Project • Thursday, May 12th, 2011 • No Comments
I updated my portfolio to include my work on PrayerSay.com. This has been the product of 1 year of development between myself and my partner in development, Todd Morrison. Check out the details of my design work.
Bad Design, User Experience, User Interface • Tuesday, January 11th, 2011 • 6 Comments
Chrome and Firefox have made it easy to turn your browser into an instant eyesore with themes and personas. With one click, you can change all the colors of your tabs, blur the text, make buttons indistinguishable from the background, all the while staring at your favorite video game character in the 40 pixels of whitespace unused by your browser!
Browser theming comes as no surprise, as there have always been communities of skinners who customize applications, sometimes hacking them to do so. In fact, I used to be one of these people. Here’s a screenshot of my desktop from 2005:
I wasn’t satisfied until every aspect of the GUI was personally altered by me. As a consequence benefit, no one could figure out how to use my computer.
Today, themes are easily applied and openly endorsed by the creators of applications which were near to perfection in the first place. Can you read this text?
Mozilla and Google should take a lesson from Apple – take pride in your design and control it with an iron fist.
If you use a browser persona or theme, feel free to let me know how ashamed you feel in the comments below.
User Experience, User Interface • Tuesday, September 28th, 2010 • No Comments
There are very few situations in which you want to give users a full color pallet.
This is a tool that most advanced users don’t even need. I am seeing more and more full color pickers in web applications when allowing custom font colors, background colors, etc.
Users are not designers. They will not account for contrast, color relationships.
Instead, consider using a preset pallet that is designed to work with what you are theming. A great example of this is Youtube, which allows you to pick a duotoned theme for the embedded player chrome.
Exposing the hex value is nice for advanced users, but not at the expense of confusing novice users.