xhtml | css | DesignThe republic of Jens Wedin (with me as the president)

I read a good article about UI design trends at readwriteweb.com. To summarize:

• No sign-up forms, no logins
• We Really Care

The article have some good thoughts about web UI trends and I really agree. Just let the user try the service, if he likes it, just sign up. The “We really care” is quite amazing that it took so many years before sites started to understand that they are dealing with people, hmm.

“As I made my selection and moved the cursor to hit the submit button a feeling washed over me that was unlike anything I had ever felt with a webservice online. I felt like they cared. I felt confident that my problem would be solved. I felt like I was contacting PEOPLE who have beating hearts, and families, who had felt worried about their missing contact e-mails too. How very humane of them!”

I would also like to add one trend that was not included in the article. The “Only show me what’s relevant” trend. Many sites have started small, maybe not with a lot of information and functionality. After a while they start to add more and more and the UI gets more and more crowded. Now I think we are starting to see sites that only show the user what he needs at the right moment. For example the Wordpress (the blog platform I’m using) admin area is quite crowded when writing. In the next release (just released) that is coming up they have done really good work of only showing what is needed. Absolutely in the right direction. I believe that contextual navigation and functionality is the future.

Example of the old admin area of Wordpress

See how the new admin area of Wordpress works (flashfile)

What do you think will be the upcoming trends for web UI’s?

• Good UI Design: Make It Easy, Show Me You Care
• Screencast and WordPress 2.5 RC2

I read an article by Robert Nyman about styling the buttons with some delicious CSS to make them blend in with the rest of the site. I agree with Robert that most of the time you shouldn’t change the default style of buttons. It may make them less findable and visible. But sometimes it is worth it to make changes to the style.

The only thing that I didn’t like with the example that Robert did was that buttons broke when enlarging the size of the text. I know there are a bunch of rounded boxes examples out there so I did some quick testing with some of them and buttons. So instead of making a specific hook to the button element I used hooks around the buttons. I know that this isn’t semantically correct, this is just a test if it would work.

The code if heavily based on the great work of Scott Schiller and his article about rounded corners and thanks to Robert for the inspiration. The test works quite fine in IE6, FF2, Safari and Opera.

• Here is a demo of three different buttons
• Zipped package of the files

• Article at Robert Nyman (Styling BUTTONS, and achieving sliding doors with them)
• Even More Rounded Corners With CSS

Great fun. Good illustration how it often works. At my work I have a bunch of internal applications that I use daily. They all have different GUI’s, better and worse, most of the time worse. (via)

I’ve been working at Skatteverket (The swedish tax agency) for almost three year now. It is now time for something new, fresh and fun. I’m starting a new job as a interaction designer at Antrop. Antrop is a consulting firm in Stockholm that focus on usability. I had the pleasure to work with two great persons at Antrop last year when we did a study of Skatteverks external website. I’ll be working with interaction design, front-end developing and web graphic design for customers.

I’m starting at Antrop on the 14th of April so now it’s only three weeks away. It will be really sad to leave some great guys and girls at Skatteverket that I’ve worked with for some time now. Hopefully will they keep talking to me even that I have started to work as an consultant

Antrop is one of Sweden’s leading companies in the area of usability. We believe that the business benefits for an IT project is directly related to how the system is being used and how well it meets the business’ and users’ goals.

At Antrop, we have thorough knowledge and many years of experience in helping organisations to focus on the business benefits for their IT projects. We work with well-established and user-centred methods and have participated in several international projects.

• Antrop (swedish)
• Skatteverket (swedish)

Helvetica comes from the latin words Confoederatio Helvetica and means Switzerland. Helvetica is also a typeface used widely around the globe.

I had the opportunity to to see the movie: Helvetica, a documentry film by Gary Hustwit, which was really good and interesting. If you have a chance to see the film you should. Even my girlfriend that is not really interested in typography liked it. It was an good documentary with many laughs and smiles.

Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which will celebrate its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. The film is an exploration of urban spaces in major cities and the type that inhabits them, and a fluid discussion with renowned designers about their work, the creative process, and the choices and aesthetics behind their use of type.

About the typeface

Helvetica was developed by Max Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann in 1957 for the Haas Type Foundry in Münchenstein, Switzerland. In the late 1950s, the European design world saw a revival of older sans-serif typefaces such as the German face Akzidenz Grotesk. Haas’ director Hoffmann commissioned Miedinger, a former employee and freelance designer, to draw an updated sans-serif typeface to add to their line. The result was called Neue Haas Grotesk, but its name was later changed to Helvetica, derived from Helvetia, the Latin name for Switzerland, when Haas’ German parent companies Stempel and Linotype began marketing the font internationally in 1961.

• Helvetica, a documentry film by Gary Hustwit,
• Arial or Helvetica (Arial is a Microsoft rip-off)
• Helvetica at Wikipedia

My host (Proinet) was hacked this month and been having major problems since then. The site goes up and down and now it produces some kind of SQL error. It seems to be working now but this the end of my stay at this host. Now it’s time for bed so no long post.