Robert Hoekman, Jr is a user experience designer and consultant who is best known for his books about interface design, Designing the Obvious and Designing the Moment. His self-published book Big Deal: On Being Famous to Almost No One tackles a far more personal subject. In Big Deal Hoekman, Jr recounts his rise to the top of the web design field, and describes how his craving for professional notoriety eventually devastated his personal friendships, marriage, and sense of self worth.
The form of celebrity Hoekman Jr discusses in Big Deal has been dubbed “micro-fame”:
My name is Robert Hoekman, Jr, and in certain rooms, under certain circumstances, at certain moments, surrounded by certain people, and when all these very certain things come together, I am a big fucking deal.
In other words, Hoekman, Jr might be unknown to the general public, but within the web design industry he is a bona fide rock star.
Sitepoint have just announced the release of a free ebook, Thinking Web: Voices of the Community. The book is a collaborative effort designed to tap the wealth of knowledge that can be found in the Sitepoint forums.
The book is over 200 pages in length, and covers a whole gamut of topics including web accessibility, coding HTML emails, database basics, online marketing, and going freelance.
While I was twiddling my thumbs waiting for my last Amazon shipment to arrive I asked my studio mate if he had any design theory books I could borrow. “Aha! I’ve got just the thing”, he said (or words to that effect) and plucked a copy of Kenneth Fitzgerald’s Volume from his bookshelf. The author’s name didn’t ring any bells, but the book’s back cover promised a survey of “the discipline of graphic design in context with the parallel creative fields of contemporary music and art”. Since I love graphic design, music and art, I figured I was on to a good thing.
Donald A. Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things frequently pops up on lists of “must read” design books, but I’ve somehow managed to avoid reading it until now. I finally included the book in my last Amazon order, and now I wish I hadn’t waited so long to get my hands on a copy, because it really is a classic that deserves all the praise that’s been heaped on it.
The Design of Everyday Things was first published in 1988 under the title The Psychology of Everyday Things, and is aimed at anyone involved in the design process, regardless of which field they work in. Norman’s background is in cognitive science, and in the book he explores the psychology of everyday objects, making a persuasive argument for the importance of a user-centered approach to design. After reading The Design of Everyday Things you will never look at a tap, light switch, stove top, or telephone the same way again (and I guarantee you’ll learn a thing or two about the layout of your computer keyboard!)
For a number of years I have used Campaign Monitor to provide email marketing services to my clients, and I’ve always gotten a kick from seeing how subscribers interact with my client’s emails. When sending out a large campaign it is satisfying to watch the ‘views’ and ‘clicks’ metrics climb higher as subscribers open the email and click links within the newsletter.
I must not be the only person who enjoys these kind of real-time statistics, because Campaign Monitor have just launched a new reporting feature they call Worldview, which is designed to give instantaneous feedback about your subscribers.
In his presentation Frank discusses graphic design in the context of history, philosophy and anthropology, and draws interesting conclusions regarding the purpose and function of design. Apparently The Shape of Design book will expand on the themes of the lecture, so it should be a goodie.
If you want to create your own @font-face kits, you absolutely must check out Font Squirrel’s new @font-face generator tool. All you have to do is upload a TrueType or OpenType format font, and the generator spits out a zip file containing:
The original typeface for Safari and Firefox 3.5
A WOFF font for Firefox 3.6+
An SVG font for Opera, Chrome, and iPhone
An EOT font for Internet Explorer
A sample HTML page
A sample CSS stylesheet
The generator also features options to reduce file size by subsetting the font, cleanup font outlines, and auto-hint glyphs to improve rendering.
Microsoft have announced that Outlook 2010 will use the crippled Word rendering engine to display HTML emails (as does Outlook 2007). In response The Email Standards Project have launched a campaign to send a clear message to Microsoft: Outlook’s broken – Lets fix it.
In my last post I outlined some of the problems that might arise from the proposed version targeting changes to Internet Explorer 8. My major concern was that by removing the motivation for web authors to update legacy sites, version targeting might hamper the adoption of modern web development techniques. During the week I have given some more thought to this issue, and it occurred to me that in Adobe Flash we have a fantastic real-world test case from which we might learn if version targeting is a viable strategy for a web browser.
When Dean Hachamovitch demonstrated in December that the forthcoming Internet Explorer 8 browser passed the Acid2 test in standards mode, there were calls for Microsoft to clarify if “standards mode” was the default setting for IE8. Last week it was announced on A List Apart and the Internet Explorer blog that IE8 will render pages using an IE7-level rendering engine by default, and that web developers must opt-in to take advantage of the new Acid2-compliant rendering mode.
