Toluu

Bleikamp.com

user interface design, web development, and marketing

I am not a Malcolm Gladwell FanYesterday

I recently picked up Outliers on a whim while I was waiting around at Chicago O’Hare during a long delay. I finished the book in the 6 hours I was flying and I was left a bit “empty” feeling when I was done reading. The book attempts to explain the perception of “genius” or “excellence” and show that society’s opinion and social circumstance turn minor advantages into major advantages to individuals over time.

Great. I agree. But most of the “evidence” here is anecdotal, and while it makes for interesting stories, it is not really anything new - it is simply all summarized in a nice, hardcover book. I am not the only one underwhelmed by Gladwell’s book, Joel Spolsky provides a nice summary as well.

Rather than rehash my issues with Outliers, I will simply give my only anecdotal evidence that Gladwell doesn’t really offer anything new in this book.

My Anecdotal Evidence that Malcolm Gladwell is Lame

When

Create a Custom Search Box with ThesisJanuary 4

I’ve been working on realigning my blog a bit the past two days. It is running on Thesis, which I am treating more as a WordPress framework than a theme, so I’ve been doing quite a bit of work to get rid of the default look and feel that the theme comes with.

A huge bonus of using Thesis is that most of the typography decisions are made with the theme’s control panel, so that gives me a chance to work on little details, like the search box. So, how’d I make a fancy search box?

First, lets get one thing straight: This is not a custom search box in terms of markup. This is the exact same, default XHTML that Chris includes with Thesis, all I did was position it where I wanted in the theme and style it to look the way I wanted.

Step 1: Add the Search Box to Your Theme

Using Thesis’ hooks you can position the search box anywhere: within the navigation, inside a sidebar, even inside every single post (I wouldn’t recommend that). I positioned it to the right of my tabs.

// Remove default navigation remove_action('thesis_hook_before_header', 'thesis_nav_menu');   //Create my new markup function bleikamp_nav() { echo '<div id="nav">'; echo '<div

Fox News is an Example in Bad Design DecisionsDecember 28 2008

I am not a fan of Fox News.  It has very little to do with their coverage of the news (I think Bill O’Reilly is hilarious) and a lot to do with their design choices on the web and in their on air graphics.  They are laughable in comparison to MSNBC (at least their website) or CNN.

The Logo is Different

The logo sucks, but I suck at logo design too, so I can live with that.  Instead I’ll point out that it’s completely different than the logo they use on air and instead appears to be some sort of Photoshopped, general Fox logo.  My question:

Why the distinction between Fox News Channel and FoxNews.com?  Why can’t we simply have Fox News and utilize the same logo with consistent branding?  The content is, in theory, the same.  The website is an extension of the TV channel.

Notice how CNN uses the same logo on everything. It never changes, they have a consistent brand everywhere you look. It helps that their logo is better because it lacks the overblown gradients and terrible font choices of Fox News.  Fox could, at the very least, have a consistent identity mark.

Lazi

What Do Designers Do? They CodeDecember 22 2008

Do designers need to know how to program? I’ve gotten this email a few times and have been asked about it when interviewing for jobs in some form or another. The short answer is yes, for an interaction designer writing code is just as important as pushing pixels in Photoshop and maybe more so. I am not talking about writing heavy back end code, regular expressions or CRON jobs, I am just saying that a designer should know how to make their design actually work.

First, let me point out that I think the 20 different names for “designer” on the web are a joke. User experience design, interaction design, user interface design, web design, etc. are the same. The end goal of each is to create a website that is easy for people to use. That said, web design is not graphic design - a graphic designer (in my view) is generally someone who is “classically trained” who does design for design’s sake without much thought for usability.

37signals actually avoids Photoshop and does their mock ups in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This is obviously an extreme case and their design style allows for it, but it is an interesting idea.

If you look at the job listing for a Facebook product designer they insist their designers be fluent in CSS, HTML, PHP, and JavaScript so that they can prototype their designs. Those four languages are what

Rick Warren is an Idiot, but Give Obama a BreakDecember 20 2008

I found this link while reading Paul Krugman’s blog at the New York Times, and it bothers me.

Do you believe Creation happened in the way Genesis describes it?
WARREN: If you’re asking me do I believe in evolution, the answer is no, I don’t. I believe that God, at a moment, created man. I do believe Genesis is literal…

I have had this argument who knows how many times with a number of people both on the internet and in person and each time I have the argument it baffles me how someone can deny that the theory of evolution is the best understanding we have of how we came to be.

Is the theory of evolution flawless? Of course not. But there is not a better explanation right now and we continually find new evidence to support evolution. Does it explain how the universe was created? Nope. But neither does the Bible (at least not in terms that any scientist can accept). Not understanding how the universe was created is not evidence of God and a blow to evolution. It is simply proof that scientists have more work to do and more discoveries to make.

So why did th