The Nietz

R.I.P. Steve Jobs

Stephen — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 03:16:58 +0000

You are already missed.

Designing for the fold: best practices

Stephen — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 03:22:04 +0000

We tend to get in some heated arguments around here about keeping things above the fold. Do you need to design a page with 600 pixels in mind, or do you ignore the fold? Jakob Nielsen’s research indicates people don’t like to scroll, but there are some great sites which use the fold to their advantage:

Paddy Donnelly thinks the fold is dead,

The newspaper’s goal is for you to actually read the newspaper, not just the front page. That should be your goal too. You want your visitors to explore your site/see your product or content. Don’t let the statistic scaremongers bully you into thinking the visitor will decide in 3 seconds whether to stay or leave your website. Trust me, having no space and information overload will most definitely make your visitors leave before the 3 seconds are up.

So, what’s the answer? Read onTake Mozilla’s Firefox page. On the initial load you get some basic primary and secondary navigation, but mostly, you get a giant ad.

Taking up almost the entire page, but giving you a hit of something more. So you scroll,

and learn more about Firefox. And again, you get a hint of something more,

and more, and more until you reach the footer. And if you have JavaScript turned off, it degrades gracefully, creating a staggered effect, encouraging you to scroll.

Each time you scroll, you learn a little bit more, and want to scroll a little more.

To fold or not to fold?

Just because these two pages are successful, does that mean we can start ignoring the fold? Absolutely not. These pages aren’t ignoring the fold, instead, they’ve focused on the fold and incorporated it into the design.

Something Cool: dummyimage.com

Stephen — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 04:53:30 +0000

I am amazed no one thought of this yet. I cannot tell you how much time I spend in PhotoShop or Fireworks creating placeholders for images. Invariably they all come out looking poor. On a wireframe they stick out like a sore thumb and clients just cant see past them. Well, those days are over. Need a FPO for 350×250 image? Easy. Just point your browser to:

http://dummyimage.com/350×200

and viola!:

Any combination of height and width’ll work. It’s simple and elegant. And it gets better…

In addition to height and width, you can do all the standard ad sizes, screen resolution, even video format. For a full-sized banner, just use:

http://dummyimage.com/fullbanner

Different colors? alt text? jpg or png? just as easy:

http://dummyimage.com/400×100/0099ff/CCCCCC&text=TheNietz

Too lazy to save your own images and don’t want to link to their site? They have that covered too, just download the source (MIT license) and run it on your own server.

If you do wireframes, this is a must-add to your toolchest.

[dummyimage] via [lifehacker]

All Edie needed was a hug

Stephen — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 23:45:20 +0000

If this doesn’t move you, you have no soul:

Click here to view the embedded video.

[Youtube] via [Neatorama]

OK Go: This Too Shall Pass

Stephen — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 20:22:01 +0000

An even newer new video!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Their first video for this was awesome, but sadly not embeddable (unless of course you embed the Vimeo version…). This caused a bit of an uproar to fans since it was embedding which made them so popular. The Band responded, mostly that they were at the mercy of the labels. This time it looks they worked around it with a little sponsorship (note the StateFarm truck at the very beginning, and the logo at the end). So watch the video then add some collision covarge. Enjoy.

Bonus: The marching band video after the break

The original. Equally as awesome:

Click here to view the embedded video.

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.

Visualizing Information: Olympic hockey on facebook

Stephen — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:18:50 +0000

From Techcrunch, This is what the USA v Canada hockey game looked like on facebook:

The first big spike comes 24 seconds before the game end, when the US scored tied the game. A few minutes later, a giant spike when Canada won the gold. 3.5 million status updates.

source: [TechCrunch]

Awesome

Stephen — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 21:42:45 +0000

[NASA]

Something Cool: fav4

Stephen — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:12:30 +0000

I use the fastdial extension in firefox, and love how Chrome and Safari give thumbnails of favorite sites, but I’m really digging fav4.org. It’s simple and elegant:

You pick you fav 4 sites (from ~50) and that’s about it– you have a new start page. One trick pony, but a very pretty horse.

[fav4.org] via [Gizmodo]

Free social media icons

Stephen — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:33:02 +0000

From IconDock Via webdesigner wall. A pretty nice set, missing a couple of key ones I’m looking for (Picasa?), but they are high quality, vector based, and best of all, free.

check ‘em out:

[IconDock] via [WebDesignerWall]

Hipster know-it-alls talking about how fascinating ordinary people are? There’s an app for that.

Stephen — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 15:10:00 +0000

This American Life has it’s own iPhone App. Access to all the podcasts and a handful of extras $2.99. Money well spent. Screen shots and a full review in a few.

[iTunes]