Yesterday, I gave you some advice on making your site more accessible. Today, I’m going to help you wrap things up. Do the easy things first. Review your highlighted list, and perform the simplest tasks that don’t affect your design. Don’t worry about priority levels just yet. Many of the most basic modifications–like replacing your deprecated HTML tags with...
Web designers are often told that their pages should be made “accessible”, but to many, that just means testing on a few extra browsers and ensuring that the type is readable. These are, without a doubt, important concerns, but accessibility is about much more than that. It’s about opening up your site to all users, including those with vision...
Perhaps you’ve seen this story making the rounds: A Texas teenager is suing Virgin Mobile because it used her image without permission in a billboard campaign in Australia. The girl appears in a photograph which was released under a Creative Commons license. The photographer, via the license, expressly permitted commercial use of his image, as long as he received...
Okay, I need a show of hands; how many of you still design your web layouts with tables? Not because you don’t know any better, but because it’s just plain easier. (I’m sheepishly raising my hand.) We do it because it’s almost second nature, and because we assume that learning CSS positioning is hard. But in the back of...
Apparently, some people think the success of online, interactive advertising is all due to blinking lights and sound clips, so they’re bringing the same capabilities to print advertising. Yes, print ads can now sing to you and flash lights at you; they can give you a temporary tattoo, a whiff of black cherries, or a taste of rum. Take...
In my previous post, I suggested that contemporary designers are increasingly responsible for “designing” the contexts in which their designs occur, and I gave two examples of what such contextual designing might look like. Here are three more instances in which context is not merely taken into account, but rather purposefully altered in order to enhance a designed experience....
I’m not sure exactly how it happened, but October is here. Walk into any store and you’re greeted with pumpkins, mums, and heaps of Halloween candy. In another month or so, shops will be covered in fake snow and sparkly snowflakes and will be packed with trees up to the rafters. In a brick-and-mortar store, holiday decorations draw attention...
Up until the late 1800s, a painter could concern himself solely with what occurred within the borders of his canvas. In the biannual Paris Salon art exhibits, paintings were hung floor to ceiling and side by side, piled upon one another. Nobody considered the implications of hanging a painting of a virile bull directly above a painting of a...
Something funny for you on a Monday: This video by the New York-based sketch comedy group Free Love Forum is a much-needed parody of the smug, wonder-filled Apple product launch videos. Listen as they extol the virtues of the year’s hottest design application: Microsoft Paint!
Khoi Vinh is the Design Director of NYTimes.com, where he and his design team seek to communicate the prestige of The New York Times via an innovative online user experience. Khoi has his own blog, Subtraction.com, and also recently launched his dog’s blog, Misterpresident.org. Before joining NYTimes.com, Khoi worked with other high-end clients, including HBO and the Smithsonian, through...
