Last year I began exploring the idea of the uncanny valley as it applies to creating prototypes, using a panel from Understanding Comics as an illustration. Lukas Mathis at UX Magazine has had a similar idea, but explored it in much more depth and with greater clarity.
I work as an Information Architect / Developer, and I’m a big fan of comics. For my IA work I refer frequently to the work of Jesse James Garrett, especially his Elements of User Experience book, and as a fan of comics I recently read (again) Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics.
I’m not saying that to boast of my geek credentials, but to introduce something I never imagined I’d find: a connection between the two.
The ongoing documentation of Mark Boulton Design’s redesign of the Drupal website is providing some great insight into the process; Leisa Reichelt’s latest post, on the community wireframing project, is a prime example. Now — whether by happy serendipity or a desire to compete — WordPress have begun to do likewise.
Mark Boulton Design have been selected to redesign drupal.org, the website of the Drupal CMS. I’m a big admirer of Mark’s writing about design and typography, and I think it’s exciting that a big open-source project is going in this direction.
Now, if we could get him to design the Drupal user interface (as Veerle Pieters is doing with Expression Engine), that would really be something.
I’ve been doing quite a lot of site mapping recently, and looking for a way to escape the standard boxy top-down view. In searching for examples of different ways to present the information, that are pleasing to look at but still immediately convey meaning, I found a number of interesting examples.
Below are the pick of the results, along with a few that don’t quite work, and some old standbys. I wanted to include images to illustrate this, but in most cases the license didn’t allow.
Some search engines, particularly on content management systems, give a percentage figure for the relevance of a result to your search term. When viewing a lot of results on a page, the figures can tend to run into one another and be hard to quickly distinguish.
This was the case with a client site I’m building using CMS Made Simple at the moment, and the results page suffered from a lack of clarity. Thinking of a way to simplify the page, I remembered the old adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” and hit upon the idea of using Google’s Chart API to replace the figures:
As part of .Net magazine’s Responsive Week, I’ve updated an article by Denise Jacobs to now bring you 50 fantastic tools for responsive web design.
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