Design

  • How to write great content for your audience

    How to write great content for your audience

    Good writing on the web takes commitment and skill. It’s the difference between a website with a great user experience and a mediocre one, yet we still struggle to give it the same importance as we do to web design and build.

  • A design history of chillfinn.com

    I guess I’ve had a site of my own since about 1999. I recently re-built this site, mostly because my Wordpress install kept falling prone to various vulnerabilites, but also because I tend to redesign it every couple of years out of boredom and a need to express where I’m at.

  • My latest wireframing /prototyping tool

    Reusable, portable, rapid, infinite battery life.

  • RWD – where my journey began

    So stoked that I found this page in an old notebook of mine. I used it when I went to the FOWD 2010 conference, and heard a talk by Ethan Marcotte that changed my whole approach to making websites.

  • Web Design is not dead

    Web Design is not dead

    I must say that I don’t fully understand the assertion that the days are numbered for people who know how to plan, write and optimise semantic, lean, mean HTML and CSS.

  • How to improve your Responsive Design process

    Responsive Design — or designing in a multi device world- is very challenging, but also very exciting and rewarding when it works well. However, agencies are finding that they need to change the way that they approach build and design because otherwise designing for a multitude of screen sizes becomes extremely painful (and expensive).

  • Viewing local MAMP sites in connected devices

    I recently wanted to start using real devices more as I  develop web sites locally, using MAMP as my web server,  so I can see how they respond to my code changes almost immediately. My starting point was to try out Adobe’s Edge Inspect, but I quickly came across the same problem that most people…

  • Memories of Itaipu

    Had to bid farewell to one of my favourite T-shirts today, I think it was a birthday present aquired visiting the colossal Itaipu damn in South America – one of the 7 wonders of the modern world. Good memories from South America.

  • Economy Class on Pan Am 747 in the late 60’s

    This encapsulates so much of what I think about how the world has changed for people. You can’t compare this to the experience you have nowadays in commercial air travel. [Sourced from @HistoryInPics]  

  • My favourite MP3 player of all time

    Sleek, light, shiny perfection. It worked, stored almost 4GB of songs, didn’t get updates that slowed it down to a crawl, and didn’t require your facetime all that much.

  • wtf gmail contacts?

    So this probably got implemented awhile ago, but how the blazes are you supposed to know that contacts are found by clicking on the Gmail word with the tiny arrow? This is an example of trying to minimise the interface at the cost of usability, with negative results.

  • Ready for liftoff?

    This washing machine looks like you need a degree in rocket science to start a wash cycle! Seriously, if you had to guess at which buttons and dials you needed to operate, in which sequence, and the logic behind some of the groupings is, how would you fare?

  • Coffee anyone?

    I know this is an established design, but I bet most people don’t understand the affordance in this lid for getting liquid out and into your cup.

  • Going down?

    This was in a shopping mall elevator in Turku, Finland. Can you figure out how the buttons relate to where you need to go?!

  • Marks and Spencer self checkout

    This one has bugged me for a while. Seems like a disconnect between the software and the planning of the self-checkout terminal. Here’s what happens: You scan in your items You choose to pay (by card) You are asked to insert your card, so you move to the card reader and gaze at it… Meanwhile,…