JasonMorrison.net

A while back I wrote some early thoughts about redesigning my blog for usability. I haven’t had much time to work on my blog since then, but to be honest my homepage was in even more dire need of attention.

The design considerations for my home page are a little different from my blog – I don’t expect anyone to come back to my homepage again and again, looking for informative articles or useful info. The use case for the home page can be stated pretty succinctly: “who is this guy, and what does he do?”

I’m also operating under the design constraint of what I can get done while our 8-month-old is napping. This means a very simple layout – it takes time to come up with lickable web2.0 buttons and reflections. I’d like the page to be visually interesting, though, which is why I decided to use a big freaking photo in the background.

Normally I would try to avoid such a bandwidth-sucking design but bandwidth doesn’t seem to be the problem it used to be. I have some ideas on how to trim down the image size without impacting the design too much that I’ll share once I’ve got it up.

Here’s a screenshot of the first draft:

And here’s what it looks like, as of this post:

What do you think? I’m specifically wondering:

• Should I put a photo of myself on my homepage?
• Any typography ideas? Right now everything is Helvetica (or Arial, if Helvetica isn’t installed).
• The content boxes are floats, and they change position depending on the window size. Should I lock them down?

Before reading further, take a look at this impressive map web app from the Sri Lanka Ministry of Defence: http://www.defence.lk/orbat/Default.asp. Below is a screenshot of the main map.

What’s your initial impression? It’s certainly well-made. The graphic design is very professional, the map is interactive, allowing users to turn features on and get more detail. There’s also an animated timeline map of the recent conflict in the north that shows the progression of troops and photos from the various towns.

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ReadWriteWeb had an interesting post showing word clouds generated from Barack Obama’s inauguration speech. 

But what are word clouds, and how are they useful? Word clouds visually represent the frequency or importance of a word in a given text. In President Obama’s speech, we can see from the cloud that he used words like “nation”, “new”, and “people” fairly often. You can use them to compare to texts in in a sort of qualitative way – does one text have a much sharper distribution than the other?

I would say that most of the time their primary purpose is aesthetic. I’m not convinced people really use them for anything other than as nice design elements – thought I think they have untapped potential. That’s why I created the Tag Altocumulus WordPress Plugin, to try to integrate tag clouds into a site’s navigation system in a way that’s actually useful.

To generate the clouds they used Wordle, a very cool site that lets you create your own word clouds from any text.  Wordle gives you options on color, font, and orientation and you can end up with some pretty nice looking clouds. I went ahead and generated one from my paper on Tagging and Searching:

It does look pretty cool. Wordle also will generate a cloud from any site with an RSS feed. Here’s the cloud for my site:

Drop me a note in the comments below if you make one for your site or find an interesting text to use.

If you are a web developer or designer in the Cleveland area, I highly recommend dropping by the Cleveland Web Standards Association meetings. They just launched a new website, including a great aggregation of local web development blogs.

I started going to meetings last year and I have to say it’s a great group of people that host some really interesting discussions and speakers. And I’m not just saying that because they let me give a presentation a few months ago.

At the last meeting Eric Meyer took some photos – one makes me look really important:

In the other, it looks like I dozed off in the middle of the discussion:

Oh well. The group screened the film Helvetica, which is the best movie I’ve ever seen about a typeface. I’d recommend it for anyone who has an interest in design, typography, or even 20th-century history.

Since I’ve moved out of town I won’t be able to make it to too many meetings in person. I want to set up videoconferencing, anyone have any recommendations for web cams, software, or services? I’m looking for something that is extremely easy to use, since my parents want to be able to do video calls too. I’ve heard some good things about Skype. Any thoughts?

These are designs I made for the 2004 Liturgical Publications resource calendar. The finished
product was 12″x12″, printed at 100 lpi. The print run was about 1000 copies and they were distributed
across the Midwest.

Front cover

Back cover

Other ideas

I hate html in emails, and I guess Outlook 2003 now blocks it by default (because otherwise it would spread viruses, which all previous versions of Outlook have been experts at).  Someone brought up this issue from a designer’s point of view.  A lot of the newsletters that people actually signed up for were being bounced back.  Some people agreed with me that even if readers can turn the blocking off, would they want to?  Journalists can track traffic with html newsletters, but users don’t care about that.

As part of a class project I’ve been reading the Online-News mailing list and responding to some of the issues and discussion brought up there.

These are designs I made for the 2003 Liturgical Publications Resource calendar. The finished product was 12″x12″, printed at 100 lpi.

Front cover

Back cover

Other ideas