Showing all posts tagged: design
Can you imagine a web without GIFs when they are gone?
13 October 2022
Once the mainstay of motion design during the early days of the web, GIFs appear to be on the way out, and may soon be non-existent. I shall miss them. Some of them that is.
GIFs are old and arguably outdated. They’ve been around since the days of CompuServe’s bulletin-board system, and they first thrived during the garish heyday of GeoCities, a moment in history that is preserved by the Internet Archive on a page called, appropriately, GifCities.
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Craigslist keeping it simple and the same for twenty-five years
21 September 2022
When I started designing websites back in the day, you were lucky to get a couple of months out of a look. With new web technologies, and design ideas and trends, constantly emerging, it was necessary to redesign almost monthly*. We’re talking personal sites here, but in the late nineties, they were the closest thing an aspiring web designer had to a social media presence, or something like LinkedIn.
I’m certain though there are any number of still active websites that have not changed in the last twenty-five years or so, and American classified adverts site Craigslist is among them. Speaking recently to PCMag writer Emily Dreibelbis, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, says staying the same is the best way to serve their users:
Because that serves people better. I’ve learned that people want stuff that is simple and fast and gets the job done. People don’t need fancy stuff. Sometimes you just want to get through the day.
* or what felt like every month.
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Five levels of encryption on the Australian Signals Directorate coin
7 September 2022
Sen, an all-round IT professional, writes about decoding messages embedded in the recently issued Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) fifty cent coin. While a fourteen year old boy in Tasmania is credited with making the discovery of four messages “hidden” on the coin, it turns out there is a fifth level of encryption.
The outer ring came close to looking like Morse Code and was giving some output that almost looked like real words, but just a bit too gibberish. After much banging-of-heads-on-keyboards we realised I’d transcoded the outer strings wrong, which meant of course we were trying to break codes that didn’t exist.
Note that Sen’s article contains spoilers, the messages are revealed in their entirety, so read it later if you still want to decode the coin’s messages yourself.
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Australian Signals Directorate 50 cent coin with coded message
3 September 2022
Image courtesy of Royal Australian Mint.
I’d never heard of the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) until now, but in short they’re a government intelligence agency.
To mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of their establishment, the Directorate, in association with the Royal Australian Mint, have issued a commemorative fifty-cent coin. But not any fifty-cent coin… this one comes with a hidden, coded, message:
Designed in collaboration with staff from ASD and the Royal Australian Mint, the commemorative coin pays tribute to the evolution of signals intelligence with multiple layers of cryptographic code included in the design. A hidden message will be revealed as each layer of code is cracked; all that is needed is a pen, paper, Wikipedia and brainpower.
Anyone who thinks they’ve cracked the code is invited to submit their answer to the ASD, who will reveal the correct message at the end of September 2022.
Update: well that was quick… ABC News reports a fourteen year old Tasmanian boy cracked the code in about an hour, on the day of the coin’s release.
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Reddit Cutawayporn, cutaway illustrations and videos
20 July 2022
I think I lost at least an hour to Reddit community Cutawayporn when I stopped to take a quick look the other day. As the name suggests, it’s full of cutaway illustrations, including Spanish Bronze Age houses, bomb shelters, Roman aqueducts, and vehicles. Fascinatingly addictive. There’s also this video of an electric arc furnace plant. Who doesn’t want to indulge in a little (harmless) prying?
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A guide to designing and building websites in 1997
11 July 2022
It’s 1997 and you want to build a website, a history of the early days of website development, by Jay Hoffmann. The first version of disassociated went online in 1997. I even held a small launch party. We went to an internet cafe so I could see disassociated on a third-party device that was not mine, nor anyone I knew.
They were the good old days of web design. Designers would stay up all night working on a new website, only to pull it apart, and start all over again when some new trend came along, which seemed to be all the time. Javascript image rollovers, anyone? TV lines? Some of the best experimental web design was to be found in the late nineties. Partly because there was a new-frontier exuberance, and the rules were few.
Despite this, I worked to the HTML 3.2 standard — a non-proprietary specification for building websites to — published by the W3C. My desire to use standards was two-fold: they promised to make the web a little more accessible, and hardly anyone else was working with them. It made me feel like some sort of counter-culture rebel.
When the HMTL 4 spec came along in April 1998 though I quickly adopted it, because, you know, it was shiny and new. I only talk about standards because they were the only paper resource I referred to when coding — sorry, marking up — a website. I didn’t rely on text books to teach myself web design, but rather the online tutorials of the time. Plus a little, actually considerable, trial and error.
I worked at some big-end-of-town company for a short time in 1998, where I furtively printed out the HTML 4 spec, twenty pages at a time, here and there, throughout the day, for several weeks.
Why I needed to waste all that paper — once printed the spec was almost the size of a telephone directory — when I could’ve referred to the document online (via dialup), eludes me now. I think having the spec, bound in a ring-binder, sitting on my desk at home, validated my then fledgling web design aspirations.
For somebody surfing the web in 1997, a book might feel a bit… 20th century. If you already knew the basics of getting online, why not poke around some sites that might help, right there in your browser.
Hoffmann’s article also mentions a bunch of early-on-the-scene web design agencies, including Razorfish, who were behind the production of This Girl, the monthly serialisation of the life of a fictitious twenty-something living in New York, called Phoebe. The work of Razorfish, and the exploits of Phoebe, were one of thousands of web influences I absorbed.
I wonder what became of Phoebe. And that print out of that HMTL 4 spec.
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3D maps of all London Underground tube stations
29 June 2022
Ian Mansfield has posted axonometric diagrams of every station on the London tube, or underground rail network, which were released by Transport for London.
Axonometric diagrams?
They are technically axonometric diagrams, which is 3D-like, but not to scale, which becomes obvious when you see some of the vertiginous descents offered on some stairs and escalators.
Balham station is exactly as I remember it, as is Brixton.
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How locks, including the unpickable Enclave lock, work
27 June 2022
The Enclave lock, designed by Andrew Magill, comes with the claim that it cannot be picked. This might be the news the security conscious have been waiting for.
Some locks are more difficult to pick than others. Some have more perfect tolerances, or more positions, or keyways that are more difficult to fit tools into, or parts that move in unusual ways, or parts designed to mislead pickers, and so on. But these are only incremental improvements, and don’t address the fundamental flaw. The solution is to make it so that the two steps- accepting input, and testing that input- can never happen at the same time. When those two steps cannot interact with each other, a well-designed lock will never reveal information about the correct positions of its individual parts, nor can they be made to ‘fall into’ their unlocked positions through manipulation.
Watch the video clip for the Enclave lock though. As well as demonstrating Magill’s new lock, it also shows how conventional locks work. Quite fascinating.
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design, security, technology, trivia
2022 Australian Book Design Awards winners
7 June 2022
The winners in the 2022 Australian Book Design Awards (ABDA), which recognise outstanding book cover design, were announced on Friday 3 June 2022.
In Moonland (published by Scribe Publications, August 2021), by Melbourne based Australian author Miles Allinson won the Best Designed Literary Fiction Cover, while Catch Us the Foxes (published by Simon & Schuster, July 2021), by Sydney based Nicola West, took out the award for Best Designed Commercial Fiction Cover.
Cover designs in twenty categories were nominated, and all winners can be seen on the ABDA Instagram page.
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Australian literature, awards, design, Miles Allinson, Nicola West
Keming is omnipresent, now let’s add it to the dictionary
16 May 2022
American photographer, filmmaker, and writer David Friedman has launched a campaign to have keming, a word he devised in 2008, added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
I coined the word “keming” in 2008, defining it as “the result of improper kerning.” It’s a bit of visual wordplay because kerning is the adjustment of space between letters and if you kern the word kerning improperly, the r and n can merge to form an m. “Kerning” becomes “keming.”
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