Have you ever wondered that? Is there some “web cabal” that sits in their beanbag chairs with indirect lighting overhead and thinks…”lets make things shiny”…and then for the next 6 months every site looks like it is under a pane of glass.

The question hit me when I was looking at Smashing Magazine’s new list of all the logos that use leaves. I mean seriously…there are like 20 different logos that somehow incorporate a leaf in the design. How in the world?

Realistically I know how it happens. Someone makes a cool site or logo and then one designer sees it, then another, and another and finally you have a forest of little leaf icons all over the world.

What is interesting to think about is there are probably a dozen people in the “web world” that create something new and then there are about a million others who copy and expand upon the idea. Don’t you want to be one of those dozen? How cool would that be? To be the guy (or gal) that decided that was behind the “wet and shiny” look that took the design world by storm.

Now I say that would be cool, but honestly, it would take some serious cojones to be that person because for every iPod you think up, you have 100 Newtons that get ridiculed.

Still it would be a lot of fun when you do make your iPod…

So here is a question. What if you were one of the lucky few who has enough clout to really push the next thing in the world of web design? What would your next thing be?

Daniel Mall is an acclaimed web designer who works with some of the best in the business at Happy Cog Studios. Long time readers may remember the interview I did with him in the early days of this blog.

Daniel is submitting a panel idea for the next SXSW festival called “Cross-Pollination: Breeding a Better Web”, or in his words…

The web’s history is full of accidental innovation. By scrutinizing HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, and other familiar technologies, we’ll explore how unlikely combinations can spark evolution and show that even individuals operating outside the various standards bodies can advance the industry.

To make the panel even more exciting he will be working with the illustrious Shaun Inman (of Mint fame).

It sounds like a cool discussion. If you want to join me in supporting his panel idea cast your vote in the SXSW Panel Picker.

You can see the other panel ideas by visiting the Panel Picker home page

I learned early on in my freelance days that it is always good to get a feel for what the client likes when it comes to web design. So whenever I get a new client I always ask them to send me some example sites that they find “cool” or “beautiful”. Over the years I have found that this is a good way to get a feel for their style. Conservative or artsy? Bright and bold or cool and subdued? You get the idea.

So what do you do when the client sends you to some sites that are just painfully ugly? Something with some 1998 animated gifs, or (God forbid) a site with some of those sparkly letters you see on myspace so much.

Do you swallow hard and build them a site that suits their taste even if it offends your own sense of style? Go go gadget sparkle!

Do you throw out all of their ideas and substitute them for your own?

Or do you try to somehow blend the two? Glassy effects and sparkles!!

Here is an extreme case. I built a site several years ago; it was basically a company that provided services for the elderly. The original design was meant to be cheerful, bright, and colorful. The first time I showed it to the owner he absolutely hated it. He demanded that I rework the site so the primary colors were black and violet. What is even worse, is he wanted his company’s logo to be a picture of an elderly couple floating in the clouds. Fortunately he understood that old people + clouds = dead people…not exactly the image you want to portray to your customers. In the end, the site was black, violet, and was (in my opinion) completely inappropriate for its target audience. Now that isn’t to say black and violet can’t work in some sites, just not this one.

With a client like that you don’t have a whole lotta choice except never to show the final result in your portfolio (that one never did make the cut by the way). In the end, the client always wins…

But lets take the scenario that you have a client who has…ahem…difficulties with their choices of style, but who has an open mind. In this case, I typically show them progress much more often than I would normally. This way you can build what you think looks good (you are the professional after all), but they can give their input before you wander too far down the rabbit hole. The end result is usually a nice, happy medium that looks good.

Another option is to try to get into their head and find out why he/she likes the sparkling animated American flag so much. You might find that what they really like is the concept behind the ugly pic rather than the pic itself. In this case the client may just want to show patriotism as a major theme. Work with them…talk with them…and find out the “whys”.

As with all of the issues around dealing with a client, in the end it all comes down to the relationship. With new clients it is important to show that you know what you are doing and are not some fly-by-night. Once that relationship is built, then you will be able to direct them in terms of style much easier than before.

So have any of you ever run into this problem? How did you deal with it? What advice would you give new designers/freelancers when it comes to clients with strong design opinions?

So I am minding my own business…reading up on some of my favorite sites, and I see this fun article on FreelanceSwitch called 15 Web Addressess for Wasting Time.

So I think to myself…I always have a few minutes here and there to waste…lets see what we have here.

One of the links on the article is a game called Duels, and seriously, I think when you sign up for the game they lace your keyboard and mouse with crack. This game is REALLY addictive even though it is rather simple. Basically, you create a little gladiator and fight in duels against other players, gain levels, buy loot, etc. It has a great polish to it (as these games go), but it is a bit on the slow side (probably courtesy of the FS article).

Anyways…if you are stuck at work and have a few minutes to spare, check it out. And while you are there, throw out a challenge to a warrior named Azmodian.

Anyone played Bioshock yet?

I picked up a copy for my Xbox360 last night and MAN is that game cool. Gorgeous, cool, and creepy…those are the words I would use to describe it.

Seeing a Big Daddy walking around for the first time is really intense. Screenshots just don’t do it justice.

One of the cool things is that it isn’t scary in the traditional since (i.e. things jumping at you…even though things do jump at you), but rather the game elicits an emotional response. For instance there is a scene where one of the “splicers” is crying over the baby she will no longer be able to hold. It doesn’t have to do with anything, but I just sat there and got a bit choked up (yes, I know…I am a wuss). Can’t say that many games have been able to do that…

I was talking to a couple of friends today and we decided that the one thing that this game will be remembered for in the long run will have to be its art style. The buildings and interiors use an “art deco” look that is from the 40s and such. The Empire State Building is probably the best example. It is just a look that has never been used before (at least to this scale) and it really adds to the atmosphere.

My only gripe is the very beginning. Don’t worry, I won’t spoil anything (this part is actually in the demo). You start out as a dude whose plane has crashed. Instead of drowning you decide to go into this big elevator thingie and end up in the city of Rapture. About 2 minutes later you run into this HUGE syringe, and without asking questions like “what is this?” or “where do you stick THAT?” you grab it and plunge it into your arm. No explanations about the syringe are given till AFTER you stab yourself. I don’t know about you, but I don’t go around and grab pointy objects and stick myself just to see what happens. Seems a bit silly. Course, 10 seconds later you forget about the whole thing because you can now shoot lightning!

Finally, if you are holding off buying the game because of the “widescreen controversy”…don’t. If you played the game before you heard about the “issue” then it would have never crossed your mind that you were missing something. It really is a non-issue, because you don’t miss anything. Just feel sorry for the people with a regular tv who can’t see this amazing game in glorious HD. If you haven’t heard of this controversy and are going to buy the game, then I suggest you don’t even bother learning about it. Just get the game and enjoy it. Its truly a one of a kind experience.

Picture this…

Its 1:45 am. You have the shakes from too much coffee, but you are smiling because you have just finishing putting the final touches on your tableless, buzz-word compliant magnum opus. Just before you crash you decide to see how it looks in the new Safari for Windows you just downloaded. Suddenly, your masterpiece looks like some other kinda piece and you begin to weep.

We have all been there, and I am pretty sure that I have invented a few new four letter words over the years because of it. CSS is great, but it can be a bear to get working across the various browsers.

Enter the concept of CSS standards and framework libraries…

These are basically CSS files designed to make the browsers treat CSS elements the same way. Today I am gonna take a look at a couple of them (Blueprint and Tripoli) and give you peek into what is possible with each.

Read the rest of this entry »

Its been another busy few weeks around the web…lets see what has been happening.

Design
Thinking outside the box - Boxes and Arrows goes indepth about the ever important topic of “ease of use”.

Bulletproof Web Design - Dan Cederholm has released a new edition of his really great web design book (I have the first edition and it is a worthwhile read).

Freelancing
Project Juggling - FreelanceSwitch has a new article on how to manage multiple projects.

Motivation - A List Apart’s newest article gives a lot of helpful hints on how to stay motivated when going through the different phases of a project.

.NET 3.5 and Microsoft Goodies
What’s New in What’s New - MSDN has a new article on what is new in the new edition of the .NET framework (version 3.5) that comes with the new version of Visual Studio. My goal was to say new as many times as possible in a single sentence…I believe I succeeded.

WPF 3.5 - Here is a video of what is coming in the next version of WPF, also part of VS 2008.

Expression Part Deux - Even though Blend v1 just came out a couple of months ago, they are already releasing previews of Blend v2. Those crazy Microsoft people…

Silverlight is Suite - Component One has officially come out with an unofficial version of their new toolset for Silverlight called Sapphire.

ASP.NET and CSS - ASP.NET’s server controls are notorious for creating some really ugly code. This is supposed to change with the controls in VS 2008. The controls will, for the first time, output clean CSS driven markup. Hooray for progress!

Tools
BuiltWith - Ever wonder what technologies and libraries your favorite site uses? Wonder no longer!

XRAY - Here is a cool little tool that lets you see the properties of different parts of a webpage. It works on just about anything but IE, but if you have Firefox’s Web Developer extension you have been playing with something very similar for a while now.

Miscellaneous
All Hail the King - BusinessWeek has a great article on Jeffrey Zeldman and the rise of web standards. A great read.

CSS Navigation 101 - Sitepoint has a nice article on how to build menus using CSS. Great for beginners.

RTE Meet YUI - Yahoo has just recently released a Rich Text Editor for their YUI platform. On their blog you can get a behind the scenes look on how it was built.

Last week I introduced a super simple cms system that I created for a client. Ever since I completed it, I have been toying with the idea of expanding it a bit and releasing it as an open source tool for other freelancers, developers, and designers to use.

The “business need” is simple…as a freelancer, I want to make my services as valuable to a client as I possibly can. A good “value add” is a CMS system so that I can pitch to a client “you can update your own static pages”. I have been successful with this because in the long run it saves the client money because they don’t have to pay a designer/dev every time they want to change a word or two. Its a win/win.

So I was thinking…I know I am not the only freelancer doing this so why not take my little CMS and expand it to suit that exact need? A basic CMS that can be deployed to a client quickly and easily, but then gets the heck out of the way and that I, the designer/developer, have complete control how it looks and behaves.

I have noticed that since I wrote the original article I have gotten a good bit of interest on the subject so it seems like there is a market for such a product. The question is…what are the basics?

When you think of CMS what are your requirements?

Here is an obvious one…Add/Update/Delete pages…

Not much of a CMS if it can’t do that, but what other features are required?

Another way to ask it is “If you were to create your own simple CMS for a client, what would it do?”

For a while now I have been writing about how to create a Side Scrolling Page Effect similar to the one that is seen on Panic’s Coda site. I have built the effect using 3 different frameworks and I have found that each framework has its own pluses and minuses, but in the end I decided to build a more robust solution using Scriptaculous (you can see why in the conclusion section of the MooTools article).

Today I am rounding out the series with the posting of that robust solution. Basically this is my take on that effect and what I implemented for my client. How the basic effect is achieved is covered in the other articles, so today’s goal is to explain what takes it from a simple demo to a fully functioning, cross-browser compatible website. At the end of the article I will, as usual, have a link to where you can download all the code used in the demo.

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I have always been fascinated by online start pages. In fact, some of the earliest articles on this blog were about them.

I have been a member of too many of them to count over the last couple of years. Before they called them that, I had some on places like Yahoo! and even old-school AOL (man that brings back some bad memories). There is just something about being able to bring all the information that is important to you together in a single place. Nowadays its almost required if you are an avid blog reader.

I have always been fascinated by the different approaches, technologies, and ui styles so a while back I contacted a couple of the older start pages out there: Netvibes and Pageflakes. Unfortunately, the Netvibes guys are too swamped right now to finish the interview we started, but I am happy to announce that Ole Brandenburg, one of the co-founders of PageFlakes agreed to “sit down” with me and answer some questions.

So without further ado… Read the rest of this entry »