Konstruktors Web Direction & Design by Kaspars Dambis
Amazing and entertaining lectures by the outstanding Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman — explaining how the physicists try to view and understand the world. This is also why I love blackboard and chalk.
Name it how ever you prefer, but that is indeed true that writing regular posts or blessays takes hours while ideas and cool things are all over my mind. Let’s see how this works out. p.s. using MiniPosts plugin by Erigami Scholey-Fuller.
Sorry for such a long heading, but it is the question which by itself is an answer to those trying to understand how the web design is different from the graphic design.
Designer and writer Armin Vit recently asked “[W]hat web sites could be considered landmarks for our profession?”. Ideally one should be able to name
A visual solution that not only enables, but also transcends, the message to become memorable in the eyes and minds of viewers.
He lists few examples from the field of graphic design: “Milton Glaser’s Dylan poster. Paul Rand’s IBM logo. Paula Scher’s Public Theater posters. Massimo Vignelli’s New York subway map. Kyle Cooper’s Seven opening titles”. Read more »
Update (October 15, 2008): Sans-serif Racer has been updated with improved CSS (and fixed IE7-only bug), enhanced design and support for the default image alignment classes. Get it here. If you are updating, be sure to back-up the old theme files.
While tweaking the Times Racer theme which is currently used in this blog, I was fascinated by how the sans-serif typeface and the aligned positioning of different elements made it look really harmonic and solid.
After hours of PHP, HTML and CSS trickery, the new theme was named Sans-serif Racer and ready for the release. It features unique border elements, light background shading and, similarly to Agneka Simple, one base color which can be easily adjusted. Read more »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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.
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 »
After writing the previous article ‘What is Wrong with the Tech Journalism’ and thinking more about the portrayal of the Web by off/online journalists, I have finally found a few great articles that try to critically assess the otherwise hyped “user–generated content” and “social networking”:
Continuing the debate over the importance of professional journalism and the rising popularity of individual publishing, there are number of different viewpoints presented in the following blog posts:
While I may disagree to some of the views expressed in the above articles, I still think that most of the authors would be better of without using the term Web 2.0, to make their point clearer.
This article was inspired by an email conversation with Donnacha DeLong, and is a reply to the following articles:
I disagree with the idea that personal publishing on the web is a threat to journalism, and I also don’t think the increasing popularity of individual publishing could undermine the professional standards of journalism (in its broadest sense). However, the idea of personal publishing replacing the concept of media is totally absurd, indeed. Read more »
The problem is with the journalists who write about the web, with their understanding of the subject and literacy of the web in general. The final drop of encouragement for writing this essay was an article by Jonathan Richards in Times Online titled Web 3.0 and beyond: the next 20 years of the internet.
Web is not a software that is developed and released in versions. Actually, the “versioning” of the web is the worst thing that could happen to the hype of the internet. In the particular article, the author was informed by “Mr Spivack, the founder of Radar Networks, a leading Web 3.0 company” that the cycle of the web development is ten years.
Think of “Mr Einstein, the founder of General theory of relativity, a leading Physics 2.0 theory” saying that the cycle of physics development is 30 (or any other number) years until the Physics 3.0 which concentrates on strings and membranes in an eleven dimension environments. Can you see the absurdity of such statements? Read more »
Seeing a <div class="left green">...</div> block in HTML code might hurt the eyes of a lot of web designers. To identify good and bad id and class names, it is important to understand the idea of the CSS.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) defines CSS2 as:
a style sheet language that allows authors and users to attach style (e.g., fonts, spacing, and aural cues) to structured documents (e.g., HTML documents and XML applications). By separating the presentation style of documents from the content of documents, CSS2 simplifies Web authoring and site maintenance.
Therefore class names left, green or largetext are theoretically good according to the first part of the CSS definition, but very very bad according to the second part, which can be illustrated with the following example. Read more »
Search engine optimization companies are spreading all over the web. They claim to optimize your website so that it comes first in the search results for whatever the people might be looking for. Well, not everything really, but for whatever you make, produce, sell or do.
Who uses their services? Those who initially hired a bad web design company to build their website. You may wonder which are those bad agencies, that make bad websites and don’t know how to put your site high in the search results. But you may also wonder, why not a single agency advertises itself as we don’t know how to design proper websites but can do one for you company. Read more »
