Konstruktors Web Direction & Design by Kaspars Dambis
Bitstream Charter is a glyphic serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter which I discovered only recently in Ubuntu 8.10 (it ships with X11). It is definitely one of the most beautiful serif fonts that I have ever seen. At first sight it looks similar to Liberation Serif but is more rounded and easier to read. Read more »
Since the feedback for the mock-up of the podcast theme for was so great, here is a little preview of how far I have gotten. Read more »
I love the new WordPress 2.7 dashboard design even despite all the bad things that I have previously said. Back then it was only a prototype and probably even the core developers didn’t have a clear and complete picture of how it is going to look and work in real-word environment.
Now when it is one minute away from the prime-time, I applaud Jane, Matt and all the designers and developers behind the overhaul who carried out the work in such a transparent and feedback driven way.
For me it is the new icon-only-slide-right navigation bar that makes the whole administration section work so much better than I could have imagined. All the administration sections are only one click away. Navigation takes up only 40 pixels of the cheap vertical space and thus saves much of the expansive vertical area where things get done. The result is truly amazing and it makes me wonder if anyone really knew it will turn out to be this good. Read more »
With the latest design update, I have stripped away most of the clutter in the form of secondary content. It also included removing most of the ads, just because 400 visitors a day is still to few to get more than a single click per day.
I decided to install Ozh’s Who Sees Ads plugin to make ads visible only to visitors coming from search engines. The problem, however, is that it shows ads only on the landing page and not on all pages that the user visits. Read more »
That is 0.07 seconds per query. How fast is your WordPress on your host? Go to three random post on your blog and copy-paste those values here in comments. I am trying to decide if I should switch web host. Read more »
One day I’ll stop pushing pixels and will write.
Is it true that finding solutions to problems in programming is more satisfying than discussing and stating ideas in writing? Or are these simply two kinds of people who prefer one over the other? Read more »
After having used the new WordPress 2.7 (which is not even beta yet) for some time, it is clear that the vertical dashboard navigation has been a bad design choice.
The aim of this revised design was to minimize vertical scrolling and make everything easier for both new and experienced users. The fact is that for me it has made the navigation more complex and has moved every action several clicks and scrolls away.
Why? Because information of equal importance cannot be aligned vertically. Items at the top will always have more importance than the ones at the bottom. Read more »
Do you know what good designers do when everyone else thinks Helvetica is cool? They stretch and bend Times New Romans and Comic Sans. Thats because message is what is important, not the color or the typeface.
Don’t like the proposed WordPress 2.7 menu structure? Why not make it sortable and with ability to rename top-level menu items so that those who still prefer Manage and Write instead of Posts and Pages can have it.
WordPress Dashboard menu sorting and renaming
Here is how it works: Read more »
Automattic have published WordPress 2.7 user interface wireframes (.pdf) that list and explain the changes planned for the next major release of WordPress.
WordPress 2.7 User Interface proposal (version 002)
I think there are only two things wrong with the purposed user interface and the information architecture: Read more »
Thanks to Ben for spotting a bug in Tabbed Widgets plugin — accordion type widgets didn’t open the selected default tab because of a missing javascript code which I forgot to add to the accordion type widget initialization in js/init.ui.tabs.js. An update should show up in your Widget Plugin Management page.
Fluid width WordPress administration user interface: idea (no.3). Read more »
Here is a modified open share icon with less rounded corners which looks good even at 16px or less. Read more »
Here is another take on how to improve WordPress Dashboard. See also the Widget Administration section. Read more »
The new Microsoft ads are absolutely brilliant — Mr. Bill Gates turns out to be the marketing talent they have been missing since the very first day. These ads are already the second thing that Microsoft has gotten right over the past year, first being the Internet Explorer 8 and its support for Web standards.