A designer who wants to achieve good design must not regard himself as an artist who, according to taste and aesthetics, is merely dressing-up products with a lastminute garment.

and don’t mistake gloss for design:

To use design to impress, to polish things up, to make them chic, is no design at all. This is packaging.

Technical specifications in isolation are not good design:

The majority of products that we encounter in our day-to-day lives scream for attention or try to impress us with their magnificence or miniscule size. These objects try to dictate our relationships with them. Good design creates powerful long-lasting relationships with products as good design creates objects with balanced proportions

Sustainable design:

There is an increasing and irreversible shortage of natural resources: raw materials, energy, food, and land. This must compel us to rationalise, especially in design. The times of thoughtless design, which can only flourish in times of thoughtless production for thoughtless consumption, are over. We cannot afford any more thoughtlessness.

Source: Dieter Rams: Design by Vitsœ.

Sometimes you see the dumb things companies say and you wonder, “What were they thinking?”

I never imagined that happening to us, but we did something so dumb in a blog post, we’re now looking at each other blankly and asking, what were we thinking?

Worst of all, beyond any complaints you may have about alternate versions of sites – with responsive its’s a one way street. You can’t opt out of the media query that’s driving this thing. And that really sucks, so you better be pretty sure you can pull this thing off sonny Jim.

A Responsive Panacea – Alex Morris

python-intercom is a python interface to Intercom’s API. It is designed to (almost) mirror the behaviour of python-ruby.

Here is an example of it in action:

from intercom import Impression
impression = Impression.create(email='somebody@example.com')

from intercom import User
user = User.find(email='somebody@example.com')

For more details you can check out the project repository, and the pypi page.

Idea Magazine, a journal of ideas & technology in Ireland, is launching on Thursday, December 8th. Best of luck to Martha and Stu.

Here’s an example of it in action:

from docraptor import DocRaptor

docraptor = DocRaptor()
resp = docraptor.create({
        'document_content': '<p>python-docraptor Test</p>',
        'test': True
    })
# PDF data is now available in resp.content

Visit the repository for more examples.

One, Baseliner is a JavaScript tool, that creates a baseline grid overlay. There is an accompanying bookmarklet, which means it’s easy to drop a grid over any page.

The other, Baseline Background, is a web app that generates PNGs that can be used to create your baseline grid (Baseliner uses this).

There are a few reasons why I’ve published these, the most important being that I enjoy creating things. That aside, I believe it’s important to continue learning new skills and to hone current ones. So when creating these works I tried to do achieve it with some technologies that I hadn’t used before.

My first cut of Baseliner was jQuery powered. It’s too easy to turn to jQuery when writing any JavaScript for the web. So one of my first tasks after the initial release, was to remove this dependency, and to write pure JavaScript. There is nothing groundbreaking involved, but it felt good to do some work at that level.

Early versions also used PNGlib, a JavaScript library, for generating the background images. I then referenced these images using data:uris and base64 encoded images, again a first for me. That led an investigation into browser support and the inevitability that it wouldn’t work in IE6 and IE7.

Another aspect I dived into was how to deliver the latest version of Baseliner for the bookmarklet. I had to host it somewhere, so I decided to use CloudFront, not because it was necessary, but because it was something else that I hadn’t used before.

Then I decided to drop the PNGlib dependency and setup a web app to serve the PNGs. My first stab at this was a simple PHP script. That was to prove the concept, then I thought this would be a great opportunity to try a Django deployment on Heroku. This was something that I’d wanted to try for a while, so the timing couldn’t have been better. The app is now running at baselinebg.keyes.ie.

The two apps are MIT licensed so feel free to have a look around.

Even with a simple problem, you can learn something while implementing it’s resolution. Maybe the next time you have a smallish problem, you’ll use a new tool to resolve it. It’s just another reason why I love the web, it provides great opportunities for continuous learning.

A couple of hours later and I have an initial version of Baseliner ready to roll. It is currently based on jQuery (for personal efficiency, but there is no reason why it can’t be rewritten in unadorned JavaScript) and PNGlib to dynamically create the background images.

I’ll stick the source on GitHub soon, but in the meantime, here’s a fifty five second preview of it in action: