Maverick Conceptions

Is Revolution in Web Design Possible?

Lynn Wallenstein — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 06:54:23 +0000

Nikon recently announced their new camera, the Nikon D3S. What does this have to do with web design you ask? Just bear with me.

So as an amateur photographer and Nikon fanatic I was browsing through the specs and I noticed something interesting. The camera has the ability to pull pictures with perfect clarity out of video with no loss of quality. This single concept floored me… this is going to change the entire way photography works. No longer is photography going to be about making sure to “capture the perfect moment” or “missing the shot”, you now will have every moment to comb through and pick and choose which ones you want to save/display/print. Think about the ramifications on wedding and child photography. Think about when you are trying to get 20 people to look at the camera and it seems impossible to get everyone to keep looking long enough to press the button. This feature will revolutionize the way photography works… the work flow, the process, the options, the methods – it is all going to change. Upgrades in cameras come by every day, more megapixel, higher ISO, better lenses, quicker cards… these are evolutionary changes. But this, this one new feature, this is a REVOLUTIONARY change. Nikon started at square 1 and rethought the entire process of how pictures are taken and has changed it from ground zero. Will it be better? It is too soon to say and depends a lot of additional tools and work flow to see if it is more of a hassle then good, but either way, the change itself is revolutionary.

Web 2.0 Cliche Style

So back to web design. We see changes in web design all the time. Just like in fashion, elements of design become popular, overused, cliche and outdated. Code gets optimized, standards get established, frameworks get published, aesthetics copied and styles even get coined with names such as “web 2.0″ … all these things are the evolution of web design. I say evolution because in the grand scheme, the way the users interact with the web page is still the same. They use their eyes to scan through text and media and make choices of which “branches” of the web site “tree” to explore. We concentrate on evolving the existing process, but never examining the process from the beginning.

So how can you be revolutionary with web design? Just like with anything else, revolution can be found by thinking outside the box. Easier said then done. Lets start with thinking what web design is. Standard web design is the methods of:

displaying information on a web page so that easy to navigate

conveys the important points quickly as well as allows the readers to access the detailed and complete information if they so desire

present the media in an attractive manner

make the information accessible to people using different software and devices

have the information load quickly and create a site that functions as the user expectsTo be revolutionary, we would have to step back from these ideas for a moment and think about, what is the goal we are trying to accomplish. We are trying to convey information to our users. Most web sites do this by throwing all the points of information up on the screen with some sort of navigation for the visitors to sift through to find something they want or need. Navigating a web site is like getting directions, and this method is like using a map. You establish where you are (the current URL), you determine it isn’t where you currently want to be (you view the current pages’s content) and you try to determine the best way to get to where you want to go (the navigation). Most sites, including this one, follow this very established method of web page usage. Now lets think of some other ways of how to get directions that don’t use a map. How about asking for directions. In web design this would be the search. Search is an overlooked in most web designs and thought of as the last resort a user would use to find something. In reality, as humans, search is the first thing we do whenever we have a question. We don’t keep indexes of our valuables in our houses with maps to all the items so we can easily retrieve them if lost, when we can’t find something we ask, or perform a search of our resources (our housemates in this example). So why not make a web site that focuses on search. Something that looks like Google, but just for your site. Just ask the user flat out “why are you here”. Maybe even try hiding everything else so that their complete attention can be placed on the search and provide them with a focused output so that we aren’t distracting them with information they aren’t there for. This is just an example of something that might be tried, maybe it is worse then what we are currently doing, the thing about revolution is it isn’t a safe change. It is an experiment.

As web designers we have the greatest opportunity to experiment with minimal risks. All it takes is a little time to test out experiments and with awesome tools like google analytics and feedback sites like getsatisfaction or uservoice, we can almost instantly get feedback on our experiments and either further evolve our idea or just backtrack to previous versions. We have the perfect opportunity to try and be revolutionary every day… whats stopping you?

A Buzz

Lynn Wallenstein — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 21:45:59 +0000

Been checking out Google’s new Buzz. I think it has a long way to go, but reading the “plan” of what they want to do with it, I think it will be great once it gets there. I will reserve my complete judgment for a couple weeks until after they work out some of the UI bugs that make it very obnoxious. Feel free to follow me!

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year…

Lynn Wallenstein — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 17:20:04 +0000

Time for my yearly Christmas post listing the loot I got and thanking my friends and family for being awesome. Spent Christmas day in Maryland with my sister, brother in law, my nieces and mother and then drove to NJ for a Wallenstein/Skelly Christmas party. All in all a fantastic time, although 10 hours in the car in 2 days was rough!

So here is the goodies I scammed from my loved ones:

Lots of Amazon Gift Certificates!
Novation Launchpad Ableton Live Controller
Wacom Bamboo Pen and Touch
Lensbaby Accessory Kit
Charger to charge batteries from USB
Bunch of cool shirts
Knitted Scarf, Mittens and Hat
Bottle of Irish Mist and glasses
Bunch of yummy treats

So thank you to all my family, all my friends, clients, collegues, aquaintances, neighbors and fellow humans that I share this planet with. 2009 has been a great year, looking forward to 2010.

Some New Projects and Categories

Lynn Wallenstein — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 22:33:34 +0000

It has been a long while since I last posted … doesn’t it seem that every blog has a post like this? I blame 1) Holidays 2) Sickness and 3) Laziness… in that order of course. I thought I would just post a quick blog about a couple of cool projects I am working on if only just to get myself excited about them.

Photography

Back in June I picked up a Nikon D90 and started doing a bit of photography. I have been taking classes and attending meetups and feel confident now I have moved from noob to beginner. With that being said I am planning to roll out a new category in the blog for photography to post about the cool things I learn, and in tradition with everything I do, post up some “code” (in this case Lightroom presets) I am creating.

Blog Topics

I find myself going back and forth between branching into separate blogs and then consolidating. I have a couple of ideas for some new blogs and depending on if I can get some cowriters to work with me, they may end up being new categories or entire blogs unto themselves. Most of them deal with social media, but I am hoping not to rant on about the whole “why your company should use twitter” topic that has been repeated over and over, but do more case studies, critiques, etc.

Well like I said, this is a short one… still have a lot of work before the holidays!

Are you a social network dumbass?

Lynn Wallenstein — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 21:01:18 +0000

If while using ….

Facebook

You befriend people who are friends of friends just cause someone said their name once.
You have befriended people who have “worked for you” in some fashion (waiters, clerks, bartenders), but never hung out with them outside of work.
You resend app invites for the 12th time to your friends cause ‘maybe this time they really will want to play mafia wars or farmville’
You have a profile picture is you from 20 years ago or of just your kid : yes, we all know you don’t like how you look.
You use comments like IM messages and have 40 comment conversations because everyone cares where you plan to meet up on Friday.
You post private information like phone numbers, addresses or medical information on someone’s wall

Twitter

You have multi layer retweet
You follow everyone who follows you
You tweet asking people to follow you
You regularly tweet pictures of the food you are eating
You have two twitter accounts (one personal and one for a project or company), you ask on each for your users to follow the other and then post the same content on both
You have deleted a tweet because you are embarrassed you wrote it.
You post the same tweet daily (check out my blog, buy my book, check out my software)
You tell people there is something super fabulous if they click on THIS LINK, with no details about what it is.
You call on lazyweb more then once a month.

THEN YOU ARE A SOCIAL NETWORK DUMBASS.

While this post was MOSTLY made in humor, I can actually say that I know people that do all of this. Obviously you can do whatever you want with Twitter or Facebbook, but do realize, the more you abuse your followers, the sooner they will leave.

Testing Data for Wordpress Themers

Lynn Wallenstein — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 18:15:44 +0000

I am releasing my test data for Wordpress as an open source project.

What This Is

I love Wordpress. I love the Wordpress community… especially the themers. What I don’t love is downloading an awesome looking theme, only to upload it to my blog to watch it explode because the theme creator ignored testing all potential use cases of long wordpress posts, lists, links, embedded pictures, captions etc. What I can only assume is going on is that the designer makes two or three short posts and tests out there theme. While I am not going to knock the fact that many of these themes are free so I really can’t complain, it would be nice if the theme actually worked in a real life scenario. Setting up test data takes time, making sure you cover all use cases… building up a lot of data, testing out weird edge cases; hopefully this will help!

I am not completely done with it (I would say about 75%), but I figured I would stick it up and see where it goes. This is what the database is/will be made up of:

Link Categories

Long and Short Link Categories
Link categories with and without descriptions

Links

Links with Short and Long Names
Links with Normal, Long and No Descriptions
Links with and without XFN
Links belonging to 0, 1 and multiple categories
Links with with and without ratings
Private Links

Pages

Short and Long Posts
Short and Long Titles
Pages with Comments on and Off
Pages with Images Linked from other site
Pages with Images Links from Local
Pages with HTML formatting like links, bold, italic and headers, ordered lists, tables (See ‘Advanced Formatting’ Page)

Post Categories

Categories with and without descriptions
Categories with long descriptions
Children Categories

Tags

Tags with and without descriptions
Two Word Tags

Posts

25 Posts
Posts with 0, 1 and many categories
Posts in children categories only
Posts ranging in a data span of a year
Posts with 0, 1 and many tags
Posts with No, Short and Long Titles
Posts with Linked and Uploaded Images
Posts with HTML formatting like links, bold, italic and headers, ordered lists, tables (See ‘Advanced Formatting’ Page)
Posts with Images with multiple alignments

Comments

Posts with No Comments
Posts with 25 Comments
Posts with Threaded Comments
Posts with Private Comments
Posts with anonymous Comments.
Posts with comments with formatting

What This Isn’t

This is not just a collection of Lorem test. Lets me honest, everything looks good with Lorem text. I strived to make this a really inclusive example of all kinds of data by selecting blog posts from all different sources that contains embedded video, code samples, heavy use of lists, child categories, etc. That being said the data isn’t designed to make sense in that it isn’t tagged or categorized in any sort of logical fashion, however it is done so that you will have a varying tag cloud, posts with no and many categories, etc.

Feedback

As always, feedback is appreciated… code contributions/expansions welcome.

Vark Me

Lynn Wallenstein — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 08:54:04 +0000

For the last two weeks I have been using a cool service called Aardvark (or Vark). Basically Vark allows you to define topics you know about and enter in your social network (Facebook) and then it allows you and your friends to post questions and it will traverse your social network (friends, friends of friends, friends of friends of friends, etc), looking for someone who knows something about your question topic and send them your question to see if they can answer it. Seems simple right? I was shocked something like this didn’t already exist. I mean, this is how we work in real life. We tap into our friends and family to look for answers, connections, deals and opportunities. Using something like Facebook, pretty much everyone has defined social connections with people… so why not use that social graph in the same way? Well now you can.

Check out the Vark site for more info, but here are a couple of quick points that stood out as to why I believe this will be a success:

It uses IM as a communications interface. No stopping to open a web page and login. Posting and answering questions is as simple as it would be to pop open an IM window and ask a friend.
It uses Facebook connect. No need to remake another social graph. If you sign up and your Facebook friends are already signed up, it automatically connects you.
The people care. The community (thus far) is full of extremely nice people who are more then anxious and willing to actually answer your questions. The two questions I have submitted so far I have gotten answers back in under 5 minutes. At the same point I have probably answered 10 questions… answering is a bit addictive.
The Vark staff care. I have submitted many suggestions for site improvements and they Vark staff (Hi Alison!) has been responsive, open to feedback and very nice.

I can’t recommend enough that you check this site out…. its fun, its addictive, its helpful and it can make you look smart when you seem to have answers to any questions

Final Furious Monkey

Lynn Wallenstein — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 10:21:19 +0000

Final Furious Monkey, originally uploaded by lwallenstein.

Working on a logo for furiouscodemonkey.com. My first “project” after tuning my illustration skills this summer. I drew the original sketch on paper, scanned it in and then traced it in Photoshop.

i am a social object.

Lynn Wallenstein — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 08:49:30 +0000

i am a social object., originally uploaded by lwallenstein.

Just came up with this cool wallpaper as my homage to the “i am a social object” tshirt I can’t seem to find. Thought some of you might appreciate it. Let me know if you want a different size (or the PSD for that matter).