A Dragon in Sheep’s Clothing

Thoughts from a web designer, writer and cat lover.

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Entries Tagged as 'Design'

Poor webpage design

July 31st, 2008 · No Comments

This page, www.hothomesofutah.com/video-archive.html, loads over 1,000 images (when I visited it in IE). Nearly all are the SAME four icons.
It seems they’re trying to use a CSS trick to make images appear without coding the image in HTML. The icon to view a video and the icon to download a video are displayed with [...]

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Tags: Design · HTML and CSS · Internet

Why I don’t like kuler

July 30th, 2008 · No Comments

Since I can’t access colourlovers.com from work, I tried kuler.adobe.com today. You can navigate to the Newest, Most Popular, and Highest Rated “themes,” or let the site bring one up at Random. You can limit it to themes created in the last 7 days, 30 days, or infinity. Above the navigation is a search box. [...]

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Tags: Design · Internet

More annoying than ‘click here’

July 28th, 2008 · No Comments

Many a web designer has ranted or at least grumbled in irritation at folks who continue to use “click here” in order to link to another website. I’ll let that debate continue in other forums.
But I’ve found something even more annoying. Worse than “click here.” It’s called… “click below.” (shudder)
For some odd reason, these [...]

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Tags: Design · Internet · Rants

Wal-Mart logo goes splat

July 21st, 2008 · 2 Comments

BIG ouch.

Not only is it a bad branding move, it’s a bad design. Another application of a vague symbol which seems to be the hallmark of modern branding. Is that yellow thing:

an asterisk,
a sun,
the light indicating this checkout lane is open,
a right turn signal,
a popped balloon,
the stain left when I squashed a spider on [...]

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Tags: Advertising · Design · Marketing and Branding · What were they thinking?

Geek wear

June 18th, 2008 · 1 Comment

Active Reactor Watch from Tokyoflash Japan:
(All the lights represent different units of time, so it’s possible to tell hour and minutes from the configuration. The only thing it doesn’t seem to do is indicate a.m. or p.m. — although I suppose it would be hard to get those mixed up unless you had a [...]

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Tags: Design · Pleasant Things · Shopping