http://www.seanmccambridge.com/ en sean@seanmccambridge.com Copyright 2010 2010-07-22T04:39:31-05:00 http://www.seanmccambridge.com/articles/page/its-not-about-being-different-or-difficult-its-about-being-memorable/ http://www.seanmccambridge.com/articles/page/its-not-about-being-different-or-difficult-its-about-being-memorable/#When:04:39:31Z --John Fogerty on Merle Haggard 2010-07-22T04:39:31-05:00 http://www.seanmccambridge.com/articles/page/thumbnail-design-in-37signals-sortfolio-and-google-chrome/ http://www.seanmccambridge.com/articles/page/thumbnail-design-in-37signals-sortfolio-and-google-chrome/#When:15:44:24Z After updating my Sortfolio entry and browsing around a bit, I noticed that thumbnails for Sortfolio listings looked a whole lot like my Google Chrome home screen.  Just better.  Here are some screenshots: Sortfolio Chrome The 4-column layouts echo each other.  There is more information in the Sortfolio thumbs, which would seem like a greater challenge for the designer. But this section of Sortfolio still reads lighter and richer than the similar Chrome screenshot.  The use of white space, shadow and rounded corners in Sortfolio’s layout creates more shape and legibility for the eye.  Comparing the two, Chrome looks more like a quilt made up of tightly bordering tiles.  Sortfolio’s thumbs actually read like individual objects. At first, the two layouts seem remarkably similar.  But Sortfolio’s design shows what can happen with some very subtle additions that actually serve to simplify the layout and lighten the cognitive load.  Subtraction by addition. 2010-07-16T15:44:24-05:00 http://www.seanmccambridge.com/articles/page/image-quality-in-plupload-using-flash-gears-silverlight-and-html5-runtimes/ http://www.seanmccambridge.com/articles/page/image-quality-in-plupload-using-flash-gears-silverlight-and-html5-runtimes/#When:19:22:54Z Plupload is a well endowed, highly configurable multiple image uploader that provides client-side resizing and file-size limiting with either a simple jQuery implementation ready to go out of the box or a custom build-your-own implementation that interacts with Plupload’s API.  Read more about Plupload here. For image-heavy sites like shopping carts, backends, etc., the idea of client-size resizing to cut 4MB+ images down to under 100KB before the upload even begins is incredibly appealling. Plupload provides a lot of power in a simple install.  Your script can loop through several runtimes in your prefered order looking for Flash, Gears, HTML5 and Silverlight. The form defaults to a regular form submission if none of the runtimes are present. Sounds close to perfect, right? I installed Plupload to test its image resizing powers in a project I’m working on.  I chose a photo I shot a few years ago that had three critical elements that tend to degrade during resizing: texture, line and smooth gradient. There were some obvious differences between runtimes. Here it is resized in Photoshop using regular bicubic resampling: There is some jagged line on the mast, but most of the original is preserved.  There is a nice, smooth gradient.  You can see the seams in the sails and some patches.  There aren’t any artifacts or halo around the boat. Read on for the Plupload demos. 2010-06-02T19:22:54-05:00 http://www.seanmccambridge.com/articles/page/trust-your-employees-and-theyll-give-you-their-best/ http://www.seanmccambridge.com/articles/page/trust-your-employees-and-theyll-give-you-their-best/#When:16:41:49Z I’m building a custom CMS for a client.  On the page where you add blog users to the account (no admin privileges, just blog for the company), I included the following paragraph: Some general advice about blogging for business: choose staff you trust, define their limits and let them write.  Don’t create an approval process.  Just let them write.  Many companies find this intimidating — “What will they write?!” — “How can I trust them to show the best face of the company?!” Many companies are surprised by the quality and insight that occurs when they allow an open dialog.  If there are issues that emerge, then you can deal with them or revoke their blogging privileges if need be. I really believe in this.  And most business owners have the screws so tight, they would really be uncomfortable with employees posting to the blog without approval.  At my old job, we were all supposed to write for the company blog.  I wrote a good piece about usability.  It never saw the light of day because the slackers I submitted it to never got around to reading it and posting it.  if I could have just posted it myself, there would have been a new voice on the blog, a new idea, inspiration for other employees to write and everyone would have been happy.  But the review process—instead of encouraging trust and openness—brought about resentment and apathy. Trust your employees to carry the company flag until they prove they aren’t trustworthy.  You’ll find out you have some great talent you kept in the well. 2010-05-20T16:41:49-05:00 http://www.seanmccambridge.com/articles/page/sunset-on-charleston-harbor/ http://www.seanmccambridge.com/articles/page/sunset-on-charleston-harbor/#When:12:12:02Z I was playing around with some new Photoshop actions and applied pseudonymfreak’s Retro Love action to a shot I took last fall of a silhouetted palmetto tree on Charleston Harbor from the Pitt St. Bridge in Mt. Pleasant.  I found the actions in this Smashing Magazine post. Unlike a lot of Photoshop freebies out there, this really preserves the character of the original photo but adds some nice lomo funk.  Interesting and subtle. 2010-05-12T12:12:02-05:00 http://www.seanmccambridge.com/articles/page/how-many-of-my-visitors-are-using-ie6/ http://www.seanmccambridge.com/articles/page/how-many-of-my-visitors-are-using-ie6/#When:14:34:24Z After a conversation yesterday about browser compatibility, I decided to dive into Analytics and see how many visitors to my most popular website, GoCashiers.com (a guide to Cashiers, NC) are using IE6 and other browsers.  Here’s the data from the lasts 60 days. IE6IE7IE8Total IEFirefoxSafariChromeTotal60 days1453435971085381258961832%IE13.4%31.6%55.0%100.0%%TO7.9%18.7%32.6%59.2%20.8%14.1%5.2%100.0% That was two months worth of visits and 1832 samples.  I checked the approximate percentage of IE6 users on some of my other sites to see if there were any vast differences, but it was just about 10% across the board. I did this same bit of number crunching and IE6 sniffing about a year-and-a-half ago.  Back then, IE6 users made up about 1 in 5 visitors.  I’m happy to report it appears that half of IE6 users have either died, upgraded or stopped using computers entirely because of their utter frustration with IE6.  Kudos to them. I’d be interested if anyone else out there has any recent data to confirm or dispute my findings. 2010-04-30T14:34:24-05:00 http://www.seanmccambridge.com/articles/page/airplanes-at-the-museum-of-science-and-industry-in-chicago/ http://www.seanmccambridge.com/articles/page/airplanes-at-the-museum-of-science-and-industry-in-chicago/#When:21:18:39Z I went to the Museum of Science and Industry in Hyde Park, Chicago last week during one of their free days (Charleston Museums take note) and took this cool shot of old airplanes hanging from the ceiling.  The museum is really incredible with some neat exhibits for kids but some AMAZING collections of old vehicles—like a German U-boat from WWII and an old streamlined Zephyr train.  Definitely worth a visit if you’re ever in Chicago. Here’s the museum from the lake shore: 2010-04-28T21:18:39-05:00 http://www.seanmccambridge.com/articles/page/wind-farm-on-cape-cod/ http://www.seanmccambridge.com/articles/page/wind-farm-on-cape-cod/#When:15:11:25Z Goodbye, web design.  Here marks the official fork in the road where my web development blog becomes my everything-I’m-interested-in blog. The wind farm project off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard gets a lot of media attention—way more than it deserves.  But we all love a feisty scandal.  And the two (or more) sides in the fight represent a quintessential foaming-at-the-mouth not-in-my-back-yard panic.  It’s just a ball to watch.  Each stakeholding group manages to craft an attorney-stamped sound bite for the twenty seconds of attention the average media consumer can manage. I understand how those with unbridled ocean views would not want their treasured vista littered with a dinosaur cage of wind turbines.  It’s really a shame.  Of course, this is America.  So for most of the stakeholders this is about money. I’m not a lawyer.  (Remember, I’m a web designer.) I don’t know how the rights to an area of ocean are purchased.  I always thought the ocean belonged to all of us even within our “national waters,” which extend some 20 or 50 or 100 miles out to sea.  These waters are public domain.  How can someone purchase the rights to farm the wind on a given mile of sea? The idea that we can jam some towers in the ocean floor and attach giant propellers to create power is very appealing.  The idea that we have to ruin the ocean view to achieve that is not very appealing.  Why can’t those turbines be installed far enough out to shore so they’re invisible—or nearly invisible? [Continued...] 2010-04-20T15:11:25-05:00 http://www.seanmccambridge.com/articles/page/my-web-life-story-or-how-i-became-a-web-developer/ http://www.seanmccambridge.com/articles/page/my-web-life-story-or-how-i-became-a-web-developer/#When:20:31:46Z In the winter of 1999 I bought a copy of HTML Goodies by Joe Burns at a local Barnes & Noble at the recommendation of the geekiest-seeming (and therefore most trustworthy) employee at the store.  I built my first website that weekend—an homage to Tyler, my family’s harlequin great dane.  Just a few months later, I launched a dog trainer’s website for $250 complete with animated gifs, table-based layout, images sliced in Paint Shop Pro and HTML written in Notepad.  My first web job—I was proud. These were the old days.  There was no such thing as a case of DIV-itis.  JavaScript hadn’t yet gone out of (and back in) style.  DHTML was cutting edge.  I was about to buy books on JAVA and VBScript and later regret it.  I had never heard the term usability.  Google had a very ugly logo. 2010-03-30T20:31:46-05:00 http://www.seanmccambridge.com/articles/page/my-quickest-least-involved-one-and-done-under-construction-page-in-years/ http://www.seanmccambridge.com/articles/page/my-quickest-least-involved-one-and-done-under-construction-page-in-years/#When:21:59:09Z Sometimes under construction pages are necessary.  If a company finally decides to build a website, that company should want to get a page up quickly to start soaking up some SEO on their domain.  If a website is going through a redesign and the existing website is for some reason problematic, it must come down and a temporary page or microsite must go up in its place.  And the rest. A company I’m working with, Bound’s Cave Oriental Rugs in Cashiers, NC, hired me three years ago to build a site.  That site became unmanageable and outdated.  It was pulled, and they decided we should go for round two.  In the meantime, instead of showing a blank page or logo it seemed that helping their customers with a short message explaining what’s going on and how to get in touch with the company needed to broadcast on the website. I rolled up my sleeves and built this quick page for Bound’s Cave in about an hour.  It’s clean, simple and perfectly explains what is going on.  The design isn’t special, but it gets the message across.  A small photo gives the visitor a sense of the company. One hour in, now I can move onto building the real site. 2010-03-19T21:59:09-05:00