Home -> design

design

Great NYTimes article reveals a little about their Web production process

.It was both educational and fun to read the NYTimes interview with Khoi Vinh, their Design Director.

Karl at Tuesday, April 29, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Free quality icons

I nabbed the icon I used for my earlier podcast experiment, from the Tango Desktop Project.

Karl at Friday, September 1, 2006 | Comments (0) | TrackBack

"Eclipse: Beyond the Geeks"

Shelley Powers, in one of her last Burningbird posts, shares a terrific short tutorial to help you get started using Eclipse for producing web pages.

Karl at Tuesday, May 9, 2006

'Perfectly proportioned' websites may be the worst

New Scientist:

...a study by Paul van Schaik at the University of Teesside, UK, has found that the golden ratio does not benefit all designs. Websites with golden proportions can be harder to extract information from, he says.

Van Schaik put 98 students into five groups and asked them all to answer questions using information on five separate websites. He recorded the time it took participants to answer each question, together with the number of web pages they looked at to do so.

All the sites had a navigation bar with links to other sections of the site on the left of the page and a frame for content on the right, but the sizes of these two sections differed for each group. The pages of one group were divided according to the golden ratio, while the websites of the other four groups gave over less space to the navigation bar.

Those in the golden group answered the questions slowest, taking an average of 15.8 seconds to answer each question – 3.5 seconds longer than the fastest group. The golden ratio group also took 2 seconds longer than the next slowest group and had to visit more pages to find the information required.

"It has been suggested since antiquity that the ratio is aesthetically pleasing," says Van Schaik. "But we found that not only is it not liked in web pages, it is also less efficient in terms of accuracy and speed."

Karl at Saturday, April 22, 2006

More from design