Design · Culture · Spirituality

daily links

Links for September 23rd

Experimental Theology: Love Wins: Part 6, Winning, But Not Like Charlie Sheen
Richard Beck explains where he disagrees with Rob Bell's Love Wins, and the conditionalism that Bell, C.S. Lewis, and countless others have espoused. As I've said before, he makes a compelling argument and it needs to be properly understood if universalism is going to be a real discussion, regardless of agreement or disagreement with it.
tags:
psychology
theology
eschatology
universalism
rob-bell
richard-beck

Links for September 21st

Editing tips for designers : Cennydd Bowles
"Designers know well that we often miss problems until we review our intended solutions. Similarly, we may think we have a clear argument until the blank page forces us to find the right language to describe it. Therefore, just as we appreciate the power of iteration in design, we should embrace the power of editing."
tags:
writing
design

Links for September 20th

A List Apart: Articles: Demystifying Design
"Mystifying design with jargon only we understand makes us feel like heroes and creates a sense of job security. But it also creates an 'us and them' atmosphere which excludes non-designers, obscures the true value of design, and generates antagonism when only cooperation will yield the best product. By revealing our process and inviting others into our world, we can create a team that is invested in the success of our work, and deliver better design."
tags:
business
design
a-list-apart
A List Apart: Articles: Banishing Your Inner Critic
"The inner critic is an unconscious deterrent that stands between the seeds of great ideas and the fruits of achievement, making you hate your designs, giving you 'writer’s block' as your deadline looms, keeping you stuck in a project’s initial thinking stage because something isn’t quite right. "
tags:
creativity
design
a-list-apart

Links for September 19th

Interface Design is Copywriting « Bokardo
"I humbly submit that there is no single element more important to your interface than the copywriting. There is nothing that makes or breaks a positive experience more than the simple set of words that you choose to communicate with. In a world in which we have to simplify as much as possible, nothing matters more than the small vocabulary you end up with in your final work."
tags:
writing
content-strategy
design
Following the Leader | Wendy McCaig
"He then started to invite people to join him with the simple words 'come follow me.' (Luke 5:27) Jesus did not send them to a bible study class or question them about their beliefs. He simply invited them to go on mission with him."
tags:
ministry
leadership
church

Links for September 16th

Usability Testing With Card Sorting
"Card sorting is a usability methodology that has been used by information architects for years to organize web designs and web content more effectively. It involves placing content, groups, keywords and the like on physical note cards and allowing study participants to move the cards into groups to see how the cards can be organized into categories."
tags:
information-architecture
usability
design

Links for September 15th

LukeW | Breaking Dev: Faster Mobile Anyone?
"In his Faster Mobile Anyone? presentation at Breaking Development in Nashville, Steve Souders discussed the importance of performance on the Web, why it is even more important on mobile, and a set of emerging best practices for faster mobile Web site."
tags:
performance
design
mobile

Links for September 9th

Leveraging UX Insights to Influence Product Strategy :: UXmatters
"Many UX researchers and analysts aspire to influencing not only design implementation, but also product strategy. However, it is rather difficult to effect this kind of influence because user research insights tend to center on design and fail to speak to a company’s overall strategy for a product."
tags:
business
user-experience
product-design

Links for September 8th

Mark Boulton on layouts and grid systems | Interview | .net magazine
"The idea is a very mature way of thinking. It’s almost ingrained as a designer: this is how we approach layout. But we’ve tried to make it work on the web by basically inventing a page, like a best fit. We’ve created a page in a medium where there are no edges, there is no page. The web is different. So I’ve thought up three rules, which I think we need to apply to modern web design. It’s a complete reversing of the way of thinking about it."
tags:
responsive-design
layout
design
The shape of our future book — Satellite — Craig Mod
"The notion of a 'new,' digital kind of book scares a lot of folks because there is such a rich fabric of romanticism, nostalgia and myth built up around the physical book. These qualities — romantic, nostalgic, mythical — are really indicative of emotion. And we don't want to lose that emotion. It's easy to forget this; I know I do. I forget how the weight of those myths (some real, some imagined) can and should be informing the work I’m doing now."
tags:
publishing
design
books
Books in the Age of the iPad — Craig Mod
"With the iPad we finally have a platform for consuming rich-content in digital form. What does that mean? To understand just why the iPad is so exciting we need to think about how we got here."
tags:
ipad
books
design

Links for August 31st

LukeW | UX Week: Creating Engagement on Twitter
"In their presentation about Creating Engagement on Twitter presentation at UX Week 2011 Mark Trammell & Jesse James Garrett walked through the concepts underlying the redesign of Twitter's sign up process."
tags:
adaptive-path
user-experience
twitter
Responsive Data Tables | CSS-Tricks
Data tables are still a hard thing to style, but it's important to do it well. Naturally, they're even harder to style if you try to do things in a responsive way. But this is a good start..
tags:
html
css
responsive-design
Why an Apple Fanboy Would Want to Work for Microsoft: Improving the perceived importance of usability within organizations | UX Magazine
"The central thesis of Bill Fulton’s talk was that the perceived value of usability is what needs our attention. Instead of spreading usability department thin trying to fix whatever we can, Fulton recommends focusing our efforts on specific departments, projects, or sub-projects are the most receptive to usability recommendations and thus will produce high-impact results. Teams that actually value usability engineering will develop products that are shining examples that make usability look like key asset that can accomplish great things."
tags:
business
design
user-experience
usability

Links for August 29th

21 top tools for responsive web design | Feature | .net magazine
"To get started with building a responsive site, having a strong toolkit can make a world of difference. Here Denise Jacobs rounds up 21 great tools to aid the process of making your sites responsive."
tags:
javascript
design
css
responsive-design
Subtraction.com: My iPad Magazine Stand
"My opinion about iPad-based magazines is that they run counter to how people use tablets today and, unless something changes, will remain at odds with the way people will use tablets as the medium matures. They’re bloated, user-unfriendly and map to a tired pattern of mass media brands trying vainly to establish beachheads on new platforms without really understanding the platforms at all."
tags:
reading
ipad
design
Subtraction.com: iPad Magazines Go to ’11
"It’s bordering on obstinate to think that something you care so much about can be salvaged by doing more or less the same thing that has failed magazines so consistently until now: continuing to ignore the fundamentals of digital user experience design and how they diverge from analog print design."
tags:
reading
user-experience
design
ipad
Subtraction.com: The Other Kind of iPad Magazines
"There’s a deep reservoir of opportunity here; some of it would be easy to pull off but a lot of it would be difficult to make happen, because it would entail turning these apps from magazines into truly social products that just happen to look like beautifully designed magazines. That’s not an easy task, but someone is sure to do it, and whoever that is — whether it’s Flipboard or TweetMag or someone else entirely — they’ll stand the best chance, in my opinion, of creating a truly new, truly engrossing reading experience."
tags:
ipad
user-experience
reading
design
Button Sluts and Web Actions
I think it's fantastic that folks are starting a conversation to get beyond social media buttons into what people are actually doing. It's important, as the alternative truly is another NASCAR effect on the web, as if we didn't have enough ads.
tags:
design
social-media
Underscores vs. dashes in URLs – YouTube
Matt Cutts definitively explains what happens with underscores and dashes in URLs, from an SEO perspective. In essence, dashes are treated as separators, while underscores are treated as joiners. Starting from scratch? Use dashes.
tags:
video
google
seo

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About the Designer

Jonathan Stegall is a web designer and emergent / emerging follower of Jesus currently living in Atlanta, seeking to abide in the creative tension between theology, spirituality, design, and justice.

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