Sep 26

Sportsify - Become a smarter sports fan

Sportsify is a side-project I’ve been working on after hours for a few months and the main reason this site has been so neglected as of late.

You can think of Sportsify like a Rotten Tomatoes/Metacritic for sports picks and power rankings, aggregating all the #1’s and weekend favorites from around the web into one site.

I’ve already found myself referencing its consensus percentage in everyday conversation — “Yeah, it was a huge upset, the analysts gave Oregon State a 0% chance to beat USC” — and maybe other folks eventually will too. If not, that’s okay, it’s fun to work on and play with regardless.

Aug 26

The iPhone productivy plan

When you earn your living sitting in front of the computer all day, you eventually find lots of highly effective ways to waste time sitting in front of the computer all day.

After trying — and failing at — jargony productivity plans like GTD and 4HWW, I decided finding the one perfect way to make to-do lists wasn’t the answer. After all, making the to-do list isn’t the important part. Making sure you do the stuff on it is.

And what was keeping me from my to-do lists was the web. When tired or challenged or waiting or stuck I would browse. It was just so much easier than working.

In order to get more done I was going to have to eliminate that easy out, so I came up with the iPhone productivity plan (I use the terms “productivity plan” here loosely and with tongue firmly planted in cheek). Simply put:

  • I dumped all the sites I frequent too often into an /etc/hosts file, blocking them on both my laptops
  • I added those same sites as bookmarks on my iPhone
  • I made sure the things I was working on were — if at all possible — fun and inspiring

Not much to it. At first I was worried that my decreased browsing time would cause me to miss out. But I found that during the course of a day, while waiting in line or stopped at a light, I had plenty of opportunities to catch up.

I also realized those sites that I had previously found so crucial to my everyday life and work didn’t actually have that much information on them that was immediately and absolutely necessary to know. Visiting them once a day or a couple times a week was more than enough.

And, lastly, I made sure the things I was doing with my new found time didn’t suck. I’ve axed a couple things that I no longer enjoyed working on and it’s already showing in my other work. If the real reason you can’t get stuff done is because you hate what you’re doing, no amount of plan will save you.

I’ve been doing this for a few weeks now and it’s been working well for me. Of course you might hate it. That’s the problem with productivity plans, they’re so personal they usually only work for the creator and those who think exactly like them. You’re probably better off not doing anything I or anyone else tells you when it comes to your workflow. Just trial and error your way into your own plan. And then get back to work.

Jun 1

Trivial notes about NFL logos

I’m going through all the NFL logos on SportsLogos.net for a personal project of mine and came up with a few observations during my work:

  • Oldest logo still in use: Steelers (1963) — Dallas is a close second (64)
  • Coolest old logo: Chargers (61-73)
  • Stupidest old logo: Steelers (60-61) — slipping on a high steel beam shouldn’t be this fun
  • Ugliest old logo: Packers (51-55) — the redesign wasn’t much better
  • Ugliest “team of the past” logo: Houston Oilers (60-71)
  • Most inclusive logo: Chiefs (63-71) — they included half the lower 48 in this thing
  • Logo that looks most like Radioshack’s current logo: Redskins (70-71)
May 27

Design blogging ain’t what it used to be

I read a lot fewer design blogs than I used to, and one of the big reasons — even bigger than lack of time — is because there’s a lot less good content out there that needs to be kept up with. Designers just aren’t blogging like they used to.

Why? My guesses are 1) social networks like Twitter and Facebook and 2) web design has stalled and it’s just not as much fun to write about as it was 3-4 years ago (there’s also probably a 3) of blogging in general isn’t as close knit or rewarding as it was a few years ago, which I’m sure is another big reason Twitter has taken off).

To test this theory I came up with 10 design bloggers who’ve been blogging since 2004 — when web standards adoption really took off and everyone was writing about it, sharing tips, tricks and their latest work. I wanted to compare the number of blog posts they’d written up to this point in 2004 to the number of blog posts they’ve written so far this year.

I know this isn’t a scientific study or anything, but here’s my quick count:

So, on average these still popular design bloggers have written about 75% less this year than they did in 2004. I guess it speaks again to just how interesting web design’s gotten these last few years.

Feb 26

Turn-based games for the win

For years people have been saying that casual games would be the future of gaming online. They said both men and women would flock to Flash games on sites like PopCap and Kongregate and developers would soon be rolling in the cash. These sites and developers seem to be doing fine, but I have a few problems with casual games:

  • Seriously, I can only play so many 3-way connector puzzles and tower defense games
  • I don’t really have time to sit down for even 10-15 minutes straight to play something — I’ve got a couple minutes tops
  • I hate playing against the computer — gaming today is a lot about interacting with friends and family, not scoring points and finishing levels

That’s why lately I’ve been playing at Weewar and ItsYourTurn. I think these games — turn-based games that update you via email that it’s your turn — are the real future of casual gaming:

  • Each game can take days to finish, but each turn only takes a couple minutes at the most — perfect for when you need to take a quick break from whatever you’re doing
  • You’re playing with a real person so you can always expect the unexpected, plus chat with them, badger them, etc.
  • You get updates when it’s your turn — via email and potentially RSS, SMS, Twitter, etc. — so you usually have something waiting for you in your inbox that you actually want to open
  • Completely browser based, no need for plugins, etc. — some might miss the sounds, music and fancy animations, but personally I would rather play Weewar than something like Diner Dash any day of the week (even though Diner Dash is a lot more popular than Weewar — the biggest weakness of Weewar is it’s slanted heavily male)
  • There’s a networking and competition aspect that regular Flash games almost never have — weekly tournaments, competitions, leaderboards, chatrooms, etc.

Plus you can play them on your iPhone. I don’t know, maybe I’m in the minority, but I love these types of online games and hope to see more of them soon.

Feb 18

The stagnation of web design

When something big happens in tech — the most recent example being Microsoft’s attempt to buy Yahoo! — bloggers oftentimes link to TechMeme to show a permalink of the ongoing online discussion. As they should, it’s a great resource (as well as a great example of how one guy can make something extremely useful if he executes well).

As I was browsing through the blogs that had linked to my Pixish articles last week, I noticed people linking to searches on Google Blog Search whenever they wanted to mention the online discussion. It worked well enough, but there was obviously no threading or ranking, because that’s not what Blog Search is about.

That got me thinking, why isn’t there a TechMeme for web design?

That, of course, also got me to thinking about how maybe I should start one. Which then, as it always does, immediately started me thinking up good domain names (I’m partial to designermeme.com).

But then I stopped, realizing I was missing something. TechMeme works because there are thousands of people blogging about Google, Apple, et al. at all hours of the day. These companies are constantly pushing for PR of their latest initiatives and bloggers hoping to get traffic out of it are constantly pushing out new blog posts about them. Few of the posts are good, most are just me-toos, but it keeps a dynamic, updated conversation going all the time.

That’s why TechMeme works. DesignerMeme (or whatever) would never work.

The Pixish flare-up was the most excitement web design’s seen in weeks. We’re so bored with the stagnant web design industry we jump at the chance for a little drama, a little something to ruffle our tail feathers and make us fire up WordPress/MT/whatever. I guess the last brouhaha was the IE8 mess and before that you have to go all the way back to last year for more of Jeff Croft’s web standards rants.

Have you looked at what passes for web design news these days? Design Float is an unreadable trash heap of Top 10’s that bubble to the top with just a handful of duplicate votes, deli.cio.us’s popular page is a shell of itself, Digg’s Design category has always been worthless, and then you have all those sites that shan’t be named (CSSBeauty, CSSVault, CSSRemix, etc. ad naseum).

A DesignerMeme would only have something interesting on it once or twice a month. Every other second of every other day it’d be populated by junk no one would want to read and that I can’t believe people can force themselves to write — example titles being “The top 5 best ways to find new clients”, “Top 10 CSS design secrets you can’t live without”, “50 reasons XHTML’s better than HTML”, “101 reasons HTML’s better than XHTML”, “10,000 Clean & Usable WordPress Themes”, “How to use the pen tool in Illustrator”, “The stagnation of web design”.

But I guess you can’t really blame the design bloggers — they keep rehashing the same tripe because there’s nothing else to write about.

It’s been disappointing watching the stagnation of web design the last few years. I guess it’s largely why I’ve been blogging only in fits and starts for so long. Individual browser innovations (of the -webkit and -moz variety) seem like they’ll always be overshadowed by IE’s marketshare. Those who want to adopt and learn CSS and standards have probably already done so. All the innovation and excitement lately has been in frameworks, business models, Javascript, video — none of it in web design. And none of us see anyway that’s really going to change anytime soon. As a result many of us don’t write, while others write vacuous garbage.

I don’t have a solution. But as I wrote before, it all most likely means that — for the first time in a longtime — I’ll just be finding a few new ways to spend my time outside of web design.

Feb 12

A follow-up on Pixish

Well, Gruber, now you’ve gone and done it.

I’ll start by saying that after the way Derek’s handled the slight blowback he’s gotten about Pixish being spec-ish from me and others it makes me respect him even more. His emails to me and his posts and comments on the issue show that he really believes in Pixish and where he sees it going in the future.

I still don’t, but he certainly does.

One thing he wanted to clarify was that calling Pixish a bunch of design contests isn’t quite fair because Pixish:

[I]s not really for design (as in a complete combination of elements) as it is about individual imagery (photos or illustrations) to be used in design.

So, say someone saw an assignment for “a picture of a girl and an orangutan” on the site and just happened to have one on their hard drive. They could quickly post it to Pixish and maybe make a few bucks or win a wristband or something. Not so bad, right?

Unfortunately, already that original utopian vision isn’t being followed. If I look at the assignments as they stand right now — of the 20 on the page, 2 are for blog headers and 5 are for logos (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). 3 more are for t-shirt designs, but it’s somewhat arguable whether that stands on its own as a combination of design elements (though there are certainly plenty of people who accuse Threadless of profiting handsomely from their community’s spec work).

So already 7 — and arguably 10 — out of the 20 new assignments on Pixish are for complete designs like blog headers and logos, not just elements of design like pictures of orangutans. Without strict moderation by the folks at Pixish, logos and site headers and blog designs will continue to pop up as assignments. The only way to stop people and companies from posting stuff like this is for people to not participate in it at all. Derek says so himself in his email:

[I]t’s all opt-in, right? Publishers get no rights to anything you upload unless you submit it to the assignment. And my hope is that, if publishers don’t offer enough of a reason for people to submit, the artists won’t do it and the publisher will be forced to raise their pay - just like in the real world.

Spec work is opt-in in the real world, too. But in the real world one of the biggest arguments against spec work is that it drives down prices and occupational respect because clients see that by using it they get far more for far less. Even designers who don’t do spec work are hurt financially and professionally by the sheer presence of it and the willingness of others, maybe amateurs maybe not, to participate. It’s bad all around and you can’t make it better by hoping people are smart enough to maximize their earnings potential by only participating in the “good deals” — and even then, again, one winner and a bunch of losers — and that people and companies looking for work to be done are good natured enough to pay what good design and imagery are worth.

Lastly, Derek mentioned future plans to foster private assignments and make the site into more of a marketplace. That’s certainly an improvement, but the site can’t currently be judged by what it will be in the future, so once again — just like the assignments for full logos and header designs — it’s a case of the site as it is today not living up to its founder’s excitement and optimism of what it could eventually become.

Pixish can and is being used right now for full-fledged spec work and design contests — and that’s a problem. Is it a problem Derek and team can fix? I honestly do hope so. But I do know it won’t get fixed by just saying the site’s not meant for complete designs when it already is being used that way. Or by hoping people are smart enough to force companies to drive up their prices by only participating in the “good deals”.

Stock photo sites are one thing. Pixish is something completely different. And sorry but until I, and I’m sure several others, see otherwise, I won’t be convinced of anything else.

Update: Shortly after this post was published Derek announced he was taking down all the logo, header design and template assignments, many of which I had mentioned in this post, and would only be accepting pictures and illustrations on Pixish from now on.

Feb 11

Give my regards to Willy

“Back to the drawing board again,
it feels okay to be back to the drawing board again.
The life I love is making things on the interwebs,
and it feels okay to be back to the drawing board again.”

Feb 10

The Pixish logo belongs next to “spec work” on dictionary.com

Derek Powazek seems like a cool guy. He got screwed when he was ousted from his old startup, JPG Magazine, and has done a great job of keeping himself busy with his personal blog, other blog Magazineer and, now, his newest startup Pixish.

Unfortunately, Pixish is not cool. At all. It’s the defintion of spec work.

“Spec work” is when a buyer/client gets several designers’ unpaid work upfront and only pays for the work they deem best. One winner, a bunch of losers. Almost all designers are unabashedly against it. There’s No!Spec, Zeldman’s Don’t Design on Spec and the AIGA’s stance that “doing speculative work seriously compromises the quality of work that clients are entitled to and also violates a tacit, long-standing ethical standard in the communication design profession worldwide”.

The classic argument against spec work, and its wicked step-sister “design contests”, is that it’s like asking a bunch of architects to design the blueprints for your new house and only paying the one you like the best. Or, in the case of contests like the ones Pixish will be holding, you don’t even have to pay them, just give them a prize or something. “Ooh, an iPod shuffle! You mean I can keep it?!”

Derek and the folks at Pixish know this. They even added a response to it on their About page. Saying, basically, “if you don’t like the idea don’t participate” and, “pros like you are lucky, we’re giving talented amateurs a chance to make a name for themselves”. Oh, for crying in a bucket, here we go.

If the architects example is the classic argument against spec work and design contests, “giving amateurs a chance to make a name for themselves” is the classic argument for them. And 50 years ago it might have even made sense. Then there really was lots of talent and only a few ways to showcase it. Television, radio, movies. “You’re up against 300 other plate spinners. Good luck to you, little lady.”

But now we all know this is no longer the case. We’ve got, you know, the web. Blogs. Youtube. digg/reddit/lots of other lowercase social sites. There are no longer just three ways to showcase your talent — there are three bajillion. And if you aren’t getting noticed, sorry, you either aren’t trying hard enough or you suck.

Pixish isn’t going to make any pros out of amateurs. I don’t imagine it’s going to do much of anything for anybody. “I saw your work on Pixish and wanted to offer you this highly lucrative job!” “Oh really?! Thanks Pixish!”

I respect Derek and I certainly respect how hard it is to come up with a great idea and execute on it. I’ve had a lot more failures than I’ve had successes trying to do that exact thing.

But, plain and simple, Pixish is trying to capitalize on spec work on a massive scale. Spec work is bad. Therefore, Pixish is massively bad. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see a backlash against companies that use Pixish. Emails to CEOs, petitions, etc. And even if there’s no real retaliation against the companies that use it, I know I for one will never participate. And I really hope no one else does either.

Update: Here’s the follow-up post with comments from Derek.

Feb 6

Another design realign

I updated the design night before last in honor of the already defunct Design Deadline deadline. Unfortunately, Design Deadline didn’t generate enough interest, so instead of having just 6 sites that actually met the deadline, I decided to just go ahead and scrap it. No big deal, in fact I’m already working on another side project. This time something totally unrelated to web design …

Anyway, the biggest change — the ambient background — was all Drew Wilson. And man, did he do a great job. I hope everyone else likes it as much as I do, because I can’t stop starting at it. Thanks again Drew!

I also updated a few other things here and there to give the site better spacing, padding, etc. Nothing drastic, just polish. Next up I’m going to look at possible color changes, a few new categories and, most importantly, better more original (and oft updated) content.

Onward!

Jan 23

A little more on the web design community

Following up on yesterday’s post ZzZzzzZzZZzzZzZzZZzzzZzz (heh, now that’s a permalink). So, what are you supposed to do when the online community you used to be pretty active in — a community that was once full of really interesting people, work, and new ideas, a community that helped you get work and make money, as well as got you into your current career — no longer holds your interest?

Do you step up and make it interesting yourself, or just move on and participate in something that’s as interesting and inspiring as the old community used to be? Right now I’m leaning towards the latter.

This doesn’t mean I’ll change jobs or careers, not by a longshot, especially since I love them both. Just that I’ll maybe start using my freetime differently than I have the last 6 years.

Jan 22

ZzZzzzZzZZzzZzZzZZzzzZzz

Is it just me or has the web design community not gotten extremely, teeth-suckingly boring over the past couple years?

Is it because all the buzz has been about startups and programming frameworks and Javascript and scaling and business models — and none of it around tired old web design?

Is it because we’ve been waiting on HTML5 and CSS3 for what seems like decades?

Or is it just because we’ve all been too busy working to write anything interesting?

Nov 6

Site reorg and realign

I managed to find a little time tonight to update the design of the site and prune away some of the useless posts I had started collecting.

I think — after several months of designs I weren’t happy with and content I wasn’t excited about — I’m starting to finally get somewhere. Look for more, better content coming soon … fingers crossed.

My top 5 favorite science fiction movies

From best to fifth best:

  • Blade Runner
  • Aliens
  • Gattaca
  • Children of Men
  • Back to the Future

Movies that finished just outside the top 5 would be Terminator 2, The Matrix, Brazil, Jurassic Park and The Empire Strikes Back.

Aug 31

Design galleries ain’t what they used to be

Screenalicio.us “features” the website Deepakd.com, which would normally be all well and good, except for the fact that Deepakd’s entire site is just a mocked up image.

The funniest bit is the “UsableNet approved” badge down at the bottom of the sidebar — must be tough to get approved for those things.

Aug 22

Carsonified rebranding process

If you’re not following Elliot Jay Stocks’s screencasts on the rebranding process he’s undergoing with the Carson Systems brand … well, you should, because they’re good stuff.

Here are Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 over at Carsonified.

Back when I was still reviewing websites daily and thinking constantly about new websites with the Reboot, I got the idea of doing screencast critiques of new sites. Then online video wasn’t where it is today, so I never really pursued it. But after watching Elliot go through and talk about his logo ideas, I wonder if screencast reviews of site designs would be equally as entertaining?

Unfortunately, I’m southern, so people don’t really like listening to my voice. And neither do I for that matter. So maybe not me, but I think someone else could do something really cool with it.

Jul 2

Archive.org should be nothing but full-length screenshots

Archive.org is great, but there are so many sites it flubs because of CSS tricks, broken images, etc. that it’ll never be the resource it could, and needs to, be. Especially if — thinking ahead 50 years — it’s billions of saved pages are useless because browsers no longer parse HTML that old.

That’s why we need an Archive.org that only takes full length screenshots of a site’s homepage. And just once a month, not whenever the site updates like Archive.org does. This way you could quickly flip through a site’s entire visual history, preserved forever in screenshots. It’d be the ultimate in design inspiration, reference and web history with an idea as simple as “a site full of dated screenshots”.

A couple of weeks back this was going to be the new side project I pursued — but after trying to get my head around everything it’d entail I shelved it. I still think it has the potential to be extremely successful, I just can’t get it started on my own. And projects I can’t at least get started on my own I tend to shy away from.

Jun 18

Your mom’s web app sucks

With more and more sites like Webappers and FeedMyApp and Startupping popping up every few minutes it’s no longer avoidable — web apps are the new personal sites.

As these CSS Vault-esque and A List Apart-like sites start springing up specifically for web apps it shows that Ning was actually kind of onto something — generic web apps can be almost as easy to build as personal sites and therefore everyone could soon have one to call there own.

Of course, most of them will be useless and ugly — but that’s not the point. Not right now at least.

I guess it only makes sense. As tools have improved we’ve moved from static personal experiments to portfolio sites to blogs and other CMS’s and now — thanks to the various frameworks and just better overall languages for the web — onto personal web apps.

Have to wonder, though — will it scale? Will there be enough users to signup for all the random web apps? Will there be enough ideas to merit all these random web apps? Will these random web apps be anywhere near sustainable? I won’t posture like I know the answers — but I’ve got a random web app I’m working on right now that might help us find the answer. I’ll let you know when it’s in beta.

May 17

Why I ditched tumblr for WordPress

I liked tumblr the second I saw it. After using it I liked it even more. But after several weeks there were a few things that made me jump ship:

  • I’m a web guy — even with a custom domain and surprisingly strong theme control, I can’t feel right about not having complete control over my own site.
  • The web’s a lot about comments — even though I don’t use them in every post, I also can’t live without them on every post.
  • Blogs are a lot about archives — tumblr doesn’t offer one, and I wanted one.
  • tumblr controls my post types — I wanted a “code” post type, a staple for other tumblelogs, but would have to wait for tumblr to release an update to ever have it.
  • And lastly, Davidville — the company that runs tumblr — is going to have to eventually either make money off tumblr with ads, etc. or sell it. In many ways, my switching is just a preemptive strike against that happening to my stuff.

So, I borrowed a couple of tumblr’s conventions — the post types, the permalink tag on the left that shows the date (and type of post) — and using WordPress, a heavy dose of category checking to classify my posts and CSS classes to style each different kind of post, quickly got my own tumblr-esque tumblelog up and running.

It’s hacky, but it works for me. And, you know, after working on this I can’t help but think that a WordPress-like, open-source, easy-to-install PHP tumblelog CMS (that doesn’t suck) would be a good thing.

May 11

Grid me a break

So you’ve been waiting for web design to move past the bubbly (no pun intended) “web 2.0″ design aesthetic? I think your wait is over — grid-based design seems to be the new hott.