SUPERMETRIC FINDS » article

Site Inspire, No.3

Marco — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:30:21 +0000

Brandfields, a site we designed for Diego Kolsky, is featured at siteinspire.net this morning!

What’s remarkable is that the site has been up for almost 3 years now. It was one of the first projects where we replaced Flash animation with Ajax, and created a custom CMS controlled back-end to feed the site. It’s really nice to see that both, the design and the technology of those virtual things we create hold up for a while.

Bring Down IE6

Marco — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 23:01:01 +0000

Yup, the world would be a better place without certain things — IE6 is definitely in the top ten of my list, right after war, religion (which maybe counts as one), cigarettes, and girls who like horses. Please support the most important campaign after “yes we can” (note the Shepard-Fairy-ness of the graphics — don’t ask me why they did such a poor job copying him), initiated by .net magazine. Blog it, link to it, donwload the wordpress warning plug-in for your blog… help to spread the word and let’s finally Bring Down IE6.

Here’s an excerpt from the site:

The premise is simple: Internet Explorer 6 is antiquated, doesn’t support key web standards, and should be phased out. This isn’t about being anti-Microsoft, it’s about Microsoft’s lack of development in the browser market. With IE7/8 not available for Windows 2000, IE6 accounts for up to 20% of web usage, primarily via business users. Clients pressure designers to ‘force’ sites to work in IE6, and designers, not wanting to lose business, comply, using hacks and workarounds. This wastes time and money. Microsoft needs to fix this, designers need to unite, and we all need to move on.

“Bringing Holistic Awareness to Your Design – Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design”

Marco — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:09:30 +0000

A very interesting article by Joseph Selbie from Boxes and Arrows I found on Twine. He describes the values of fully integrative partinioning of all team members during all phases of a project — or in short: Sharing Is Caring. Even though a lot of this sounds kind of big-business (obviously bigger teams can make more mistakes), the size of a team seems to be irrelevant when you streamline it using the old iea of ‘Talking to Each Other at All Times’.

The (Mostly) True (and long) Story of Helvetica and the New York City Subway

Marco — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:39:17 +0000

(top and bottom rows): From the 1970 NYCTA Graphic Standards Manual, Unimark Design Consultants, a page indicating directional information, the cover and and typeface instruction using Standard, not Helvetica; (middle) “Donna” illustration of platform signage by Bob Noorda (c.1966, colorized in 2008).

This should be a nice weekend read for a rainy day where you don’t feel like going out to get the paper and have no books or magazines left to read. Or for any other ordinanry day if you really really like reading lengthy stuff on your screen…

UPDATE: here’s the link to the AIGA article