Matt King : By Design

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It’s a small thing, but I love how the New York Times’ website prompts you to view the next article with a little animated signpost when you reach the bottom of the story you are reading. Very simple, very nice.

I’m off to dConstruct tomorrow morning for what looks to be a decent set of talks. What I like most about the schedule this year is, what I assume to be, a deliberate move to slightly more abstract subject matters, rather than the normal faire of the nuts and bolts of web design and development.

• Nathan Shedroff and Chris Noessel’s talk on learning from sci-fi interfaces – Make It So
• Mike Migurski and Ben Cerveny talking about information visualisation
• August and his Emotion Commotion – all about the role of emotion in design

I’m a big fan of grid systems such as 960 grid - I just can‘t get enough of their neatness. Even with designs that haven’t been put together with a specific grid framework in mind I like all the measurements to be one of the following;

•  Multiples of five
•  Even numbers
•  One single pixel

And that’s it! It’s even in that order of preference and applies to padding, margin, border, width and height of all elements where feasible.

Do I have web OCD? I know, in my career, I’ve come across many different styles of putting together a web template. At each end of the scale there have been the following two methodologies utilised when the original visual has been slightly inconsistent.

•  Inconsistencies have been replicated pixel-perfectly
•  Inconsistencies have been ironed out

Am I taking it too far by going one step further, even when the visual is consistent, by changing a margin of 7 to 8 or the width of an image form 218 to 220? Anything else just feels plain wrong.

Picture credit: Flickr user eriwst

Over the last few days I’ve been tinkering with my personal site 98degrees.co.uk and have changed it slightly. The focus is now my lifestream. After wrestling with getting the various links, #hashtags and @replies in my tweets to link I’ve finally got it up. The look will probably evolve over time but my favourite feature are the “HeatLinks”. I’ve set it up so the latest entries are hotter (coloured orange) and as you go progress down (into the past)  they gradually get cooler (coloured blue).

If you’re interested in what’s going on behind the scenes, I’m using Yahoo Pipes to aggregate all my feeds and PHP to control tweet hyperlinks (using regex) and apply the correct link colour. Please note, it works best in Safari 3+ and Firefox 3.5+.