What does this mean?

• The general look and feel has come to feel quite clunky and over simple, I’d like to make it a bit more delicate and thought out, but still retain the same general feel
• I’m not counting on using my site to find freelance work via cold enquiries, so less of a ‘salesy’ tone to the copy
• I’m not posting to my blog as often as I could be, due to some decisions made in the last design. I’d like to go much more down the Tumblr route and make the blog less about articles and more about bookmarking and sharing.
• I’m using Twitter more and more so I’ll put that as a higher priority on the site
• If I can, I’ll do it all on one page.

I’ll do my best to post my progress as I go, as I did with this version.

Sources & Essential Reading:

• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/08/20/typographic-design-survey-best-practices-from-the-best-blogs/
• http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/five-simple-steps-to-better-typography
• http://www.adobe.com/education/pdf/type_primer.pdf
• http://www.webtypography.net/toc/
• http://www.aisleone.net/2009/design/8-ways-to-improve-your-typography/
• http://www.alistapart.com/articles/on-web-typography/
• http://www.alistapart.com/articles/settingtypeontheweb/
• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/08/11/top-ten-web-typography-sins/
• http://24ways.org/2006/compose-to-a-vertical-rhythm

Line-length (Measure)

A general good rule of thumb is 2–3 alphabets in length, or 52–78 characters (including spaces). A simple way to calculate the measure is to use Robert Bringhurst’s method which multiples the type size by 30. So if the type size is 10px, multiplying it by 30 gives you a measure of 300px or around 65 characters per line.

Why? Long lines of text require longer periods of attention before the eye moves lines, short lines of text require moving lines too often, which can break rhythm, an optimum measure means creating a comfortable balance.

Line-height (Leading)

Optimum line-height is 1.5 x text size (1.5em), this should be lowered for large headings (1.2-1.4em).

Why? Too much leading causes the eye to jump from line to line and can be disruptive to reading, too little leading creates a dense ‘typographic color’ which looks less appealing, and can create the illusion of ‘more’ text.

Measure and leading are related, when increasing your measure, ensure you adjust your leading, longer measure requires greater leading and vice-versa. These rules can change depending on choice of font, for example, a font with a larger x-height (literally the height of the x character) such as Verdana, may require more leading.

Letter-spacing

In most cases letter spacing should remain default, as fonts are designed to work best at this setting, in special cases, such as all uppercase or small caps increase letter-spacing by a small amount (~1px).

Why? Uppercase characters are tighter and will require extra spacing to improve readability.

Vertical Rhythm

Ensure that the spacing between elements is equal to, or multiples of, your line-height (Measure) e.g.

body {
font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 12px;
line-height: 15px;
}
p {
margin-bottom: 15px;
}

Why? The baseline grid is the skeleton of your typographic layout and provides consistency. Conforming to your baseline ensure flow and improves readability. A continuous rhythm in the vertical space keeps all the text on a consistent grid so that proportion and balance are retained throughout the page, no matter the type size, leading or measure.

Hanging Punctuation

Quotation marks and bullets should always be set ‘outside’ in the gutter outside of your body text, so that the text remains consistently aligned.

Why? Maintaining left alignment means that the text is scannable and rhythm is uninterrupted. The eye looks for straight lines everywhere, when type is indented in this way, it maintains the flow of text.

Got any of your own to add? Let me know in the comments.

Saving for a wedding means I’ve been checking my various internet banking accounts quite often, and although yours is one of the better ones, there’s something that’s been bothering me. You see, when I get to your homepage, I have to click through to log-in on a separate page. How about shortening my journey slightly?

Before

HSBC's homepage before

After

HSBC's homepage after

It may not seem like much, but one thing I’ve learnt is when it comes to customer experience is that it’s all in the details. Your customer’s time is valuable and you should make every effort to streamline your processes.

Just a thought

Its a 48 column, 950px wide template with 3, 4, 6 and 8 columns layouts built in. Feel free to download, modify and redistribute to your heart’s content.

950px_grid_layout

Designing in the browser

Ever since reading about designing in the browser in Andy Clarke‘s ‘Walls come tumbling down’ slides I’ve wanted to push Photoshop out of my workflow and jump straight into the browser.

The first thing that strikes me is how fast it allows me to work, going from one paper sketch to a working wireframe prototype within a few hours, and I’m able to see what works very early on in the process, something that doesn’t usually become clear until after Photoshop. Iterations and revisions are much easier, meaning that what would usually be major, structural changes take a fraction of the time and effort to complete.

I know skipping Photoshop isn’t for everyone, but my first experience has been so positive, adding an element of freedom I haven’t had in a long time and I can’t wait to work like this again.

CSS 3

Although we have been dabbling with CSS 3 at work for a while now, I often feel tied down by our commitment to legacy browsers and always have to tread carefully when implementing some more ambitious ideas. I’ve designed the majority of this site with CSS 3 in mind; the letterpress effect on the headings, differing levels of transparency and rounded corners are all pure CSS 3 and although not every browser will get the same visual experience, the progressive enhancement built into CSS 3 (pictured) ensures I don’t spend time making sure that the basics are in place universally.

Progressive enhancement in CSS 3. Left to right: Safari 4, Firefox 3.6, IE8 in Windows 7

IE6 and friends

I decided to forget IE6 during development completely, save for a glance on launch day, just to see what would happen. After all the CSS 3 and reckless behaviour on my part I was expecting to launch IE6 on a test machine and see a complete mess, although surprisingly, apart from two minor bugs (the background of the content areas isn’t showing, and the accommodation entries don’t line up) it’s completely intact. Maybe all those years of coding defensively have hardwired my brain to avoid IE6 bugs.

Still to come

I’ve still got plenty of things I’d like to build into the site later; I’ve got a pretty neat idea for a countdown timer which I will attempt in-between my client work and when we send out our invitations I’m going to implement an AJAX RSVP form.

Overall this has been a really fun personal project that has given me a chance to try out some new things and work in a way I’ve never worked before, I’m really happy with the final result and would love to hear what you think, so love it or hate it, drop me a comment.

• Cross browser testing – I have no idea what it looks like in IE6 or 7 or Firefox pre 3.6
• Font stacks – The ampersand in the logo is Palatino, I need to do some research into how widely available that font is
• Build an RSVP form

Anyways, enjoy and be sure to feedback

Following the initial reaction from Birmingham residents, local government bloggers and webbies everywhere a group of volunteers led by Stef Lewandowski have combined their efforts to create BCCDIY. A wiki built on the content of the Birmingham website; the goal is to improve the content, and make the information easier to find, understand and update and after their first hack-day, it’s looking great with plenty of advanced functionality already in place.

There are plenty of examples in the wider web world where a wiki style website has worked, but could this ever work for a local government site? Could (or even would) a council effectively hand their content over to the people? It will be a huge investment in time for moderation and administration, but surely no more than writing it all yourself?

What about handing over key online services to third party products and mashups? Green Box Day gives you bin collection times if you are willing to hand over your data, Fix My Street gives you an excellent way to report problems and Get Satisfaction gives a solid customer support service.

Using community generated content and services could have endless benefits in the quality of data and the standard of service but do the pros outweigh the cons? Is there a council out there brave enough to try it?

The truth is I don’t think anyone knows, but when a council does get the guts to go with a community driven site, we will all be watching with baited breath. In the meantime with interest from SOCITM, TV news and even the UK Parliament, BCCDIY will certainly give some weight to the notion.

That said…

When using the search function I keep clicking the ‘Basket’ button because it’s placed so close to the end of the search bar. I’ve done it more times then I’ve hit the tiny orange ‘Go’ button.

Is it just me?

I stumbled across Fever while aimlessly web browsing one day, I am familiar with Shaun Inman and the acclaimed analytics package Mint and I had not long acquired a new web host so I decided to throw $30 (£18) at it and give it a go.

What is Fever?

Fever is a self hosted RSS reader with a twist. Once you have loaded it with RSS feeds it performs some clever aggregation and gives you your feeds sorted by temperature.

How it works

Fever gives you multiple choices when adding an RSS feed. The feeds you read every day get marked as ‘kindling’, other feeds of the kind that you may not want to read as consistently get marked as ‘sparks’. For example I have a feed from Smashing Magazine which I read daily so I’ve marked that as kindling, whereas the feed from Digg’s technology section that is not always going to contain stuff I want to read gets added as a spark. When an item appears in one or more kindling feeds and also one or more spark feeds the temperature of the item is raised.

What you end up with is a chart of the hottest items by week (this is the default but you can change the timeframe). This is great for those busy periods when you can’t read your feeds all day long, you can get a good overview of the most talked about things. Fever still functions like a traditional RSS reader if you are into that kind of thing, and it allows grouping of feeds and saving so you can categorise feeds however you like and save RSS items you want to remain in your feed.

The roof is on fire

When I first installed Fever I had somewhere between 65 and 70 feeds to add, over the next few days I got the bug and went feed hunting, I used my Twitter following list, anything I could get my hands on. The great thing about Fever is if you aren’t sure about a feed you just mark it as a spark and you don’t have to read it, it just makes the whole program work better. Imagine that, an RSS feed reader that work better the more feeds you throw at it.

The downside?

Because Fever is a self-hosted service you need a web server (not IIS), with PHP and MySQL. If you are familiar with the above technologies then installation shouldn’t cause you too much trouble, if you aren’t though you may struggle as you have to do some fairly low level stuff to prepare your server for deployment, such as creating a database and setting up a user and the installation notes don’t exactly walk you through the process.

Fever will use your server’s bandwidth and CPU time so if you are on a cheaper, limited hosting plan you will want to keep an eye on it. You can configure Fever to update via cron jobs to limit this. It’s not a bandwidth hog or anything but if you regularly run at the red line you’ll notice.

What are you waiting for?

If you only want an RSS reader to manage 10 or so feeds then maybe Fever isn’t for you. If, like me, you have a lot of feeds to manage and traditional RSS feed readers don’t quite cut the mustard then I wholly recommend you check Fever out, it has completely changed the way I read on the web and has actually allowed me to do much more reading than back when I was wrestling with 65 tabs. Since installing Fever I have doubled my subscribed feeds and I’m far less afraid of adding more to the reading list. While I’m not saying it will work for everyone, it has worked for me after many years of trying to crowbar passive RSS into my daily routine.

In the article, Paul breaks context into five aspects:

Environment

The kind of information or service the customer requires will be dependent on their location, a customer wishing to report a broken street light may well be standing under it and will want different information to a customer who is sat in the comfort of their home.

Device

As the article acknowledges, environment and device can go hand in hand, a customer in the middle of a muddy field is likely to be using a mobile device, but this is not the only context affected by a customers device.

The device will determine the input methods available, on a mobile phone or handheld there is unlikely to be a mouse and on a games console the keyboard is onscreen. Using complex forms or rich applications such as maps may be impossible using devices with limited input methods.

A mobile device may have other input methods we could take advantage of, such as built-in GPS or a camera, allowing the customer to take a photo of a pothole and record it’s exact location.

Comfort

Physical comfort is something we can only guess at, but we can allow location information to give us clues. The most relevant aspect of comfort is when it is due to physical conditions, such as a disability or injury. We can’t expect a customer with back pain to sit for a great length of time to complete a job application without some method of saving and resuming later.

Mood

As the article discusses, emotional whims will affect attention span or toleration of bad design and needless steps in a process. This is especially relevant in local government because often a service is required because we have done something to inconvenience the customer or because we have imposed a complex process. Take the example of reporting a missed bin collection or applying for planning permission.

We should make every effort to make these kinds of services as simple and intuitive as possible to minimise errors and abandoned sessions.

Time

Customers who are under a time constraint, for example applying for a job before the position closes or paying a parking fine before the amount escalates are less likely to be tolerant of unnecessary steps or buried content. But also, if it takes longer to report a problem online than it does to pick up the phone you are actually costing the customer and yourself more.

To be truly ‘customer-focused’, an understanding of our customer’s context is paramount. Using context to shape the way we design and deliver services puts the user at the centre of the process.

If you can’t quite make it out, let me explain. Thats an input for a memorable date and a PIN number when opening an account, and they have disabled your keyboard completely so you must enter the numbers by clicking the onscreen keypad.

UPDATE: Since opening my account I have locked myself out twice, why? Because to add to the confusion the order of the numbers on the keypad changes every visit.

Research is a diverse activity and can range from reading industry blogs and magazines and interviewing clients to looking at the competition and the wider industry. It can be used to predict customer needs, support or inform your decision making and as a catalyst for change.

Research is not wasted time, and past research should always be kept handy. You never know when you’re going to encounter the same problem again, or find another use for some prototype code or wireframe. Having a good repository of research means you have something to refer back to, although managing this research repository can be large task in itself, there are plenty of tools around around to help.

We should not be afraid of approaching new challenges or doing things we have never done before, if we use research it can help the unknown become known, it can turn guesses into more concrete, realistic estimates and most of all it can help us broaden our knowledge and experience.

I think too often in the design community we like to jump right into the design stage of a project, relying on inspiration or chance to help us, but taking a moment to research can lead to better decisions, better designs and most importantly better websites.

There are still some things that need my attention until I can relax, including the measure in blog posts (feel a bit short to anyone else?), IE6 testing and finally I need to build the portfolio section (and get rid of the ‘coming soon…’ placeholders). I’m holding off on the latter until I get a few jobs under my belt.

In the meantime please take a look around, feel free to critique and report bugs to your heart’s content