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An experiment
I love Tumblr… I love it alot… It’s probably the easiest blogging experience I’ve come across yet. Unfortunately though, Tumblr lacks a few of the key features I expect from a blog, and commenting is one of these.
I know there’s “platform agnostic” solutions like Disqus out there, but I want to try something new. The answer? Twitter based responses…
Twitter is such a powerful conversation platform. It makes sense, to me anyway, to leverage this. So you’ll notice the “Tweet a response” and “Existing responses” links at the bottom of the post, they’re my very first attempt at integrating Twitter for comments.
There’s a few limitations. Firstly, there’s no inline commenting. I didn’t want to faff about with oAuth when I can just link to the Twitter page with the status input pre-populated with the necessary “machine tagging”. On that note, the implementation of the machine tagging is crazy simple. Simply @chrsgrrtt (So I can see new comments as @replies) followed by the ID of the post, for showing comments attached to a post in search results.
I may go further with implementation in the future, maybe parsing the search results JSON to display comments in the page. Who knows, we’ll see…
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I’ve got to say this. The UK web design scene is often just self serving, indulgent bullshit perptuated by friends
Couldn’t agree more with Brendan’s thoughts!
I’ve seen so many so-called web designers held up as “luminaries” in our industry of late, who have next to no fundamental understanding of how the platform they’re designing for actually works.
You wouldn’t attempt to design a car without understanding the laws of mechanics and aero-dynamics or the impact of different component choices, and yet there are countless “UX designers” or “User-interface designers” (or any other falsely claimed title) commanding serious amounts of cash to build web apps without a basic understanding of how their design decisions impact on the way the application is built, used or in any other way realised.
These people aren’t designers, they’re glorified art workers, and yet most of the current favourites on the speaking circuits fall into this vain. Do we really want to be influencing the future of our industry this way?
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A workflow change
I’ve not used Photoshop to produce a complete mockup for a long time. I’ve been using an approach which is now simply defined as “designing in the browser”, although for a long time I had no idea anyone else was working in this way as I’ve been doing it instinctively for the past 3-4 years.
I’ve always just found it easier to cut individual UI elements in Photoshop and pull them together into a coherent interface with HTML and CSS. However, lately, I’ve really been enjoying pushing pixels and forming complete interfaces in Photoshop again, then producing the build after a UI mockup is fully formed.
People seem to be adopting the approach of HTML/CSS based prototypes now as we have strong CSS support in the browser, aesthetic elements such as Drop Shadows and Gradients can be achieved with a single line of code. But I see this as an argument to revert back to a more heavy use of graphics editors such as Photoshop or Fireworks.
Why? This sounds crazy, no? Well to me, the biggest advantage of designing with technology was that I was always working within what was achievable with that technology. But my designs ended up, as countless people have said, lacking any real originality. When you’re working with code snippets, your design becomes equally pattern driven. You have a metric for measuring efficiency, lines of code… Graphic editors aren’t so linear, you can only measure efficiency on the quality of your output, not the number of lines of code you’ve written.
Anyway, my real point is that we have all these great new additions to CSS3 and HTML5 and everyone agrees we should be adopting them, in a progressive manner. But the way I see this is, rather than making it more practical to be designing in the browser, it actually makes designing in a graphical environment more practical as you know with a certain degree of certainty that giving this UI component a drop shadow, gradient or whatever, isn’t going to cause a real headache on implementation… So you can unleash the full extent of your aesthetic whims and create something which purely focuses on being beautiful and great, not “technologically feasible” or “easily achievable”.
That’s just my 2 pence worth anyway, this is just a preference I’ve noticed emerging in my own process over the past few weeks. It may well fade again, we shall see!
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Getting my stuff sorted
The past 6 or 7 months everything’s been up in the air. We’ve not had a clear company brand, what with the impending merger, that ultimately never happened. We had no idea what to expect with the baby on the way and all the while minor occurrences like moving office have been popping up.
Anyway, I finally feel like things are getting sorted now. We’re getting used to our new roles as parents, the office is nicely sorted (although awaiting some new furniture) and we’ve finally nailed the company brand with Abstraktion.
So to go along with that, I felt like I needed to consolidate my personal brand. I’ve always blogged alot at Minimology, but that was when the company was running as Chris Garrett Media which meant my name was pretty well known and associated with the right things.
But now the companies less centric to me in terms of brand, I felt like I need to strengthen my personal brand and output of thoughts, so here we are, ChrsGrrtt.com. You could say it’s Chris Garrett 2.0, what with the lack of vowels :)
Who am I? I’m a father, digital product designer and developer, building businesses that follow the small giants philosophy.
I’m director of Abstraktion, a small studio providing unprecedented web application design and development.
I’m currently building Podchains, a version control application for Video Projects.
I’m strategic director at Bex Media, a video production company specialising in web enhanced media. We also stream live events and performances.
Above all else, I have the cutest daughter in the world!
My own thoughts and content will be posted under the blog blog tag.
