Rikcat Industries

This morning I came across this article on netbooks in my feed reader and a quote at the end of the first page really stood out. “In the process of creating a laptop to satisfy the needs of poor people, she revealed something about traditional PC users. They didn’t want more out of a laptop—they wanted less.” That’s a pretty profound statement that all designers should consider when making a product or design.

There is a sweet spot between simplicity and complexity, a sort of supply-demand curve for an effective design. Although netbooks are cheaper to make and would see increased demand because of that, the constraints of having to make the product cheaper for a specific demograpic enabled innovation. That innovation opened up the product to a mainstream audience.

As designers, we should embrace restrictions and constraints. It’s the essential difference between art and design. I’ve talked about simplicity a bunch of times in previous posts, but this article has illustrated that simplicity can also be an innovation.

A couple weeks ago I was given a copy of John Maeda’s book “The Laws of Simplicty” and it synthesized a lot of my previous design philosophies. The first law that he talks about, the law of reduce, is one that I have long believed to be one of the most important rules for designers. Design is about subtraction more than addition. This is one of the hardest things to teach because designers are creative and make things, but unless it solves the design problem, adding things to a design is more about ego. …

There is a great debate going on over at 37 Signal’s Signals vs. Noise blog. They flat out say designers should code their own HTML/CSS. I agree for the most part, but there are exceptions to everything.

I work for a very large company and it would be impractical for the visual designers to code all their work. At some point it makes sense to hand the coding responsibility off. I do think their needs to be a close relationship between the designer and the person who is doing the coding. Also the designer should get code approval. …

There is a great post on the SitePoint Blog about new features the Webkit team has added to their CSS implementation. New features include CSS Transform, CSS Masks and CSS Gradients. Unfortunately, these features will probably only be in the next version of Safari.

So why are these features a big deal? Recently, I’ve been fooling around with doing some web development for the iPhone and find it liberating. Just having the ability to use PNG24′s with full transparency and border-radius that is anti-alias opens up a world of possibilities. There are ways to use these features in other browsers, but they aren’t as easy to implement.

So check out the article and hope that some day these features become standards.

Just noticed that this site is ranked in the top 100 out of over 11,000 sites on Command Shift 3. Wow super surprised. Those of you unfamiliar with Command Shift 3, it’s basically hot or not for web site designs. Its a fun site and has some really good use of the meta data provided by the voting. Sites are also ranked by related tag, so this site is currently 20th in designer and 3rd in simple. So cool, be sure to check out the site and participate.

From time to time I get emails from people asking about design education & career advice. I have a different perspective on this topic because my path was different than most designers. I went to a small art school that was primarily an illustration & sequential art school called the Kubert School. The school did not offer a degree, but I learned a lot in a short period of time. After completing the program, I felt that I learned a lot but wasn’t equipped to do a real world job. …

Blogs and blog-like designs have become so commonplace, it made me ask the question “What interface traits make blogs successful?” By far the unifying quality is design rhythm. Blogs break a lot of the early web design convention, like pages being too long or the fear that people will not scroll past the fold. So why is this approach more accepted and used today? …

There is no doubt there are many more reasons then just three to love Flickr, but these are my top three. My first exposure to Flickr was in late 2004, prior to them being bought by Yahoo. Its early use of Ajax, in place of editing and other user interface enhancements, made Flickr stand out and unique. Below are some of the features and qualities that make Flickr my favorite site and one that I visit and use everyday. …

Email Standards

On the heels of my posts about email client standards in early October, Email Standards Project has launched with a website that features a list of email clients and the support for the Email Standards Project Acid Test. This project is being led by Freshview, makers of Campaign Monitor and MailBuild. It’s great to see this getting off the ground and I hope it gains some traction. …

I’m a huge proponent of open platforms and open API’s, so when Google announced Open Social I was excited. After thinking about it for a bit, I’m not so sure about it now. It’s great for developers to have exposure to these host services’ large user-bases, but at what cost to the hosts brand? The thought of a Facebook style Vampire application on Linkedin just doesn’t sit right. …