Category: design-and-ideas

One day I would love to beable to use slashdot on my ipaq without scrolling here there and everywhere. Anyway this is written after reading the alist apart article. The challenge of changing slash is a interesting one, as there are many good opensource applications which dont do standards well, slash being one of them.
Next week: printer-friendly and handheld-friendly Slashdot with a few simple additions. – I wonder if people will catch on to the fact that the new palmtops support css now, which is ignoying as they shouldnt.

At long last the winner of the reusit contest has been announced. Where did i come? well I didnt do it that badly, about half way down which isnt bad considering I spent 1 hour doing it while on jury service back in August.

Visual Appeal – 1.89
Usability – 2.00
Valid HTML – 5.00
Valid CSS – 5.00
Cross-Browser – 5.00
Accessibility – 5.00
Total Visual Score – 1.94
Total Validity Score – 5.00
Total Score – 3.47 – not bad seeing how number 1 was 4.58

I love the fact no one really liked the style of it but it was valid html/css, accessable and cross browser. Just wish I kind of finished the white edition. As that was cleaner and more pleasent on the eye. Saying that I think i was one of the only entries which deployed a dark background with white text.

On the downside, one of my MA students came 2nd from last which isnt good as they didnt even validate there xhtml or css. Oh well thats what happens when you face the rest of the world.
Talking of which, some of the entries were great work, nothing as radical as the stuff you see on csszengarden but very practical and useable layouts, real attention to detail style. I kinda of feel better than I didnt come near the top ten with my lame effort. Its quite cool how alot of them used a picture of Jakob Neilsen but I decided against it as I wouldnt put a picture of myself on my own website. I cant believe my entry was viewed by some of the great minds of the web at the moment, Zeldman, Meyer, etc. By the way nice to see Louise Ferguson on the panel. Would like to hear what Jakob says about the entries…

Caught this in my feeds today. Credit to accessify.com for the link. Its basicly a presentation about why table based design is stupid and why we should be using css. Yes nothing new, but well presentated none the less. Will be useful for my students and maybe management.

Oh I spied this in Zeldman's blog today too. And I'm just fumming with rage! Good on Zeldman with a leveled response, I wouldnt be so leveled with my response to it.

Seems a lot of people are really UPSET at this article….Well, I guess, if you been brainwashed for the last 2 years or so on the absolute superiority of CSS (e.g. sort of like the Nazis who thought they were the superior race) only to watch it crumbling down with one little web page article, I guess you would be upset as well. Not to mention that they spent all that time redesigning their website without tables only to figure out that in order to get any of that neat stuff like, catalogs, forums, search results, product lists, address books, etc. you got to have tabular data…i.e. TABLES……

Oh please no one was saying tables are completly banshed, but for design layout yes they are! Dont even get me started on the rest of the points!

Because I'm a geek at heart, I've always fancied making my own tshirts with dodgy things which only a few will understand on it. Now I know there are places like think geek and others which do tshirts for geeks already, but there crap in quality. Unfortually the Nike, Adidias and even diadoria tshirts I routinely wear actually have a quality beyond the typical cotton tshirts you get from think geek. If I could only print on top of my nike tshirts i would be very happy.

Anyhow, saying all that, I found this today too. Maybe I'll setup cubicgarden.com tshirts store one day – hehe

I want to keep the whole of cubicgarden.com quite consistent in design, even though there are many different applications and services running under the site banner. The way I do this is by using the same external css for all the sections. But recently my designer side has been tweaking and fiddling with the css to see what else i can introduce to the site. So please dont be alarmed if the site design changes from day to day. Its just me fiddling.

I wrote this blog a while back in August. It included a link to edward tuffe's arcticle about why powerpoint was evil. But recently Dave has been emailing comments around to me and Miles. I decided to sit this one out, but some very interesting comments and ideas have been bounced around.

Emailed from Miles

I've found myself wondering what it is exactly that makes PPT evil.
Certainly it is dangerous: a graphic communications tool in the hands
of people poorly trained in graphical or graphically assisted
communication is a bad thing, and, as Tufte points out, hierarchical
outlines can be used to lend a spurious authority to banal or
misleading statements (and imply non-existent chains of inference and
conclusion). But this, I think, is not enough to make PPT truly evil.
For a long time I wondered what I was missing, until I came across this:


Leverage your existing presentations so you don�t have to start from
scratch. You can import just about any file type into Keynote -
including PowerPoint, PDF and AppleWorks presentations - and then
enhance with themes. You can paste data from Excel documents into your
Keynote charts and tables. Keynote lets you export presentations to
PowerPoint, QuickTime or PDF.


here: http://www.apple.com/keynote/ ... and I realised that Chomsky had
answered the question over a generation ago.

PPT, surely, has as its antecedents the blackboard, the flip chart and
the ohp. Even used amateurishly, all of these media are effectively
deployed in communication. Thinking back to my schooldays, I was always
worried about teachers who flourished ohps rather than wrote on the
board (for some obscure reason), but they never struck the terror into
me that a session of PPTs can. Why is this? And why did ohps make me
more nervous than blackboards?

In the 1970s Chomsky noted that television was destroying political
discourse. He realised that, in fact, discourse was stopping, as
television, which demanded immediacy, and is not well suited to the
delivery of lectures, encouraged a style of discourse now known as the
"soundbite". At first, "soundbites" were the distillation of more
complex arguments - and this was the point of Chomsky's objection: that
complex political debate was being "dumbed down" into a soundbite for
television's consumption. This was television's doing (as McLuhan
spotted, the medium is the message), but the political classes soon got
with the medium, and, rather than "dumb down" the argument to get to
the soundbite, dropped the argument entirely, and produced just the
soundbite. By the 1980s, politics had become merely soundbite packaging
(consider, since when did "tough on crime, tough on the causes of
crime" actually substitute for a policy on criminal justice?). To be
sure, politics has always been about sloganising - wrapping a complex
idea into a memorable phrase ("votes for women", "peace in our time",
"liberty, equality, fraternity"), but, behind the slogans there used to
be complex political ideas. Nowadays, political parties don't have
policies as such, they craft soundbites to appeal to target swing voter
groups. The party that does this best gets elected. There are no longer
any big ideas in politics not because all the big battles have been
won, but because there are no big ideas anymore.

PPT has achieved the same result for the presentation of complex
information.

In the past, the notes on the blackboard represented a summation. The
teacher wasn't writing all there was to know on the subject - that
existed in books, papers, pictures, documents, films, archives, &c. The
teacher was merely presenting a synthetic overview of the corpus
relevant to the lesson at hand. The teacher was able to do this (if
they were a good teacher) because they had some mastery of that corpus.
The notes on the board were ephemeral, epiphenomena of the narrative
the teacher's master caused him/her to weave around the source
material. This is why I got nervous about ohps (on reflection). Ohps
were more difficult to produce, and were produced in advance of the
lesson. The teacher became preoccupied with the presentation of the
ohps - making sure they were laid out clearly, and were legible from
the back of the class (as they would be unable to effect significant
changes on the fly). They would have to prejudge very accurately the
length of their talk, and the level of engagement of their audience.
They would, in short, have come to see the production of the ohps as
the end in itself, rather than the summative mastery of the subject
matter.

PPTs, too, has become an end in itself. PPTs don't summarise more
complex corpora, they are the sole embodiment of a piece of thinking,
information or ideas. The are lavishly prepared: my anecdotal
impression is that for every hour a PPT is worked on, 40 minutes are on
looknfeel, and 20 minutes are on content. As more and more visual tools
are loaded into presentation software, more and more time is spent on
the looknfeel. This is what makes PPT evil: it is the primary medium
for the expression of ideas in business, and, increasingly, education.
PPT is no longer an ephemeral medium, but a medium of record - so what
we record is executive summaries and bullet-points. Not only are
complex ideas no longer explored (if they won't fit on a slide, there's
no place for them), but people are becoming increasingly ignorant of
complex ideas - all thought has become slogans.

Is there hope? Very little, I fear. But I say this - delete your PPT
slides after presenting them. Promise yourself that you will always
treat them as ephemeral, that your primary sources will be elsewhere,
in greater depth, and with more detail, and you may yet be saved.

I keep meaning to reply to Miles but always seem to run out of bus time when writing my email on the ipaq into work. Miles raises some interesting ideas through out the email message. Kinda of hits the core of why presentations are enherently bad, just like the soundbite and slogans. How do you explain to a audience complex ideas in a set of bullet points and a 45mins talk?
Just reflecting personally, I tend to write my presentations in tagged pdf format and include lots of information which I dont read in the presentation. So when the audience gets a copy or requests a copy it contains lots more than I explained. But is this enough I ask?

Oh by the way heres the New york times arcticle which started the debate off again after wired. Oh and dave's copy on his blog, but he has no comments so people been emailing instead.

ReUSEIT – Enough said

I am seriously considering doing this, I'm going to do it without changing the html much unless its not xhtml. Anyway I need to download the pack and give it a shot.

Just got back from Designing for e-government, and it was good. Not sure if it was better or worst than the last one, but this time I stuck around afterwards when everyone went to the globe pub. Meet some interesting people including Louise ferguson. She was talking about the events calender she had drawn up on her website. I explained I also tried to do a simular thing but using the ical standard, which would allow anyone with a username and password to add events to it. And anyone could sync up with it.
So its good to see shes done this, I can see myself using it alot.

Just had a look for ical again. I remember my ical idea didnt work because you need a ical server and I was trying to use webdav instead. BUT i just found this, and i'm now thinking once I do the blojsom2 upgrade. I should try this out using resin's webdav support.

Yes please note regular readers of my blog, it will be down tomorrow while I change to blojsom 2. And unfortually all permalinks will change. Really sorry its just the way it is. It shouldnt take long to do the upgrade and my feeds will be available still. There maybe slight issues during the first few weeks.

Thanks for your patiences during this time

Flash harry pointed out this site to me, looks like a good resource.

I've always said I want to be more involved with the -standards- sorry reconmenations the w3c.org do. One of the top ones would be CSS3 or the next one.

Anyway mezzoblue's blog about the new standard has been recieving some interest.
My thoughts are simular to mezzo's, about why designers dont get involved. I mean no disrespect to anyone but wasnt xslt ment to be for designers to use? Thats a serious gap between reality and wishful thinking.

Anyway the spec looks good so far but yeah this will keep a few flash heads happy for a while…
Transparency will be available anywhere you can use colour.

I was alerted to this Inaccessible Website Demonstration through mezzoblue. Which gets the message of accessability over very quickly. Its not just about the technology its about the way you design the sites. The blury example is one which touch me, as I've always been told my sizes are too small on cubicgarden.com

Nice link from London underground, charting the orginal 1933 london underground map and how the underground really looks when placed on top of a real street map.

I asked miles, about kinship and he wrote me a fantastic email back explaining not only what it was but its relationship with ontologies, etc. I hope miles you didnt mind me blogging it

> I came across the term at that thing on Wednesday.
> And started wondering how this relates to semantics? For example
> wouldnt social organization just be another ontology?

Your man at the mobile ponytail conference seems to be using “kinship” as a buzzword – it's characteristic of designers to strip language of meaning in pursuit of trendiness

Is social organisation an ontology? Hmm.

It seems to me there are two (or maybe more, but I will consider two) kinds of ontology: constructed ontologies, and natural ontologies. Natural ontologies are wired into the human brain, and are presumably evolved classificatory mechanisms.

Natural ontologies are those expressed by children, or culturally universal. For example, children have no difficulty distinguishing the animate from the inanimate, or the dead from the living from the never alive. To a certain extent, natural ontologies overlap with culturally approved constructed ontologies, and contribute directly to epistemology.

Constructed ontologies require a more “sophisticated” view of the world. For example, children may not be able to make the same kinds of distinctions between sanity and insanity that adults are able to, and, therefore, are ontologically blind to a classification system that distinguishes the rational from the irrational.

In the wacky, wacky world of computer science, an “ontology” (and I presume this is where you came across the word) it the relationship amongst objects you have to tell a computer to make it seem like it understands constructed or natural ontologies. For example, you would need to tell a computer the relationship between “hardcore” and “porn” so that a search containing those two terms as positive assertions didn't return results about building materials or music. So, in the computer sense of things, kinship is an ontology that is, a manifest describing the relationships amongst blood relatives.

But outside of computer science, kinship precedes ontology. That is, we have no reason to suspect that ants or bees have the concept of ontology, but, clearly, their social actions are constrained by kinship. This is because kinship isn't written in the genes (in people, natural ontology is written in the genes, or at least, in the expression of the genes), it _is_ the genes. Kinship is the measure of shared genetic material (your kin share your genes, and the closer your kin, the more genes they share). So, kinship is not imposed on living matter through intellect or instinct – it is a fact of living matter.

Kinship is only distantly related to social organisation (though many primitive” societies are organised along kin lines) in human beings. We do not form organised collectives because we are related, but because we are able to articulate common purpose at a “higher” level.Bees and ants do what they do because the others in their colony are their sisters: this is not what guides our social collectives. At best, ontology can only apply to social organisation at a meta-level (classifying the terms we use for social organisation is an ontology).

Please note this was slightly edited.

I have little to say in return for now, except this is a great starting point and it may be very relvent for work in the future. Now if only I could find a visual topic map editor.

Spied this in my aggerator flock Creative techniques on Tons blog. The direct link is here.

As the creator says, its a general knowledge base rather than the written word. Also finding its a good site to quote bits and bobs from in the many papers I will have to write soon.