I’m watching a livestream from the FrontEndConference in Zürich.
The current talk is about the Windows–Style UI. I like it. Did I mention my sympathy for simplicity?
I’m thinking about switching from OSX back to Windows, or at least installing Windows 8 on my iMac. The design of Apple’s hardware has the same roots as the Metro UI: cleanliness and usability.
On the other hand, Apple’s software got bloated with glassy reflections, leather texture and torn–away–paper. That’s visual overhaul for somebody who has to work with it 10–12 hours a day with it (like me).
(Skeu.it is a blog about exactly that)
Monty Python’s Life of Brian
Mobile and responsive websites should allow their visitors to know whether they will find what they need within one megabyte.
I recently bought a smartphone. I can use 200 MB with UMTS before they cut my bandwidth to “snail”. This might happen quiet fast and I’m left with a handful kbit/s for two weeks.
Landing–pages are often designed with big images to gain the user’s attention. That’s fine, as long as filesize does not matter. In mobile browsing it does, though.
Let’s keep it simple: let’s show the user right away if we can help him. Ideally without big stock photos.
Sometimes it’s easier to start something new than to fix the old thing.
This is a test post for the layout, but it’s also an article about rediscovering my love for simplicity. My old website was a mix of pixel–art and drop shadows. I made it while I still was studying design, thinking that I had to make something fancy to impress whomever I thought I had to impress.
One of my favorite websites is Fefes Blog. The layout is bare HTML without any styling. Not the fanciest design out there but it’s readable and allows me to do what I came for: to read his ramblings. He is offering stylesheets for people who need colors and gradients. I tried to use, but kept removing them again.
This look would be a little too minimalistic for a designer, though. Instead of just stripping the old design I decided to make a new WordPress installation and make a minimal Theme from scratch. The font used is Droid Sans, which I discovered recently when I played around with Android programming. It’s freely available from Google Fonts.