This from Ben Shneiderman in the October 2005 issue of Treehouse:
Design for monochrome first and then add color where emphasis or additional meaning is required. This will help you make sure that all the knobs and levers are in the right place (so to speak) before you even consider color schemes and palettes.
I’m not alone then.
The Trouser Press Record Guide writes that “The early work by Throwing Muses bears no resemblance to any other group or artist in recent memory”. (I disagree with almost everything else that they write, mind.) From Kristin, 10 June 1998:
I swear to God, we thought we were a party band. As Throwing Muses, at age oh, sixteen or seventeen, we were gleefully impressed with ourselves and our ability to bring joy to people through sound. We were then stunned and horrified to see audiences react with something like stunned horror.
So, this sound became our mission. Every note and word had to fascinate us. Every song had to be alive, like a great person… full of colors and sweat and memories and potential. We never expected anyone else to want to listen again and this was okay. I guess we figured we’d get the internal right and the external world would either fall into place or disappear.
It kind of did both.
Lizzie Sage was written in the days that Throwing Muses were a party band. That’s 1983. It was re-recorded in 1996.
Warning, more crap to come: Sony BMG has established a new company, called Fever Media. An independent (?) entertainment production company, which will be “part of our ongoing vision to create a completely multidimensional entertainment company at Sony BMG.”
Amazon’s Simple Storage Service launched yesterday evening. It’s a storage service backend for web developers. According to the design requirements, it’s scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive and simple.
The service is reasonably priced, based on quantity stored and bandwidth used.
Judging from the API, the latter point is true. Everything is coming.. online.
We’ve just subscribed to treehouse, a web development magazine. I duly added a subscription to the shopping cart, then checked out, only to be confronted that I needed to login to checkout.
But, I didn’t have an account. I created an account, logged in, then found a nice new empty shopping basket.
This is a frustrating behaviour (demonstrating the flywheel analogy). Here are some solutions and advice:
Finally, if you have electronic products that are chronological, please ensure that their filenames reflect their chronology: don’t put a month number before a year number.
If you were stuck in a cage all day with a hamster wheel, what would you do?
HamsterTracker keeps a record of Lucy 2.0’s treadmill statistics, which shows that even hamsters get bored of hamster wheels.
..and I’m gonna start a sketchbook, and use it the same way Tori Amos uses recordings of the musical ideas she has.
Sometimes when I start the design for a website I have a vision for the eventual design. Both in graphical terms, colours, fonts etc., and in layout, user interface pieces and interaction, which, in a sense, lay on top of the graphics.
Quite frequently, however, I have no idea where to begin. All I have is a knowledge of the content and from it, the navigation and interactivity requirements. But I’m very happy with this.
From this state I’ll usually start sketching on paper or dumping ideas into Fireworks. Inevitably I am distracted by the colour scheme(s) to use and the choice of colours affects the design and fonts I use. Maybe it’s a synaesthesia related issue?
Last year, our design for our yearly Yellow Pages advertisement was in colour. Just one colour, combined with greyscale. But it took me ages to come up with the right colour.
This year’s design will be just greyscale, and today I started and finished the design without any problem. Part of this is due to us simplifying our ‘message’ to tie in with a forthcoming website redesign, given prospective customers a stark choice between us and other candidates. But, I’m convinced the main reason it was much easier was that there was no colour to care about.
Colours seem to intrude on my design process, in the same way that colour photographs always seem to be less emotionally effective than black and white ones. So, for my next website design I’m going to try starting it in greyscale, then adding colours after the core design is finished. I’ll report back on the success (or otherwise) of this experiment.
A Man Called Adam:
Take the gloves from my hands
I'm not licensed to wear them
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