So that’s what this new revision brings. Simplicity. The ‘blog’ link on the right brings you to the most recent blog post and you can continue through older posts from there, if you desire. If not, well, so be it. I write for myself, for the most part anyway. As such, the blog design isn’t perfect. There are some display quarks that I haven’t worked out yet — and might not — because I can’t seem to figure out how to get it to work with my intended look. But for the most part, it works.

There you have it. Simplicity and function.

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Just like everything else here, this picture has nothing to do with anything.

So, instead of just letting 3,360 tweets go by without fanfare I decided to change things completely and launch a new site design. One has absolutely nothing to do with the other, but what do you expect from me? Like the Twitterversery I had a whole post planned out to show off the new features this theme brings, like threaded comments. I was going to title it “Change You Can Believe In” and launch it on June 1st to tie in with Conan O’Brien taking over the Tonight Show — see what I did there? Instead, I decided to throw all that out and just say here it is. It’s called Limb Kulers and derives it’s name and colors from guvilla’s Kuler set. Other credit is due and can be found in the CSS stylesheet, if you’re into that sort of thing.

In light of the completely unconnected nature of this post, I’m not going to end it by asking for your take on the new design. No, instead I’m going to close by asking what is a change that you can believe in? Let me know in the comments.

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It’s really a simple thing. A little graphic that makes the site unique. But for some reason sites still do not use them. I hate these sites. I loathe them. I wish them would burn in the fiery pit of the internet. It says they’re boring and unoriginal. Or that maybe their web designers just don’t care.

You know, if you have a small website that doesn’t have a lot of traffic, then I get not spending the 33.8 seconds it takes to create a favicon and add it to your site. It makes sense. It’s obviously not worth your time. And I get it if you have your site hosted on something like Blogger or WordPress.com or LiveJournal and you’re stuck to their default favicon. That makes total sense to me.

What I don’t get is big time sites who don’t seem to care. American Express, I’m calling you out. You’re a huge freaking credit card company trying to become a bank so you can cash in on some of that sweet government money. Why don’t you spend some of it on a graphic designer who knows how to make a favicon. I mean, you’ve got music on your front page. Which is totally awesome especially considering this is the MySpace age and all, but really? No favicon. And I pay you money? Come on. It really angers me every time I need to pull up my account.

And you know what Weblogs, Inc sites, like TUAW and Engadget, is it too much to ask for you to get the RSS favicon going? It really makes your site’s feeds look like crap and completely unappealing. I mean, you are owned by AOL News so it makes sense that you don’t have enough money to hire a quality designer — does anyone even use AOL anymore? — but for real, just put some effort into it. Or continue to be lame. What do I care?

Am I blowing this out of proportion or what?

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On the site, the spoiler tag will simply black out the text in question. Should you want to read the spoiler, all you have to do is put your mouse on the text and all will be revealed. Check it out:

You’re reading this text and all is really cool but all of a sudden I decided to drop some really revealing information that you weren’t expecting. Now, thanks to the spoiler tag, you don’t have to see if you don’t want to.

Should you want to implement this on your own site, all you have to do is add the following CSS to your style.css template file:

.spoiler { background: #000; color: #000; }
.spoiler:hover { background: inherit; color: inherit; }

Then, the next time you decide to write something that could contain potentially spoilerific details, just wrap the text in a spoiler span:

<span class="spoiler">Juicy information goes here.</span>

I’m sure there are other things you could use this for, like making your blog posts look like something released under the Freedom of Information Act, but I’ll leave that up to you.

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Over the last few weeks I’ve been testing the design in a number of browsers to see how it looks. I stuck to Webkit (see Safari) and Gecko (see Firefox) based browsers. I did not test on Internet Explorer. Today I decided to render a few screenshots to see just how bad it looks. Follow along, if you will, a tour of how different web browsers render the exact same page.

Safari 3.2.1 (2008)

Camino 1.6.5 (2008)

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 (2008)

Internet Explorer 7 (2007)

Internet Explorer 6 (2001)

The worst is obviously Internet Explorer 6. It’s a piece of garbage yet still roughly 20% of the internet is using it. People, wake up! It’s now nearly 8 years old and there are two newer versions. IE7 handles the page, and web standards, much better than IE6 and the IE8 Beta is exactly what a browser should be.

If you’re still using Internet Explorer 6, it’s time to upgrade. If you can’t do it, get your IT department to do it for you and if even that isn’t possible, at least start using something else, like Firefox or Safari. You’ll realize how much better the internet is once you stop using a nine year old piece of software.

Internet Explorer screenshots were rendered using NetRenderer.

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Look a little familiar? I thought so too. So I typed ‘Bourne’ into the search field and look what I found:

Interesting. Considering The Bourne Supremacy earned nearly 11 times 88 Minutes take at the box office I guess you can see what they were going for. Whether that’s what they were thinking or not, it’s a pretty blatant rip-off.

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If you’re a member of Facebook you might have noticed the bar atop every page lately announcing the “new Facebook.” If you haven’t clicked “try it now” then you should, just to see what a horrible mess the whole thing is. If you’re not that adventurous then just keep reading and see what you’re not really missing.

The first ting you see when you pull up the new Facebook is a modified stalker news feed. This is, of course, where all of your friends updates can be found. It’s also the location of my first gripe. If you notice in the picture below, there is a large amount of whitespace surrounding profile pictures in the news feed. The profile pictures are so far away from the text it’s almost as if they’re not associated at all. On a positive note, the right hand sidebar is leaps and bounds better then the current implementation.

What's with all the whitespace?

Another issue I have can be found on a profile’s photos page. A person’s photo galleries have been moved to the bottom of the page, below ‘photos of’ that person (which is a collection of photos added by others that tag the person in question). It’s odd that the designers chose disorder over order here. The galleries should be at the top, or at the very least along the side. Also, notice the large amount of whitespace on the right side of the page. Granted, that is probably where an annoying ad goes but when ads are turned off it’s a gaping hole in the page.

What's with the disorganized photos page?

My final, and largest complaint, lies with people’s individual profile pages. Facebook has broken the profile pages into a number of tabs (Wall, Info, Photos, Boxes). Boxes is a very odd place to store all those crappy applications that should be done away with completely. Photos is mentioned above. Info is, well, exactly what it sounds like. The problem I have is with the main tab, Wall. The current Facebook Wall is the place to exchange messages with other people. Now the Facebook Wall is that and the profile’s mini-feed. That’s right. They’ve been combined into a very confusing, horribly implemented hodge podge of information overload. Grated, there are different filter buttons to get just what you’re looking for, but why should you have to do that? The two things don’t make sense together.

Did you really think it was a good idea to combine the mini feed with the wall?

Generally change is a good thing. Though Facebook seems to be changing for the sake of changing which is a very bad thing. The layout and design all scream FriendFeed, which is about as terrible a UI as I’ve seen on the internet in a long while. I guess Facebook decided to redesign things since MySpace recently did the same, but really, why should they care what MySpace is up too? I hope Facebook is paying attention to user complaints because I know I’m not alone in my thoughts.

Or am I? Let me know what you think about the new Facebook in the comments below.

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I downloaded their template and filled out all the various characters (I decided not to fill in the British pound symbol because when would I ever use it?). I then scanned the form in, uploaded it and took a look at the auto-generated preview of my font.

Justin Sans - A TrueType font like no other!

Now you might be thinking that is some horrible handwriting, why would you possibly want that as a font? In fact, my high school english teacher once told me that my handwriting was the worst she had ever seen. So why a font? Why not? At $9 it’s worth it to have my handwriting be digitally available for whatever reason. Maybe I’ll redo some of the graphics here to have a more personal touch. I’m sure I’ll find something to do with it.

Any ideas? Post them in the comments.

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Over the last few days I have decided, despite my better judgement, to give Twitter a try. After reading Nick’s breakdown of the service I figured it might be worth a spin. After all, communicating with people is a good thing. Though after a few days of use I have really only come to one conclusion: whoever invested in this service should be really disappointed.

According to the CrunchBase, Twitter has $5.4 million dollars of investment capital running the show and 17 employees. The question I have, is with all the money and people how can the service be down almost as often as it’s up? Sure, they show a cute little graphic to say their sorry for the downtime, but what’s the point? It has been a nice means of communicating with some people through the @reply and direct message feature and by syncing with Facebook for general status updates. Though the system seems to pick and choose which updates are actually shown to me, which kind of defeats the purpose. I can see how it’d be pretty easy to become addicted to Twitter, as many people are, but it’s hard to keep using it with all the issues. I’ll continue to use Twitter and give it the benefit of the doubt. Surely they are in the middle of some sort of upgrade, or something. I mean, with all the money they have, these issues are just a sign of growth, right?

Zack and Miri Make a Porno is the upcoming movie from the very talented and funny Kevin Smith. I had heard about the movie a while back and finally, last night (or really this morning) the teaser trailer was released. It looks pretty funny, and seems to be about exactly what the title implies. But what caught my eye is the design of the website. It seems the cork board idea is spreading, or hitting the big time, or… something, I don’t know. Be warned, the trailer is intended for audiences of 18 and over and is completely uncensored. If you’re over 18 head over and check it out and just remember where you saw the design first.

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One of the biggest comments was that the colored stripes, while interesting, distracted from the content of the site. TVDinner said it best with this comment:

to me it is a little to much, but that is just me. I guess my question to you is that I am not sure what it accomplishes as far as your site. I assume you want people to read your words, thoughts, posts, etc. I am all for creativity and use it on my sites, but also understand that there has to be a balance in design that will be attractive to viewers and keep them wanting to come back time and time again…

After about a week of going back and forth, and toning down the color of the stripes, I came to a conclusion: the stripes were distracting from the content. Unfortunately my stubbornness prevented me from actually hearing it from the good people in the forums. I came to the realization that I didn’t like pulling up my site. Considering that I am my sites most frequent visitor that says something. So the design that I was all to excited about quickly became a lame duck design and the search was on for a newer and sexier design.

I don’t know exactly how I originally found Mostly Lisa, but it happened sometime around my unrest with Coloured. I really liked her use of objects at the top of the page. Thinking about that lead me to an idea for a design:

I’d create a sort of virtual table where you, the viewer, were looking down directly at the table. Scattered on the table would various objects that the blog content features (video games, DVDs, camera, iPhone, pens, etc.). The content would then be found on sheets of paper on the table.

I thought it was brilliant. I quickly sketched it out, played with how the objects would interact with the content, and then set up a tri-pod and took pictures of various objects to be placed in the design. I started laying things out in Photoshop when I hit a snag, I couldn’t figure out how to integrate the site name into the design. I started cruising the typical inspiration web sites when I came across this. It was sort of what I was thinking about doing, enough to get me going at least. But after a little more searching I found this, this, this, this, and finally this. My idea was officially unoriginal and actually overused. I thought about trying to put a unique touch on the idea but decided that I didn’t want to create something that would feel, to me, just like a cheep knock-off.

I went back to the drawing board, again. This time, instead, I started looking at my previous designs. After a brief look at Mindless, I decided to return to my favorite design for this site, Corked. I had the idea for Corked literally for years before I made it a reality back in late 2006. The problem with corked, however, is in mid 2007 I accidently deleted all of the Photoshop files to make the design a possibility. Unfortunately for me they weren’t uploaded to the server and while announced, Apple’s Time Machine had yet to be released. I was officially boned. After all the work that went into this design, everything related to it was gone.

With nothing to start with other than the flattened .png’s and .jpg’s I decided to re-invent Corked, to give it a more modern and cleaner look. Instead of the entire site being a cork board, I’d create a virtual cork board complete with a wooden frame and I’d hang it on a textured virtual wall. I’d make sure that all of the site elements fit with the overall theme; if something is on the cork board it’d be “attached” in some fashion. Using only the original corked background and the BittBox paper vectors I created what you see here today, Corked 2.0.

While as a designer I’m never completely satisfied, I do enjoy the journey from one design to the next. I never know exactly where or how I’m going to get to the end point, and as you can see there are often many detours along the way, but in the end it’s all worth it and hopefully results in a quality and unique design.

However, even though I’m my biggest visitor, it doesn’t mean I’m the only one. What do you think of Corked 2.0?

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