hyalineskies

After reading an interview with a typeface designer on the design of entirely functional sans-serifs, I realised that the three is of typeface design are no different than the things we should be thinking about when developing new web applications from scratch; however, there’s a usability caveat in web application design that complicates things.

As I started development of the new hyalineskies codebase this weekend, I found a total lack of standards in WordPress theme development. I needed a robust, extremely flexible framework with which to base my newest theme and all of my themes thereafter; after some investigation, I found that that meant developing something much bigger than I had expected.

I’ve received too many comments lately asking for my opinion on VIRB°, a new social network by design-oriented Unborn Media. While Virb’s aesthetics are certainly nice, history has proven that usability and aesthetic aren’t the primary reasons for social network adoption. I’ll play the skeptic on this one.

I’ve been able to avoid the crazy Getting Things Done phenomenon for quite a while now; after a failed attempt at trying it out using my Treo 650, I’m going back to the old school. In a little over an hour, I crafted my own GTD-and-PigPog inspired system using a Moleskine Pocket Notebook as its core.

When Facebook released a new news feed interface, the userbase revolted. After tons of media attention, multiple user protests, and two days’ worth of furious coding by Facebook’s developers, Zuckerberg apologises. Should Zuckerberg have to apologise for building a better interface? Regardless of the hit Facebook takes because of this, Facebook has taught all of us in social media design a new rule of the game: there is actually a threshold where social users feel uneasy about the ease of information access, and it’s closer than we would have guessed.