Logos and Names Are Not <h1> Headings

November 13th • 1 Comment • Under: Design Suggetions, Understanding Web • Tags: code, Design, suggestion

It is a common trend among many web designers and developers to use h1 tag for a logo of a website. Although such decision has no impact on the visual presentation of the content, it drastically diminishes the semantic power of h1 tag.

Every page on the web can be viewed as a single document. Hypertext enables linking and organizing them into groups and sets, which requires that each document has a clear purpose and structure.

Domain names are unique identifiers of those different groups of documents and are the broadest description of their content. Therefore usually they already include the name of a business, person or product (I will refer to them as ‘logos’). Read more »

Features Of the Upcoming «Times Racer» WordPress Theme

November 8th • 22 Comments • Under: Design Suggetions • Tags: Design, WordPress

Times Racer is a WordPress theme which you can currently see on this blog. I have always thought that sans-serif typefaces (like Helvetica, Arial or Verdana) are the best for readability on the screen. However the increasing use of font anti-aliasing among different operating systems can be a good reason to reevaluate this assumption.

Breaking the rules that were once considered the only reasonable way of doing something is very hard, especially for designers. But it is also very mind-opening at the same time — to realize the unbounded beauty of the design choices and opportunities. Read more »

Time Magazine’s Blind Love for the Apple

November 5th • No Comments • Under: Journalism, Web Critique • Tags: critique, writing

What do you think is the Invention Of the Year according to the Time Magazine and it’s Best inventions team that has been arguing about the nominees and speaking to the actual inventors since the early September?

It is a mobile phone with which you can make calls, write messages, add phone numbers in a contacts list, listen to music and watch videos, access the web and view the street maps. I am not kidding.

The list was chosen by a team of experts lead by Lev Grossman. In this video he explains the process of choosing The Best Inventions Of the Year. Just a note: at the very beginning you can clearly see how the Macintosh computer and the iPhone has made his work much more organized. I kid, I kid. Read more »

Agneka Simple — WordPress Theme

November 3rd • 17 Comments • Under: Design Suggetions • Tags: Design, WordPress

I have created a very simple and clean WordPress theme which uses only one base colour (which you can set), no images, fluid layout and doesn’t require any plugins.

It was built to illustrate the power of Konstruktors CSS snippets for creating grid based layouts. View screenshots and read more about Agneka Simple.

Usage of the Term ‘Web 2.0’

October 31st • 2 Comments • Under: Understanding Web, Web Critique • Tags: critique, Journalism, web, writing

Note: In the previous article I suggested that some writers should avoid using the term ‘web 2.0’, and thus probably wrongly implied that they don’t know what web is. The following is an explanation of what I actually meant.

If definition means “the act of defining or making definite, distinct, or clear” then the definition of ‘web 2.0’ provided by Tim O’Reilly is neither distinct nor clear. He tries to put way too many things under a single umbrella, under one next version—the 2.0—while many of these things are in a continuous development with varying speed and can not be defined by ‘versions’.

On the first page of the article he formulates the “sense of web 2.0” by giving a few examples of how web 2.0 is different from Web 1.0, like, “publishing –> participation”, “content management systems –> wikis” and “Britannica Online –> Wikipedia”.

If these are the chosen examples to illustrate the principles of web 2.0, then the arrow used between them means something different in each of the examples, which however contradicts to the use of an equal type linguistic/symbolic link among all examples. As none of the known symbols of logic are used (like ⇒ or ∈), then lets try figure out what the author meant. Read more »