this a personal tumblog featuring all of my techie interests.
It’s like getting one of those chatty, impersonal Christmas letters every day of the year.
This would make a great student project!
If you read things on the Internet, like The Next Web, you’ve probably seen an infographic. The art of the infographic depends on how what data is being presented, how cleanly, and how attractively. A well-done infographic is more interesting than a text-only post of data.
The only problem with this type of content is that it’s extremely difficult to do if you don’t have a staff of designers and statisticians. Managing the data, creating a layout, testing the design, and getting sign-off on an infographic before it goes live is a long and frustrating process.
One company, Infogr.am, wants to make the infographic creation process an easy one that anyone can do. I think they’ve done their job, as their application is absolutely awesome.
(via Infogr.am Makes Infographic Creation and Sharing Simple)
(via Stay focused and keep hacking)
This morning’s Facebook blog post gives us a sneak peek into Facebook company hackathons.
If it’s simpler and more convenient to just buy the paper book, then the existing ebook model is broken.
A List Apart: Articles: Publication Standards Part 1: The Fragmented Present
A great primer on the current issues surrounding ebooks, including formatting standards, DRM, price models and lending from libraries. I don’t know as much about ebooks as I’d like, and I’ve been confused about the various publishing formats (sounds like everyone is). Since A List Apart is about web design, I like that they tied lessons from web publishing and music into their approach about the problems with semantic markup and standards in ebook file formats. This article is a good high-level introduction to all these hairy situations.
Be sure to read part 2!
Photography is one of the most active industries on G+ so this makes a lot of sense. Photo students take note - watch the conference online!
This redesign is a response to ebooks, to web type, to mobile, and to wonderful applications like Instapaper and Readability that address the problem of most websites’ pointlessly cluttered interfaces and content-hostile text layouts by actually removing the designer from the equation. (That’s not all these apps do, but it’s one benefit of using them, and it indicates how pathetic much of our web design is when our visitors increasingly turn to third party applications simply to read our sites’ content. It also suggests that those who don’t design for readers might soon not be designing for anyone.)
Web Design Manifesto 2012 – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report
Zeldman’s redesign of his personal site picks up on the conversation about what apps like Instapaper and Readability mean for designing interfaces for content delivery. Even a certain web design blog I follow that comes to mind now was torture to read on their own site because the content was squeezed together to make room for several ads (but to be fair, this violator has improved some on this issue in a recent redesign).
I’m a fan of Readability myself and I’ve recommended it to others for the graceful ability to control the way text is delivered for low vision people. But what I got from Zeldman’s manifesto is that now is the time to consider that beautiful interface design shouldn’t get in your content’s way. If users have to rely on Readability to temporarily override your entire design to comfortably experience your content, stylistic bells and whistles don’t matter as much.
The code literacy movement began to gather steam in late 2011, when Codecademy started teaching basic programming skills for free. The debate came to a head this week as two blog posts took the top spots on the tech website Hacker News.
Computer Programming for All: A New Standard of Literacy
If you follow this tumblog, you know I’ve posted a number of times on this issue of adding programming to our definition of literacy, and the debated importance of integrating it into K-12/higher education.
This article is a good place to start if you want to catch up on this idea and its implications for how we define 21st century tech skills in the context of “traditional” communication needs.
Studies have shown, that, indeed, introverts are more likely than extroverts to express intimate facts about themselves online that their family and friends would be surprised to read, to say that they can express the “real me” online, and to spend more time in certain kinds of online discussions. They welcome the chance to communicate digitally. The same person who would never raise his hand in a lecture hall of two hundred people might blog to two thousand, or two million, without thinking twice. The same person who finds it difficult to introduce himself to strangers might establish a presence online and then extend those relationships into the real world.
I’ve got this book on my Amazon wish list.
Canadian psychologist Jayne Gackenbach says avid gamers are more likely to have lucid dreams, and are better able to turn bad dreams into more positive experiences. Gackenbach hopes her theories can help sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder overcome their symptoms.
I can totally do this, and I don’t even play that many video games any more. GO VIDEO GAMES!
Yesterday and today I’ve been attending AccessU, the conference for educating attendees on best practices on creating and sharing accessible digital content. AccessU is produced by the non-profit Knowbility every year in Austin, TX at St. Edward’s University. It’s a great conference every year, and it reinforces to me just how much good design = accessible design.
I know the conference is almost over for this year, but if you want to learn more, consider checking out Knowbility’s training services and their great blog!
