I apologize for this being a big angry rant. It wasn’t planned out. This is more of a drunk rambling. Without the drunk.

So let’s see, what new sites have come out that are fantastically different. Well everything that The Antenna Research Facility (Ben Wise) creates is freaking amazing. The new site for Build is great. Everyone Forever got a facelift… err… rather got some behind the scenes love. Studio Output got a new website that made me a real solid believer in what you can do with WordPress (built by Antenna, Tom Muller @ Kleber, Studio Output). Build & Antenna worked together on a few really stunning websites. So …yes… there have been websites that can be talked about, perhaps I’ll go back and talk about some of those sites, or do a whole post about why I love Ben. And Kleber. And Studio Output. And Build. And Suprb. Yeah, Suprb dropped a new site for David Bailey, who used to work at tDR. Andreas also relaunched his media sharing service Dropular. So yes, lots of stuff happened and I’ve just been neglectful. Moving on.

Some of you probably didn’t notice any of these releases because most of the big fancy pants web design blogs didn’t mention any of these sites. Which is rather upsetting. These are the guys who are pushing what can be done with nothing more than HTML, CSS, and Javascript (you know, the internet Apple wants, the internet that all the web design celebrities want). Every site Antenna builds should be immediately and instantaneously posted to every web gallery in existence. But nope. We’re just gonna see a two column WordPress blog that has content going down the left hand side and some advertisements going down the right hand side. Everything will have a grainy look. Buttons will be round and slightly textured. Websites are trying to look like letterpress objects these days. Not gonna lie, I’ve used the grain texture and letterpress look recently. Not for a blog or portfolio though. Not that that makes it any better. Fuck that. The best the web has to offer is a few blog style wordpress templates? I don’t think so (that’s pretty much directed to Smashing, Web Designer Depot, Abduzeedo and the rest of their inbred siblings). Now, I’m not ragging on specific authors. I’ve talked to some of the folks who write for those blogs and they’re all quite pleasant people. I just hate that all these top ten web design lists are basically modified versions of the default wordpress theme. With a fancy illustrated header and a fancy illustrated footer with all sorts of flourishes and swirls and flowers and colour splashes.

That’s my first big issue with web design. There’s a small group of self important people who seem to speak louder than the really important people. Probably an ego thing. Or maybe it’s a lack of confidence thing. And if you big up your 2 column blog layout with and use acronyms like CSS3 or HTML5 you’re instantly better than everyone else. Guess what I know HTML5 and CSS3 as well. You know why? Because it’s part of my job and it’s not much different than what I’ve been doing for the last few years already.

Speaking of HTML5, it’s not just the video tag. And that tag isn’t really all that impressive. You read Youtube’s view on it right? It’s only just okay. Actually I’ve come to hate video served through the video tag. There’s no buffering. I have yet to see a video where the audio is synced properly. Have you paid any attention to how much RAM it burns up. I mean, Firefox is already a RAM whore and trying to load in a HD video pretty much kills the browser. Chrome can handle it pretty okay RAM wise. Safari, well, I hate Safari. *note: you notice now in Safari 5 that every time a tab crashes it blames it on Flash? Even if there’s no Flash on the page. Apple can go… Anyway, if you’re using the video tag you may also want to look at your server logs. And see how much bandwidth it’s burning up everytime a user has to download a full video. Yeah, that’s a bit problematic when you can’t do any streaming right?

ROUNDED CORNER’S YEAH!! ‘nuf said on CSS3. I actually enjoy some of the new CSS attributes. It makes life easier. Actually actually, I’ve no issue with HTML5, or CSS3. Provided you’re using it correctly. I welcome change.

Moving on, Apple vs. Adobe kept on battling. I’m still on Adobe’s side (I’ll get to that in a minute). I still love my iMac. I’ll most likely get the iPhone 4 when Apple is so gracious as to allow Canada to have units. If you follow me on Twitter you probably noticed all the Apple hate I’ve been sharing regarding the antenna problems. As well as all the closed wall development and content censoring that they do. I still respect Apple’s design sense. That’s all they’ve got left for me. Anyway, on why I still like Flash. When I decided I wanted to build websites it was because of two websites. The first was A Is For Apple by David Clark, Rob Whynot, Ron Gervais and Randy Knott. The second site was the website that Hi-ReS! made for Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem For A Dream. Those two websites blew my mind away with what could be done on the web. Everything else became boring. I found similar work being posted early on by Netdiver, Newstoday (QBN), Dreamless, etc. Hi-ReS! kept releasing work that was awesome. A few years back I discovered THA Ltd. from the Uniqlo work. And I’ve been to every FITC event since the first. Actually I missed FITC 2007 or 2008. I can’t remember. I have yet to come across a web experience made in HTML, CSS and Javascript that has had the emotional impact that those early websites had on me. That is why I still love Flash.

Quickly changing topics, a few months back there was a big rant on web designers being specialists or generalists. Actually this was probably weeks before FITC 2010 Toronto. Jamie Kosoy of Big Spaceship did a presentation that I really enjoyed. I had a chance to talk to during the after parties and a bunch of us ended up at London Tap House after the party on the boat. He wrote this post about specialists and generalists. I tend to agree. I don’t think I’d be very happy with myself if all I knew how to program was HTML. That’s not even programming. I’m not a specialist. I’m not a generalist. I’m a designer. I do a lot of interactive work. Which means some of my tools include code. Some of my tools include physical hardware like Arduino. Some of my tools include a soldering iron. Some things even get printed. Or even fancy printed with silk screens or letterpress. Which I know how to do as well. I’d love to make wearable electronics. Augmented reality is awesome. I’m not a web designer. Being a web designer is just as pointless as being a flash designer. What happens when desktop web disappears. Don’t think that’ll happen? You might want to start looking at the landscape. Soon you’ll have to become mobile developers. Or you’ll have to learn Objective-C and make fancypants iOS apps. By the way, Objective-C isn’t the easiest thing to learn. I don’t even think I want to call myself a designer. Maybe Designer/Creative Coder. Or Interactive Designer. Maybe just Maker. Yeah, Maker. I like that. I’m a Maker. If you and your specialist friends think you’re better than me and my other Maker friends you can go fuck yourselves. Seriously.

I’m going to keep doing what I do. I just needed to vent some angers and this didn’t fit into a single tweet. For those of you that decided to read this, mostly I’m sorry you read this. I want the web to be a better place. I want the same emotional experiences I had when I came across sites like A Is For Apple and Requiem For A Dream. I don’t care how it’s made. I don’t care who makes it. Currently I’m getting that emotional experience from offline interactive installations. Work by UnitedVisualArtists, Universal Everything, Eyewriter, Design and the Elastic Mind, and tons of other things. You know, stuff that’s meanigful. Maybe I need to go away from web design for a while and rediscover what it was I drew me to it. But currently it’s not doing it for me. It’s full of fighting and conflict and elitism and mostly nothing I want to be a part of.

Again, I apologize for this being a big angry rant. It wasn’t planned out. This is more of a drunk rambling. Without the drunk.

Tronic have a new website. You may have seen it linked to from a few other websites or all over twitter or maybe on QBN, CPLUV, etc. I happened to just randomly decide to visit the site to see if there was any new content updates and bam a new website. Neat.

History lesson: I’ve been aware of the studio for a while. I forget how I came across their work. Maybe through Stash, or IDN, or BD4D, or just randomly through a project they worked on that I saw and looked up who worked on it. I saw Jesse Seppi & Vivian Rosenthal do a talk at OFFF 2007 NYC. They were on a panel with Justin Cone (of Motionographer), Buck, & Psyop. I think Justin was moderating if I remember correctly. Anyway, I had a chance to meet Vivian over the course of the …three… days of the event. I doubt she remembers me (I was the guy holding back the from exploding with fanboyism and wearing this shirt). Tronic started following me on twitter, which was the highlight of that particular day (I was having a fairly rotten day made up of thinking about beginning the creation of some data visualizations of really boring data). I love their work almost unconditionally (unconditional love isn’t required as their work just plain rocks).

How do I feel about the website? I love it. But it’s all Flash and HTML5 is going to take over.  Yea but no. I’ll get to the Flash bit in a minute. The website is really nicely designed. Black, white and cyan are a nice sharp, punchy, contrasty colour scheme. They’ve opted for the horizontal layout. This seems to be the way of the future. What with all our screens being wider than tall anyway, I’m surprised this didn’t happen right from the beginning. The mix of serifs and sans serifs works well as well. I love the Hoefler Text ampersands. That’s a nice classy touch. Something else I enjoy design wise is the randomly rotating home page images. It’s a nice way to quickly get some work across.

Obviously a portfolio website for a design studio is going to look nice, what about function? Well, every page (or Flash state) is written out to the URL. Which is why I could link to their various projects two paragraphs above. All the text can be copy pasted. All the link title text from two paragraphs up was copy/pasted. You can scroll ball/wheel through the website. Perfect. Does it need to be done in Flash? Nope. But who cares, it’s fast, I can bookmark random pages, I can copy text, I can do anything I would expect to do. BUT YOU CAN’T USE YOUR iPHONE!!! So? I want to see this videos large. Besides you can always Youtube them (or you can click that link as I’ve done it for you).

Okay, I guess I would question why it was done in Flash, as, yes, that does limit the potential number of viewers to the site. There’s also no alternate content, which is a bit of a problem. I like the idea of Flash being an interactive layer on top of the content (HTML). Like how CSS and Javascript are style and behavioral layers on top of the HTML.  I know *A LOT* of art directors that have taken up colour proofing on the iPhone (yes, I know, idiotic, but it happens) and will probably do all their work from the comfort of an iPad in the next few months. It’s unfortunate because these are generally the people we have to build our portfolios for. Maybe not though. I don’t know if Tronic works direct with a client or if their clients are larger firms like Goodby or Ogilvy or Wolff Olins or some such.

This website is a nice change. I’m fairly sick of seeing the WordPress blog theme as portfolio that’s been going strong for the last year or two. Maybe even last three. Those aren’t portfolios. I don’t feel like I’ve landed on a portfolio when I visit websites that a mostly blogs. Remember when we all needed printed portfolios? Or when motion designers needed DVDs or even VHS show reels? I still like that. I know that’s gone completely out the window, but the ideas that went into the creation of those kinds of portfolios shouldn’t have changed. I want to look at a portfolio. If you want to also have a blog, fine have a blog. But they should be two separate products under your own brand. Tronic does that well. I can go to the website and see their body of work. I can see studio updates. If I want to I can get more personal by following Vivian on Twitter.

Again, really nice website, easy to get around, loads fast. My only concern is the Flash and lack of alternate content (btw, I love Flash, if you follow me you’d know that) and was it needed for this project? Well done guys. Looking forward to more work.

Disclaimer/Spoiler: I love Thinking for a Living and the TFAL Network. If I had to classify my level of love it would probably be Creepy Stalker. Everything about TFAL I love. So as you may guess the verdict from this critique is that the site is good. But why? And can it be further improved? If you’re curious read on…

A little history first. I’ve known about Thinking for a Living since this book was released by YouWorkForThem a few years ago. I had been buying fonts and vectors and a few DVDs. Really, I bought this book because it was the same colour as my website, or really close. I also had a massive thing for slab serifs at the time (that phase has passed). After reading that I bookmarked the site and have been a faithful reader ever since. Like most any other designer out there I’m sure we all know about the various parties involved with it’s creation.

I can’t remember off hand if this was the only version of the site or not. I don’t think so. And if memory serves correctly the holding page for the current site said version 3.0. Anyway, Duane King & Co. have managed to create a pretty important product, service, network, educational material, blog, whatever you feel it should be labeled as. The branding and overall design is great. I love the pink, magenta, purple colour (I’m Canadian) scheme. It’s been carried all the way through from the printed book from years ago (I assume the sessions at the Dallas Society of Visual Communications Annual National Student Show & Conference have a similar feel) without ever feeling dated. This is one of those branding jobs I wish I did.

Alright, enough trying to suck up to the creators. What works? Generally, the usability, legibility, readability, and accessibility are extraordinarily well crafted. Sitting back and reading the content of this website is a very easy thing to do. The type is large enough for me to read comfortably at arms length (will be perfect on an iPad, as it looks great on my iPad Nano), the leading and column width keeps eye fatigue down. The padding around everything is ample enough for me to easily distinguish various blocks of content and which bits flow into other bits. I love the use of serif over sans serif typefaces. As much as I love Helvetica and Mr Eaves and NBGrotesk, I’d much rather be reading a serif typeface. That’s just me though. Also, thank God there’s no Museo (not that there’s anything wrong with it, it’s just everywhere). Finally, the IA of the site makes perfect sense and just navigating around is straight forward and understandable. Of course, all this is to be expected after browsing through the portfolio’s of the people building this site.

What really does it for me and has completely ruined it everywhere else and has set the bar going forward? The keyboard based navigation. IT’S AWESOMESUPERFANTASTICSAUCE! Seriously. It’s so comprehensive. You can actually not use the mouse for probably 99% of your visit (I’ll get to the other 1% in a second). No other website does this. Non of the media bookmarking services, the Cargo Collective featured websites/projects screen for members doesn’t do it. Most blogs don’t do much. All they do is scroll from post to post. Antonio Carusone of AisleOne did a good job as his posts fit in one screen, so they can scroll from post to post without skipping by a bunch of content. No one else really does this. It’s more a novelty feature.

Let me explain how amazing I think keyboard based navigation really can be. I have really extremely bad repetitive strain injury. Carpal tunnel syndrome, radial tunnel syndrome, I have it all. I can do about 10 – 15 minutes of computer work before my arms basically catch fire and I’m popping pain killers for the rest of the day. I live in elbow & wrist wraps, I tape my shoulders and my fingers (I learned this from climbing) I go to a physiotherapist and a masseuse. I hate the magic mouse with a passion. It’s quite possibly the most non ergonomic computing device ever made (a bit worse than the really mini Apple aluminium keyboard). Basically I use the trackpad of my laptop as my mousing device. Or the pen of my tablet. I’ve been thinking about getting the Wacom Bamboo Touch just to have a larger trackpad. Thinking for a Living fixed something I new was broken and didn’t know how to fix. Or rather, didn’t realize there was a fix (I wanted the faster horse, not the car, TFAL gave me the car). I can navigate the entire website read every post, view every page without using the mouse. I can all of a sudden read something I enjoy quite a bit on a platform I enjoy which won’t ever go away (computers if you’re wondering ) without causing any sort of computer related pains. I want the entire world wide web to work that way. I’m trying to figure out how to add keyboard based navigation into the app for the company that I work for. But it has to work as good as (or better) than what Thinking for a Living does. Like I said it set the bar for this type of interaction. A very high bar. I can think of maybe 2 other websites off hand that do it well, just not comprehensive enough. And anyone deciding to add key navigation to their sites better think long and hard about topping TFAL. Don’t add it because it’s a novel means of interaction. Add it because it can be an accessibility improvement. That’s how I feel TFAL is using it. As an improvement to the accessibility of the site.

Well, could I offer up any way the creators could improve upon what they’ve already crafted? Not really. I mean, they’ve already obviously made enormous improvements on the prior version(s). Maybe though I can offer up three criticisms. Nothing major. Probably already thought of. One maybe technically not possible. Maybe two not technically possible. Okay, firstly, the left right arrow thumbnails that are used as visuals for the mouse clicks seem a bit jittery if the mouse is moved fast. Not a big deal as it’s not overly noticeable and will probably be different depending on browser (as they all have different javascript engines) and it’s not a consistently jittery thing. Something just to watch for. Two & three: expand that awesome keyboard navigation to new epic heights (I keep wanting to spell words with …ei… as …ie… it’s really bugging me). So for 2, it would be cool, although probably not feasible or maybe even not possible, but, cool, if the expandable categories menu had keyboard shortcuts for each sub category. Like shift+ctrl+q, shift+ctrl+w, and on and on for each of those. Tricky, they’d have to be dynamically generated as new categories get created or old categories get deleted or merged with other categories. I was thinking as well, that just having shortcuts for all the links would be neat. Just use another shortcut, shift+tab+q, shift+tab+w, etc. Maybe putting a little span beside each link a few shades darker than the background so the user knows what short cut does what. Really, I’m only suggesting this because this is the only way to improve upon what has already been done. I’m sure this kind of functionality is hugely complex so I’m definitely not slogging TFAL for not adding that kind of functionality. Just saying, that’s the kind of functionality that will further improve keyboard based navigation on any service. My final third criticism would be the vertical scrolling. Currently it’s handled quite gracefully with some nice jQuery smooth scrolling up and down (which is arrow key-able), so there’s nothing really wrong with it. The nice to have would be no vertical scrolling. Again, I’ve no idea how the CMS is laying out the content. Are they using the jQuery Columnize plugin? No idea. Didn’t look. Could they? No idea. That probably depends on how they are dealing with the content. I don’t even know if you could calculate the innerHeight and have that determine the height of a columnized column. I don’t think so. So this is another one of those, maybe the technology isn’t quite there, or it’s resource intensive to create that kind of functionality. It’s just a thought. Currently I have no real issue with it. But, for the sake of providing some thoughts that could help going forward whether for TFAL or for anyone reading that is facing a similar situation and how to handle it. Just my two cents.

All in all Thinking for a Living is one of the best websites I’ve visited. Both in experience and in information. Bookmark it, add it to your RSS, visit it everyday. Learn stuff. I’m glad I know about it. It’s changed my views. If I know I’m going to be somewhere were it’s possible that I might run into Duane King I’d bring my TFAL book to get signed. Yes it’s that good.

A few house rules. Actually just one. Criticise work not people. Upfront right now, you will be banned if you break that rule. I’m not fucking about on that one. To further that, I’d like to add one guideline. Let’s keep it positive. I don’t mind constructive debating about technique or style (remembering of course that aesthetic taste is the subject of opinion), but let’s keep the slagging for the bar.

Okay, done with that, it shall not be mentioned further unless required. Why *start* a blog in 2010? Okay, yes, honestly it feels really weird starting a blog in 2010. But hey, I felt there wasn’t enough of this happening. You see lots of very good and important inspiration blogs. Lots of tutorial websites. Some really good blogs that are more magazines. Something happened about a month ago. Brendan Dawes of mN wrote a post which I’m not gonna even try to summerize or paraphrase for fear of getting it wrong. You can read it at his site.

“I’ve got to say this. The UK web design scene is often just self serving, indulgent bullshit perpetuated by friends of friends. Count me out.”

The comments exploded. It was interesting. I agreed with him, but not because I think UK designers do this. It’s a global issue. It’s not even that I think that we all pat each others backs and never criticise someone. The problem is that it only shows up on twitter and there’s no way for you to properly critique a website in 140 characters. It has been done before, Kyle Meyer created Typesites which took a critical look at websites featuring heavy type design. He had some pros and cons in each review. It was great. Brand New does the same thing, but mostly for identity/logo design. Brand New is probably one of my favourite (yes I’m Canadian, this is also being edited whilst Canada wins the Gold at the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, hence the image above) websites. It’s definitely a daily read. This is the plan for this website. A place to look at new web redesigns and critique them. Knowing full well that I was never a part of the business planning so don’t know all the details behind design choices. So this will be opinion. Mostly my opinion. I hope we can discuss the review in the comments. That’s something I look forward to doing. I am absolutely a fan of discussing our craft. Even debating it. In theory we can all learn from it.

Remember in art school (for those of you that went to art  school) when we all stood around and got to have a professional judge our work in front of our peers? I don’t know about you, but I loved it. Well, looking back on it I loved it. At the time I absolutely hated getting ripped by my instructor. That said, I feel that I’m a better person for it.

There you have it. In a long winded near ranty almost essay (hamburger essay I think). It’s only ranty because Canada just won the gold and I’ve had a few beers and some nachos. Go Canada! Ehm, sorry. That’s the plan. I’m going to try and stay positive for the most part. I mean, obviously because this is a website for critiquing other websites yes there will have to be the pointing out of some things that just don’t work for me. Doesn’t mean I think you’re a terrible person. Let’s see how it goes.

* Now that I made it all the way to the bottom I noticed what seems like a lot of link baiting at the top. Sorry for that. Not intentional.

** Just editing and taking screen shots of the first two reviews now. Life generally gets in the way. Plus, I wanted to wait a bit so my opinions won’t have that immediate gut reaction blurt of who cares (spoiler: the first two have keyboard based navigation). See you here in a few days. Thanks for caring.