Lé sigh. I feel like a hypocrite already. I’m about to have a hissy fit about the infux of Dribbble shots featuring people’s attempts to correct the new iTunes 10 icon. By adding this post, I’m as bad as the bloggers before me who have already had this discussion, just as the designers adding a new icon design to the heap of icons uploaded by the designers before them.
My beef is this - it’s turning into a playground fight. It’s all a bit “My da is taller than your da”. I strongly believe that the Dribbblers still uploading images aren’t trying to fix the original problem, they are just trying to one-up each other with their rendition of the iTunes icon.
The early shots of the icon solved the problem already, just like Gerado Diaz did with the new Twitter icon. He designed what we were all thinking, he beat us to it.
Yes the new icon is a bit shit. We needed to move on from the CD though, it’s an irrelevant representation of iTunes as a program. The icon on the iPhone itself is more fit for purpose. But let’s leave it now and stop polluting Dribbble with selfish one-uppery, it’s devaluing it as a tool for feedback for the stuff we are working on.
This leaked a few days ago, Internet Explorer’s new UI. Assuming it’s genuine I think it looks great, at least compared to IE8 and IE7. Here’s what I like and dislike:
What I like about it
Less clutter - no more Page, Tools and Safety drop-downs
The back and forward buttons - they look great.
Good use of Aero effects - like Mozilla will do with Firefox 4 in October/November
Dual function search and address bar is a welcome sight
A real focus on the web page itself - thanks to Aero
No status bar
Is that a cog wheel for settings?
What I don’t like about it
Tabs and Address/search bar share the same horizontal space
Separate stop and refresh controls - just one for both works
Lowlight and highlighted URL text - I’m not a fan, I don’t see the point, it looks broken
Search spyglass should disappear when there is a URL present in the address bar
People seem to have difficulty admitting when Microsoft do a good job - especially when design is the subject, it’s taboo. I’ll stick my neck out and say this is a great effort and a step in the right direction.
I woke up this morning, half-dreaming about icons (yes, my life is *that* mental). I was thinking about what Drew Wilson has done with Pictos. I love it when people make things that easy.
Then I began to think about frameworks, what would an icon framework look like?
Icon Flavours
When using icons, you generally have two types of icon:
Inline (beside text to the left or right)
Without text
Surely if you stick to a sensible naming convention for your icons, then you can re-use CSS to display them. For example if you have every “save” icon (why are we still using floppy disks for this?) named as something like: save.png or icon_save.png, then we have something themeable.
Display
Multiple classes could be used to display specific icons in specific layouts eg:
<a href=”mailto:email@example.com” class=”inline_left email”>Send me an email</a>
This, I’d imagine would give me a nice email envelope icon with text with the icon sitting to the left of the text “Send me an email”. Similarly if I wanted to display a “Save” option with no text, I’d probably have something like:
<a href=”#” class=”save”>Save</a>
Depending on your image replacement technique the text above may be enough. If you prefer the Fahrner image replacement technique however (my preferred method) perhaps another class of “icon” should trigger both the common CSS attributes for all icons and reference any span within an anchor element with a class of “icon” to display:none.
Extending the approach
You can take it further by adding triggers for large icons. This would simply be a background attribute in CSS, for example a class of “save_large” would trigger:
This idea would only suit a situation where you will be needing to use many icons, or even for rapid prototyping. I’m sure this has been thought of and probably done before, if not, please feel free to take the above methods and run with them. If it has, let me know about it please.
I didn’t expect to read something so inspiring at this time in the morning. In response to a poorly worded question about the state of his site, Frank Chimero hits on so many home truths including a tease on his views of the current state of our industry.
I looked around at what I made and what other people were making and I got sick to my stomach because it was all so damn slick and I felt like I could trust so little of it. I was suspicious of the things that I was not suspicious of before, and believed that things were fake before I believed that they were real, and that made me feel something awful in the pit of my gut.
As with previous incarnations, my new Tumblr blog (or Tumblelog or whatever the cool kids call it) is now HTML5ized… HTML5ing… it has HTML5 elements. Sadly Tumblr still uses the “strike” tag and some parameters on the Follow/Join Tumblr iframe that are holding me past full validation, but I won’t lose sleep over it.
As for IE… I still haven’t checked this site in IE yet (and probably won’t bother - this is my free time we are dealing with). I have the HTML5 Shiv JavaScript by Remy Sharp in there to add all the new elements to the DOM, but I’m not sure if Tumblr will let me reference it though.
This fantastic post by Bruce Lawson is a great point of reference for anyone looking to do the same. Next stop: Media Queries.
I can’t wait until they take the stage tomorrow night at Reading. Hopefully The Libertines will be just as awesome second time around. I’ll be watching from the safety of my dry and dirt free living room.
I’m not long back from Tescos. When I was queuing up at the self-scan till I realised something - I was queuing. I love how Tesco manage to convince you that if you scan your own items, it’ll be faster.
Of course in my head my lightning-like swiping technique and eagle-eyed barcode spotting ability is much quicker than that of the checkout staff of Tesco. It’s effin not. Giving me the option however to “customise” my experience, to do things my way, pleases me.
I’m spending twice as long in this queue because everyone ahead of me is thinking the same thing. That doesn’t matter to Mr Tesco, he still gets my money whatever happens.
It’s really making me think about a current e-commerce project I’m working on. Providing just enough customisation and flexibility to let the customer complete the process their way can make for a good checkout experience - if the customer wants it.
