Over the Eastern Holidays I had some time to read a new book called ReWork. I loved it. It reads trough like butter. Easy to understand, tons of good points. There are so many “yes, that’s it” moments, it fills you up with inspiration and motivation, but what happens after the reading?
The last chapter in the book suggests: “If it grabs you, grab it right back and put it to work”. Easy to understand, but hard to do! In the next couple of weeks/months you might remember what the book was telling you.. if you’re lucky, you actually try to change a couple things here and there.. but most likely you keep on doing it the way you have been doing it. People are just stuck too deeply into their habits. I have observed that on myself too many times.
Who knows the magic read it - do it spell?
Sometimes when I write a new post I wish I could set the post date in the future. Why does everything have to be in the past? When I write about an upcoming event, visitors will see it too early and when the event get’s closer that post is already buried with new ones.
As an example, let’s say I plan to attend Chirp, the Twitter Developer Conference. I probably post about it when I first find out about it, or when I get my ticket and maybe after the event already happened. But Nobody will see it right before the event occurs!!
Below a quick example:
The “future posts” appear above normal posts for an easy glance what’s coming up. After the set time passed, a post would fall below the NOW line and you could even update it with news from the event.
A tumblr theme could look like this:
{block:FuturePosts} ... {/block:FuturePosts}
<div id="now">NOW</div>
{block:Posts} ... {/block:Posts}
Actually any kind of stream with chronological posts could use it, even Twitter or Facebook statuses. It would kinda be like a public calendar. Let’s see.
This is the new Design Process I’ve been trying to use lately. Skipping Wireframes and Photoshop comps! This video shows all the different design steps needed to create the Shitty Day site. As you can see, I tried to implement some principles I picked up during the years:
So, where are all the wireframes and Photoshop comps? They got skipped..!! no wait.. actually you could say that the wireframe (basic layout at the beginning) and the Photoshop comp got created straight with HTML/CSS and then constantly changed and refined.
The tools I used for this project were Espresso for the HTML markup and then CSSEdit for styling. Later in the process I used Photoshop to create single images like the background tile, paper holder and so on, but never for the layout.
It all seems pretty easy and straightforward, but I think this process works best for smaller simple sites. For bigger and more complex projects, the traditional approach might still be better. Also before I started I had sketched out the idea on a notebook and had already a pretty clear picture in mind how everything should look and work. If you would ask the client for feedback during the process, they would probably tell you nonstop how ugly it looks. ;-)
Looking at all the old versions of simurai.com I realized something funny and quite interesting. I kept on switching the background color back and forth: bright-dark-bright*-dark-bright. It seems I subconsciously always tried to make the new version opposite of the old one. I wonder what the next one will be.. Back to dark or abandon the old tradition?
Here the simurai.com history: V4, V3, V2, V1 But remember.. The older the version, the more embarrassing it gets.. ;-)
* Version 3 during the night will be dark too, but let’s oversee that for now
“ Meet the new CSS double dream team: border-radius + box-shadow. ”
Together they are unbeatable! It’s such a joy to use them for rounded corners with a drop shadow. The box above uses: border-radius: 8px; to do the magic.
box-shadow: 0px 1px 3px rgba(0,0,0,0.2);
And it get’s better: They even work on embeded Flash! See the 4px rounded corners live in the photo/video section.
Note: This is CSS3 and not all browsers support it yet, like our friend IE.
Why I’m switching to tumblr.
This is already the 5th version of simurai.com. I’ve gone trough many phases.. highly graphical - minimalistic chic - fat blog - interactive 3D. But I’ve always struggled meeting all the following goals:
With tumblr I think I pretty much found that perfect balance. Thanks tumblr.
Credits: This site is based on the Prologue Theme by Hayden Hunter.
