stargeek
coudal redesignscoudal redesignscoudal redesigns 06/29/2004 07:09 PM hey, those guys are good This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)coudal redesignsGrok Headline matches for coudal redesignsOther RedesignsOther Redesigns 06/08/2004 12:28 PM Stopdesi gn, Reloaded and Just Watch the Sky: I Heart You — speaking of redesigns, Doug and Ryan launch a couple of killer remixes. Adventures in redesignsAdventures in redesigns 03/13/2003 10:22 AM So after keeping the same design around for a little over 2 years, I decided it was time for a change. My goals with this design was to accommodate more stuff, but still aim for simple and clean (and also, I was looking for a reason to use Travis Beckham's insanely cool patterns -- background images have been dorky for so long they're cool again). A couple months ago, I noticed I was writing less than usual, hiking less often, and not taking all that many photos. To force myself to spend more time on those things I decided the next design would reduce the importance of daily blogging, and give other features more prominence. The features area to the right is the same size as the blog area for that reason, and while at the moment there is nothing new there, I'm aiming to either write an article, post a photo essay, interview someone, or do some other feature-sized thing once a week from here on out. I also wanted to get myself back into taking daily photos. I did it through most of the year 2000, and I learned a lot by forcing myself to just do it everyday. The redesign is only on the front page and the weblog archives for now (which are now Movable Type powered, to boot), but eventually everything else will get converted over, and I might add more stuff to the right side, but I'll try not to make it too portal-like. The whole design is liquid, and I used some CSS tricks to have the photos on the right fill their areas -- the smaller or wider your browser, the less or more you see of the images. The daily photo image is the actual full size photo, just positioned centered as a background (yes, a pointless waste of bandwidth, but easier than thumbnaling and clicking on it to see the full sized version is faster). While this site isn't quite validating as xhtml strict (the stock Flash code is causing the errors), and I did have to use a table to get a consistent layout of the two sides (floated columns refused to work), I've found a really odd bug. If you're viewing this site in a newer version of Mozilla or mac/IE, you should see a nifty Flash map of the US/World (coded brilliantly by Bryan) showing the places I've been recently, where I am currently, and where I'm heading soon. If you're using Opera, Safari, or win/IE, you won't see anything at all. The map works by itself on a page, and inside a table in all browsers, but for some reason, half the browsers I point at this page don't like it and ignore it. I suppose I'll figure out the problem eventually. If anyone is confused, here is what is supposed to look like (screensh ot 1, screensh ot 2) One thing's certain: after the past couple days of work on this, I could really use some Extreme, Totally-In-Your-Face, Milk Products™ Technorati redesigns againTechnorati redesigns again 07/26/2004 02:25 PM a vast improvement, good enough for a first visit from CNN's audience When redesigns failWhen redesigns fail 11/02/2003 10:53 AM It is not too often that I make unrequested comments on people’s redesign of their personal web sites, but I’m... AFP548 RedesignsAFP548 Redesigns 07/23/2004 04:21 PM Mozilla.org RedesignsMozilla.org Redesigns 09/02/2004 12:59 AM Congratulations to Steven Garrity and the entire team at silverorange for their work on the newly redesigned mozilla.org. I think it's a big step forward from the last one, which always felt a little half-finished to me. But then again, that design was a big step forward from the old-old one. The one GUI nit-picky issue I posted to the feedback topic forums was about the click-targets of the buttons in the nav bar. If you hover over the right sides of the buttons, they become unclickable, however the hover still changes the colour of the button. Here's a screenshot: Full click-targets are better. But as Steven notes, they're still updating and tweaking things. The other issue I have is with the Mozilla Blogs column on the main page. I haven't read much about Planet Mozilla, but I question why blog posts from it's feed are listed on the front page of mozilla.org. Since some of the Mozilla blogs listed in the feed don't always talk about Mozilla on their blogs, I'm not sure how much value it adds to have links to a dork's post about his new iMac on the front page. I still think it's a valuable resource, but for the front page, it would probably be more useful if it had an editor, like the links featured in The Mozilla Blogging Project on mozillaZine.org. kottke redesignskottke redesigns 06/27/2004 09:08 PM introducing "black text on a white background" to the blog world F5 Redesigns Traffic ManagerF5 Redesigns Traffic Manager 09/07/2004 03:58 PM BigIP 9 integrates optimization methods. The iPod Studio RedesignsThe iPod Studio Redesigns 05/17/2004 04:38 PM Our friend Lindsey at PlayerBlog said we should take a look at The iPod Studio, for they had recently redesigned. We did, and found shiny iPod things, 'higher-fi' gear, and forums and whatnots, as advertised. Read [iPodStudio]... AllTheWeb Redesigns to Look More Like
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 Virginia
reader Myke Myers kindly
brought to my attention the work of his fellow Virginian William
McDonough.
McDonough is an architect and designer who has garnered a lot of press
for his bold yet pragmatic view of design. In a recent interview with
New Scientist he says:Consider this: all the ants on
the planet, taken together, have a biomass greater than that of
humans.
Ants have been incredibly industrious for millions of years, yet their
productiveness nourishes plants, animals and soil. Human industry has
been in full swing for little more than a century, yet it has brought
about a decline in almost every ecosystem on the planet. Nature
doesn't
have a design problem. People do... McDonough maintains four websites: His firm's, his partnership's, his own, and his intelligent design
site. The sites are as effectively designed as his buildings -- easy
to
browse, productive, engaging, and advancing the cause (the media are
invited to select from ready-to-plagiarize materials that simplify
writing about McDonough or his businesses). He's won awards as a
visionary and environmentalist, and his firm's designs have won awards
for eco-efficiency. And he's written a book, Cradle to Cradle
(itself made of recyclable polypropylene, not paper), with colleague
Michael Braungart, that explains the vision that underlies all his
work. It is, simply: Learn from, and
imitate, nature -- nature knows how to design and build things right,
everything recycled, zero waste.The Earth's natural systems can probably support a few hundred million of our species, but soon there could be 10 billion of us... Eco-efficiency, where you try to reduce everything to zero, is not much fun. And nature itself is not that efficient. It's effective. Take a cherry tree in the spring. It's not efficient - how many blossoms does it need to regenerate? But it is effective: it makes cherries. We celebrate the cherry tree not for its efficiency, but for its effectiveness - and for its beauty. Its materials are in constant flow, and all those thousands of useless cherry blossoms look gorgeous. Then they fall to the ground and become soil again, so there's no problem. We can celebrate abundance where it is ecologically intelligent. From my designer's perspective, I ask: why can't I design a building like a tree? A building that makes oxygen, fixes nitrogen, sequesters carbon, distils water, builds soil, accrues solar energy as fuel, makes complex sugars and food, creates microclimates, changes colours with the seasons and self-replicates. This is using nature as a model and a mentor, not an inconvenience. It's a delightful prospect. When I'm working with business people I talk business. We talk about how much money can be made or saved, because that gets their attention. We never try to convert someone who is calcified: we never try to teach mules to play the violin. It sounds terrible and the mules don't like it. This is the kind of thinking we need -- assuming we can somehow solve the fact that there are at least ten times as many people on the planet as it can healthily support, and that our culture, and its political, legal and economic systems are utterly dependent on an unsustainable concentration of wealth, abuse of power, ever-accelerating growth in consumption of resources, and subjugation of human will and dignity. McDonough calls himself an optimist, and thinks we can turn everything around by just redesigning our world. But I think sooner or later in this century, whether we solve the population and culture problems quickly and intelligently, or go crashing into the wall of eco-catastrophe, we are going to need to radically redesign and rebuild our culture, our economy, and our social systems. We can only hope that with guidance from people like William McDonough -- and also listening to nature and our own instincts -- we will design and build the next human culture more responsibly and intelligently than we did the current one. So that those of us lucky enough to live in that brave new world will know only balance, beauty, harmony, abundance and peace. Just as our ancestors lived for three million years before we invented civilization, and just as every other species on our world has always done. Imagine. |
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