Loud Dog Links

July 13, 2010

• Why you should not hire me to design your website:
  The most common argument I get from clients that want web design is “But I just need you to do the .psd file designs, I have a developer friend that will put them together for me.” This is fine. If I wasn’t so completely picky and insane this would be great, but to me I see it like this: If you designed a tattoo for yourself, spent months thinking about it and drawing it, would you take it to your cousin’s friend that bought a tattoo gun on ebay because he calls himself a tattoo artist now?
  by: Josh Orum | tags: business, design, webdesign

June 29, 2010

• Welcome to our new story pages - msnbc.com
  MSNBC redesigns its story pages, moving away from pageviews as a primary metric.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: design, usability

April 16, 2010

• Organic Startup Ideas (Paul Graham)
  At this point, when someone comes to us with something that users like but that we could envision forum trolls dismissing as a toy, it makes us especially likely to invest.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: business, design

April 8, 2010

• Show Me the Money (for Art Direction) (Subtraction.com)
  Khoi Vinh, Design Director for the NYT website, identifies what it means to "save publishing" and smoothly dismantles the notion that the iPad will do it. In summary: "Every article in every magazine looked different, looked gorgeous, because publishers could afford to make it so. That's over."
  by: Josh Orum | tags: business, design

March 26, 2010

• Success Secrets of the Graphic Design Superstars
  Great tips for inspiration and keeping up momentum in the business of design.
  by: Jodi Wing | tags: art, design, designer, graphic, inspiration, MichaelBierut

March 19, 2010

• Ask H&FJ: Four Ways to Mix Fonts
  Is there a way to know what fonts will work together? Building a palette is an intuitive process, but expanding a typographic duet to three, four, or even five voices can be daunting. Here are four tips for navigating the typographic ocean, all built around H&FJ's Highly Scientific First Principle of Combining Fonts: keep one thing consistent, and let one thing vary
  by: Josh Orum | tags: design, fonts

March 8, 2010

• PodCamp Nashville 2010 Presentation (Cameron Daigle Dot Com)
  Every day, your cursor protects you from unclear UI. It helpfully turns into a text cursor as you hover over textboxes, or a hand as you hover over a link or action item.
  
  iPad has no such thing. Bad UI will stick out like a sore thumb, both in apps and on websites. Your tappable areas had better look tappable. Your controls had better look controllable.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: design, usability

March 4, 2010

• Problem Solving & Kobayashi Maru (Scott Berkun)
  Rad post on requirements elicitation by Scott. I call it perception: the ability to see the true needs that underlie any request. Most of the time, when someone asks for something, they are actually proposing a solution to an unstated problem.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: design, projectManagement

March 2, 2010

• Web Design Criticism: A How-To (Smashing Magazine)
  by: Josh Orum | tags: design, webdesign

January 29, 2010

• Making dough or spam? The perplexing case of designing lead generation pages (Carsonified)
  Interesting review of lead gen & landing page design. Some nice examples as well.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: design, landingpages, leadgen

January 13, 2010

• A Negative View of White Space (Finch Creative)
  A good collection of design theories surrounding whitespace.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: design, webdesign

January 11, 2010

• The Case Against Vertical Navigation - Smashing Magazine
  In fact, designers and architects are increasingly creating user experiences focused so strongly on content that navigation starts to become indistinguishable from content. This type of seamless experience is more effectively created when a horizontal navigation bar is used because horizontal navigation does not intrude on the content area and it’s still easily accessible visually and otherwise.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: bestPractices, design, usability, webdesign
• A Makeover for the BART Map (Design Observer)
  Typically, map users crave geography while map designers prefer geometry.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: design

November 17, 2009

• 20 Email Design Best Practices and Resources for Beginners
  A great resource for creating HTML formatted emails.
  by: Matt DeClaire | tags: css, design, development, email

September 7, 2009

• 7 Japanese aesthetic principles to change your thinking (Presentation Zen)
  Nice categorization of design concepts.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: design

June 25, 2009

• The Bug, the Worm and the Death Star (Identity Forum)
  Deep in the conservative bowels of corporations and brand identity firms, they've got cute little nicknames for logos. The GE logo is The Meatball, the AT&T logo is The Death Star, and the Warner logo is Two and a Half Hot Dogs. (via Kottke)
  by: Josh Orum | tags: branding, design, identity
• Deriving Design Strategy from Market Maturity, Part 1 (Jared Spool)
  Interesting article on different design approaches.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: design

June 2, 2009

• Warmer, Fuzzier - The Refreshed Logo (NYTimes.com)
  A bunch of prominent consumer brands have changed their trademarks this year. The NYT explores some of the changes and the reasons behind them.
  by: Josh Orum | tags: branding, design

June 1, 2009

• GOOD Transparencies Archive - a set on Flickr
  Awesome set of infoporn from GOOD Magazine
  by: Josh Orum | tags: design, designInspiration, informationDesign

May 29, 2009

• A List Apart: Articles: In Defense of Eye Candy
  Hallelujah for Stephen P. Anderson's article on the value of aesthetics. He's currently my hero.
  by: Jodi Wing | tags: aesthetics, design, interface, psychology, ui, usability, webdesign