anti-aliasing a vector (or larger rasterized image with vectors inside?). Try rounding the corners to fool Photoshop into making it look pretty.
design web design
April 21st, 2009
One thing about the type in the Zen Garden—it’s not treated beyond a fourth-grader’s crayoning abilities; no shadows, in-lines, outlines, fill variety, twisting, perspective, set on a bouncing line, or opaque over another object, much less in motion. If the web’s imaging language is going to call the mighty capabilities of digital outlines for display type all the way to the user’s PC, when will it be a worthwhile shift of rendering power?

[ Real Fonts on the Web: An Interview with The Font Bureau’s David Berlow, in A List Apart ]

design web design
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