Pixelvetica

Firstly, big news: Pixelvetica is migrating to Posterous! The full change will be completed within the next week, but until then, please continue to enjoy Pixelvetica as you normally would. More about the migration in a later post.

Also, congratulations to @zaksoup for winning the Pixelvetica promotion on Twitter. In return for spreading the word about the charitable cause, Pixelvetica randomly selected Zak to receive a free giftable copy of the Humble Indie Bundle #2 (see our previous review). Happy new year, Zak!

On that note, happy new year to all of our readers. Pixelvetica wouldn’t be the same without you. This is the blog’s first year in action, & it has been a great one. Full of fine pixels, amazing apps, & some great interviews, 2010 was a worthy 12 months.

What can you expect from Pixelvetica in the coming year? If all goes to plan, no less than 2 posts per month for starters, & we’ll also be sponsoring 3 or 4 more giveaways when the time is right. The next 24 posts (some of which will be, for the first time, composed by guest writers) will hopefully include at least 4 interviews, 4 app reviews, 4 editorials, & 4 shares. The remainder of the posts are open for now, but we plan to make them fantastic ones. Remember, you can always follow @Pixelvetica on Twitter for updates & to get in on the latest promos.

Seeing as it’s New Year’s day, Michael Norton, an interaction designer in Vancouver, & friend of & coworker with our editor, has some interesting predictions to share. His 6-part forecast includes:

1. Tablet computers everywhere. iOS & Android for certain, maybe even Windows 7, but the latter aren’t likely to be of very good quality.
2. The fall of RIM. Unless something changes very soon.
3. Nintendo under fire. No HD console, a gimmicky 3D handheld that may hurt little children’s eyes; things look bleak for the Japanese game titan.
4. Apple TV app explosion. Not a question of if, but when. Could be as soon as Thursday.
5. MobileMe 2. “Freemium” & better than ever, powered by the Death Star of data centres. Could also be as soon as Thursday. 
6. OS 10.7 Lion. Not so much a prediction, but certainly the beginnings of iOS/OS X fusion, destined to change the desktop computing paradigm forever. 

We will be seeing other unprecedented developments as the year progresses, too. With the recent widely-regarded “fall” of Yahoo! & Facebook’s timely metric overtaking of Google as the most visited website in the world, the status quo just isn’t what it used to be. Google’s recent flurry of acquisitions & its tendencies in the last couple months to push not so discretely towards an empire on the local businesses front, along with its release of the Cr-48, indicate that the web giant is only likely to grow. If the publicized intentions are any sort of predictor, it does look to be for the better.

What’s more, Verizon is likely to get the iPhone, probably this very January. INTEL is going to make good on the efforts for Atom chips, Microsoft’s Kinect will continue to skyrocket as we slowly see the dream of dimensional space mapping realized in the context of law enforcement, & iPad will get some long awaited hardware improvements.

In the design & development scene, HTML5 & CSS3 will start to become less special, because, rightfully so, they’ll start to set a baseline. Hopefully we’ll see browser support worked out in that regard as well, but it could go either way. WebKit & Moz syntax will continue to battle it out, Adobe will continue to sit on its ass with regards to Photoshop’s text-rendering, & Dribbble will decline, though not enough to fall from the lead of the pack, as the “abode of elite design.” We’ll also start to see a plethora of designers & developers specializing in mobile game design emerge from the mass of graphics artists & developer wannabes who presently envelope the Twittersphere.

Whatever happens, it is going to be a fascinating year; that’s for certain. We live in some technologically groundbreaking times, & Pixelvetica resolves to be here to enhance your experience every step along the way. Let us say, from the inner depths of our servers & hard-disks, thank you for reading Pixelvetica, & may you have the best of new years.

Regards,

Carson Kahn

Editor

____

Carson Kahn is a user-interaction designer & copywriter currently crafting pixels with Design Vetica Interactive, Inc. Follow him on Twitter (@CarsonKahn) or visit www.carsonkahn.com. Questions, comments, & suggestions are always welcome.

Follow Pixelvetica on Twitter (@Pixelvetica) or become a fan on Facebook. Thank you for your continued support.

Most recently, developer and designer Kyle Bragger, the genius behind Forrst.com, was kind enough to grant me an interview. As the homepage pronounces, Forrst is a “place for designers and developers to share inspiring code, screenshots, links, and other work with their peers.” What follows is my transcription of some of the questions I asked Kyle and the answers he so kindly took the time out of his busy schedule to give me. Some of the references he makes have been linked to for your convenience.

Who are you? What do you do for a living?

I’m Kyle Bragger. I am a developer (mainly for the web) and web entrepreneur.

What is your history? What are your hobbies? How long have you been doing what you do now?

I started about 13 years ago reading Visual Basic 3 tutorials I found on the internet (probably through Dogpile or something; remember them?) and wrote lots of silly little apps. I also started writing apps for TI-82 calculators, and mucked around with QBASIC, too.

Eventually, I came across an old Windows Explorer shell replacement called Cloud9ine and spent months and months trying to replicate it in VB5, following along with its source code. It taught me a bunch about the Win32 APIs, GDI, and all of that, as well as gave me my first taste of OOP.

I also started getting into web development; I bought a book (I can’t remember the title) and started making simple HTML pages before getting into PHP (I think right around the time PHP4 was released). Around the same time, I stumbled across DeskMod; DM was probably what sparked my interest in building dynamic websites. As always, I attempted to build my own website engine mimicking DM and their ModWorks engine. I’d say a lot of my early development was trial and error, and emulating other apps/sites quite a bit, trying to figure them out. 

Are you a designer or developer, mostly? Back-end or front-end? Why?

Developer, but somewhere along the way I picked up some decent design chops (nothing to write home about, but I can hold my own in Photoshop and Illustrator). Every day I wake up thankful that I happened to pick those apps up, because I can’t tell you how awesome it is to be able to imagine, concept, design, develop, and launch projects without reliance on anyone else. I’m well-versed in HTML, CSS, and JS, in addition to the back-end engineering I do. You’re doing yourself a disservice if you isolate yourself to a single specialty.

So, someone comes up to and says, “I’m a complete design/development noob.” What do you say to this person; what advice can you give them?

Try as much as you can. Be a do-er. Make lots of cool shit. Screw up a lot. I’m a firm believer that you have to actually dive in and create, it’s not the same just reading about it. (Disclaimer for Pixelvetica readers: I have no formal CS background or education and can’t speak for those wanting to get a formal CS degree. However, I don’t think they’re necessary for everyone. I also don’t think that college is the best place to learn web stuff; not by a long shot.)

What’s the most important thing for a designer to remember as he or she goes through life?

In general, get a good therapist.

Who’s your biggest role model, your inspiration?

I have a mentor (although I doubt he would call it that) named Mark that I’ve worked with at a few companies. He’s old school and an incredible dev & systems guy. I’ve learned a lot from him.

Talk about your projects. What have you created, what are you creating, what do you plan to create? We’d love to hear about the process.

I’ve made a bunch of stuff over the years— much of it hasn’t ever seen the light of day. I made a site called Placefav a few years ago, but didn’t have enough foresight to create a compelling location-based service. I made a to-do list app which I recently sold called Done.io. 

I’m always interested in building small projects to test an idea/theory, or just play with neat new tech. In terms of companies, I started one called BricaBox with a good friend named Nate Westheimer; that was probably the best thing that could have happened to me as far as cutting my teeth in a startup. It failed, but the lessons learned were worth every second. (EDIT: By the way, Kyle is currently perusing Forrst full-time.)

Give me a little blurb on Forrst— everyone wants to hear something.

In general though, my goal for Forrst is to keep nurturing community growth, and creating a place in which any developer or designer passionate about their craft feels at home.

Favourite fonts? ;)

Gotham Rounded, Avenir, Helvetica, Monaco.

Thanks for your time Kyle, I really appreciate it!

___________________________

If you didn’t visit it already, you can check out Forrst and apply for membership at Forrst.com. Once again, a huge thanks to Kyle for donating his time and expertise for Piexlvetica and for you. You can find Kyle on Twitter via @kylebragger.

___________________________

Liked the interview? Know another designer who you think Pixelvetica should feature? Tweet us.

I used to be a Google fanboy. Search has always been great, always getting better. When Google launched Gmail in March of 2004, I was positively hooked. When the it’s stock (NASDAQ GOOG) just wouldn’t go down, in fact, shot up to 600 from an opening count of 70 USD, it floored me. And when Google started taking over, well, everything, I was happy because it was just awesome.

However, (the bolded word being subject of this post), I’m starting to have issues with Google that I hate to express, but feel I must. The bone I have to pick with Google is threefold: information management, corporate expansion and development, and design. I’ll actually begin with the latter point, design.

Recently, Google changed it’s interface. Some of the design ideas released by Google’s Senior UX Designer Jon Wiley were positively terrible, though not without merit, I admit. However, what’s up with iGoogle? It’s looking and behaving worse lately. What’s up with it’s classic homepage? The buttons and search-bar are almost Windows XP-style now. Windows XP. Furthermore, Google fails to maintain many of it’s help files any longer, except for the new services; but for things like basic search? Outdated information and 90s design concepts are scattered throughout. And most of all, my once favourite minimalist company is getting slightly more cluttered in how they design stuff. I feel as if this could lead down a bad path.

And then there’s it’s information management. To be frank, Google is simply getting too cluttered with irrelevant information. It’s supposed to enhance search results with your history, but have you tried conducting a search without being signed in to your account lately? Likely it doesn’t return the results you’d like it to. Google also has privacy concerns now where it didn’t previously: it’s easy for someone to find all the information they need. Not in search, that’s not what I’m talking about— it’s always been easy to search someone— but people have had control over what appears in search just via basic caution. No, what I’m referring to is records. Google has got all of everyone records about everything, and that can be easily subpoenead or even requested by anyone from a government agency to a business. And given Google’s recent bouts with hackers (multiple successful attempts from China, at what, we still aren’t sure), who’s to say my information is safe?

Lastly, I’m concerned with their corporate expansion and development. Android phone? Talk about left field. Also, with Google’s recent purchase of Bumptop (see my earlier post), it almost makes me think they’re considering competing with iPad, not just iPhone, too. What is an information management and online services company doing meddling with hardware companies, much less Apple? Moreover, Google is buying up stuff it didn’t make at an accelerating rate. Look at all of the stuff it’s bought recently! I say, Google, hire some good designers and developers and make your own stuff. We wouldn’t have to go trust-busting now, would we?

Anyways, that’s my rant on why Google isn’t my favourite entity anymore. If you disagree with anything I said, tweet me. And if the only search engine you’ve ever used is Bing, which is drastically more evil than Google (rant to come soon), I guess you’re just not old enough to remember the glory days. 

PS: In unrelated affairs, my good friend Adrian Kenny recently had a PS3 that broke, and his iPod touch is first generation and slowly dying. He is one of the coolest graphic designers I know and he deserves support. Visit his site (click on his name above), read his message to you, and consider what he has to say. Moreover, his blog is located at blog.adriankenny.com. Thank you for helping out.

EDIT: How in the world does Apple’s spellcheck not recognize “Google’s” as a word yet? That’s doubly pathetic.

EDIT II: Sorry for the negativism. I’m actually very happy at the moment, having seen Iron Man 2 recently with some friends. It was great!

First off, sorry about the title of this post. It’s provocative, is it not? But in all sincerity, here’s what I mean:

We all have them, those designs or applications we just want to get done and release so people will see it. “Meh, I can just add a drop shadow if anyone notices, but they won’t. Meh, I’ll release it on Twitter now. Meh.” Or we post our design “looking for feedback,” when in reality it’s supposed to be a release. Everyone has done it.

But it’s time we start really thinking before release; we need to preempt the criticisms and provide our best work right off the tee. Don’t wait for someone on Forrst or Dribbble or M* to say that you need to round the corners— step back and take an objective look at what you’ve made. Ask yourself, “Would someone think I should change that?”

Inevitably, there will always be things you won’t catch, some gradient you screwed up or a bug in your code. But the fewer revisions, the higher quality your work will be regarded as. This isn’t to say that revising is bad (never add “_FINAL” to the end of a file name because it just isn’t true), but it is to say that there’s a lot of bad design and development out there right now, and we need to resolve that issue, and I’ve presented a way of doing that. It’s all about final objectivity.

And if you’re like my friend Louie Mantia and haven’t released a single imperfect thing since your birth, I guess you’re just better than the rest of us.  

EDIT: Yes, that’s meant as a compliment.
EDIT 2: I don’t have a live feedback system set up right now. Email your comments to carson@carsonkahn.com or tweet me.

     I think that sometimes we web, graphics, and UX designers and developers forget how important each is to the other. In a world where all of our media seems to be a collaborative effort— heck, if you post a youtube video, it’s not just you; other people can make comments and record feedback vids too— we take it for granted that everyone else is symbiotically doing their job properly. For this post, we’ll take the example of context to be iPad app creation.

     The developer cannot survive without the designer: yes, he’s got some sense of what it should turn out like, but lines of objective-C don’t create beautiful gradients and rounded corners and 1px Apple-style text-shadows. If he’s not a UI person, he’s probably not sure where to put the buttons either, or what order the navigation should be presented in.

     In the same way, the designer is lost on his own. Make all of the beautiful little icons you want, but they don’t do squat, and they aren’t gonna appear on an iPad screen anytime soon without a means of distribution, á la an app. Just because you can make an iMac icon look realistic doesn’t mean you know any code, or the math behind that radial 3-point gradient you just applied.

     When the developer and designer work together though, that’s where the magic happens. A great example of symbiosis in software creation is Panic (they make awesome Mac stuff). Tons of awesome designers and developers work constantly, consistently, and in close quarters to create what many regard to be the best designed AND coded apps of the Mac universe. They’ve achieved synergy.

     And if you’re one of those people who’s both a designer and developer, well, I guess you’re just better than the rest of us. 

I’ve noticed a lot of bad graphic design circulating lately. And thus, I present to you my favourite theorem:

Graphic design is a creative process with a few tools, a few rules, and lots of freedom.

In essence, graphic design is a visual representation of organized thoughts and a form of communication through layout, colour and organized elements such as images and words.

Basic graphic design consists simply of layout – putting existing text and images into an attractive setup within the page. Truthfully, that accounts for 90% of what most of the graphic designer do! More advanced work involves image editing – manipulating and blending pictures and type so that the images themselves communicate part of the design. Another major factor in good design is fonts. You’ll need a variety of font choices, and very few of the ones pre-installed on your computer will give your documents a professional touch. 

Here are a few basic principals that will help you become a better graphic designer:

1. Comprehend Typography – We’ve all seen designers do amazing things with type. Pulling words apart and manipulating individual letters to reflect the context and meaning is one of fun things about designing. Before you get that far, however, one simple prerequisite: read the copy and understand it! For people whose job it is to work with type, many designers have an aversion to reading. Before you can go and play with the text, you must understand exactly what you’re being asked to present.
2. Rules of Grouping – Organize perceptual objects to be as good as the conditions allow. Learn about closure – consider forming gaps between elements to form a closed figure. Be simple; objects should be group in the simplest form.
3. Limit Your fonts – A big part of putting together a good design, as you’ll see, is making sure the over-all look is consistent. The best way to accomplish a consistent look to your design is limiting the number of artistic motifs. I typically like to pick just 2 fonts per design.
4. Colour combination - You’ll either have a feel for colour or you won’t. Mostly true, however, a beginner can’t be expected to have the same balanced sense of colour as an industry veteran. So where to begin? Obviously, you’ll need to consider what kind of design you’re doing, and who it’s aimed at. But whether you’re working with vibrant primaries or a stylish earthy palette, there are ways to ensure you’re combining colours that don’t jar or vibrate against each other. There are numbers of online tools and lots of books to help with this. And don’t forget to make sure your monitor and printer are calibrated to display accurately.

Graphic design is of course subjective, and there are a hundred different roads leading to the solution. You need to find the best. Once you’ve finished your work, ask yourself this: is this the best possible outcome?

Don’t settle on something if you’re not 100% convinced it’s the best-possible design outcome. If there’s even a sliver of a doubt in your mind, change it or try something new. Your client wants to see the best you can do. That’s exactly what you and I should be delivering every time. Awesome. 