Category Archives: Design

Web design, typography, user experience, and visual aesthetics.

Color Schemes Contest

Design, Web Standards, WordPress

I’m very interested in seeing some alternative color schemes for the WordPress admin, so I thought I’d sponsor a mini-contest here. You don’t have to be a WordPress user or even have it installed to participate. The colors don’t have to match the logo or anything like that, I’m just interested in seeing easy-on-the-eyes color schemes people would enjoy looking at. For people who aren’t running a nightly build or not running WP at all I’ve put up two screenshots that you can use to get an idea of where the colors will go. You don’t have to be a designer to play, just play around with the colors in those images until you find some that you like and then post the results. Winners (I’ll probably pick a couple) will get prominent mention on this site and wordpress.org, a free unlimited-user copy of WordPress, and a small monetary prize via Paypal. So fame and fortune, what more could you ask for?

So to recap the important bits:

What?
Playing with interesting color variations for the WordPress admin sections.
Materials?
Screenshot one, screenshot two, and a HTML dummy page.
How do I enter?
Leave a comment with some way to represent your color scheme, whether it is a screenshot, CSS code, linked post, hex values, whatever you’re comfortable with. You can enter as many times as you want and win multiple times. If you don’t have time to enter, link to this entry and let other people know about it.
Any guidelines?
Be creative! Don’t modify the layout, just the colors.
Deadline?
Friday night, my time. This is a low-impact project, all you need is a color picker and about ten minutes. Submit your entry as soon as possible so no uses your colors before you do. Enter as many times as you want.
Prizes?
Fame, fortune, and that warm fuzzy feeling you get from contributing to open source and having your work in front of thousands of people.

When all is said and done I’ll roll this into a plugin or something so people can enjoy it. You don’t have to be a designer to enter, just put together something you like.

Update: There are a few clarifications and tips in the comments, so you might want to look over those. The big news, however, is that Aaron Epstein has donated a copy of his excellent Color Schemer Studio product to be awarded to the top winner. Downloading a 15-day trial would be a great way to put together a great entry and get a taste of what you might win.

This hasn’t been forgotten, I’m just can’t write the plugin for the winners until 1.3 is finished. Thanks for your patience.

Staticize 2.5

Design, Software, WordPress

Version 2.5 of the Staticize Reloaded plugin is now available for download. Installation instructions are included in the archive. What does Staticize Reloaded do? It is a highly advanced caching engine that dynamically and automatically caches pages on your site that need to be cached, when they need to be cached. It also allows for some parts of a page to be cached and others not to be, so for example your menu could always be dynamically included from a single file while your main blog content was cached. With Staticize Reloaded you don’t have to worry about rebuilding, stale caches, slow posting times, or any of that. It works silently, efficiently, and trasparently to both the end user and the author.

This version adds the ability to have dynamic functions on a page in addition to dynamic includes. It also adds full support for etags and last modified headers, though you must turn it on in the plugin file. My one tip is that when you redesign or tweak your template temporarily deactivate the plugin. Staticize Reloaded is well-suited for sites on older servers or that receive more than twenty thousand visitors per day. WordPress is so fast anyway I find it’s not worth caching on lower-traffic sites.

Update: The zip archive had a slightly older version of the plugin than the final 2.5 release. Please re-download to get the latest and greatest and fastest.

Technorati Redesigns

Design, Web Standards

Technorati redesigns and looks excellent. Is this the first search engine with completely valid HTML and CSS? Feedback: Have the cosmos link/icon in the results by the name instead of the time posted. Fonts seem a tad small for me. Footer is off-center on results pages. Congrats to Tantek and the Technorati team. (Tanteknorati, heh.) As they continue to address performance issues I can start to use the service regularly again.

CSS Nomenclature

Design

Eric Meyer: Elemental Nomenclature. If I had to name everything the same it would stifle my creativity so much I think I’d go back to tables. A better start to this would be instead of looking at the naming scheme of a dozen or so web designers, look at the naming scheme of widely used blog software. Is it worth all that work for such an amazingly small minority of users though? User stylesheets have never taken off, and I seriously doubt they ever will.

Well That Was Fun

Design, Jazz, Meta, Travel

I said I would take it down, I never said for how long. Thank you to everyone for taking a little time out with me in celebration of the big day. I was as surprised as everyone else, and watching the reactions come in was pretty interesting. The emails ranged from shocked to congratulatory to incredulous to angry. Thank you to everyone who wrote in. Many people linked to the site being down which should help solidify the #1 position in the eyes of the fickle mistress Google. Thank you all as well.

You’d think it would be cooler here in Houston, with hell freezing over and all, but it is as hot as ever. At the same time I’m told in San Francisco I need to dress in “layers.” I packed all my layers up months ago! Might have some <div>s around though…

I was able to get some of the work I was planning to do on the site done, mostly tweaks to the look and layout of things. I wouldn’t call it a redesign, more like a summer variation on a theme. Many of the changes are very subtle, but in my eyes important. The most obvious change, the sun in the corner, looks nothing like I want it to, so I’m not sure what will happen to that. (If you have any ideas, send them in.) Many other things still need attention, so expect to see occasional breakage and constant tweaking over the next week. I finally closed the comments on the mosaic. So it will stand at 1,017 comments,. The page is still huge, so I’m going to move the comments to a separate page just for that entry. The jazz quotes need some cleaning up, and I’d like to add a little information about each player to each page, including at least a picture. The photolog is being overhauled, and the long-promised classics section is almost done. Finally I promise that photo will be random again, any day now.

It was just a little over a day, but it feels good to be back. Let’s not do that again though. I really missed writing here.

I’m going to be in San Francisco next week, so if you are too I’d love to meet up. Drop me a line.