Bitten Nails Design & Illustration » Web Design

On Making Money vs Quality Work

Apaarjeet — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:23:41 +0000

Nice to hear it reiterated by the greats! Saul Bass on making money vs quality work.

Mint.com, 3 yrs & $170 million!

Apaarjeet — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:02:41 +0000

Aaron Patzer on how he built his company in three years to exit with $170 million from who else but Intuit. What a great exit, reminds me of iStockPhoto and the $50 million they exited with by creating the field of Micro Stock Photography.

See this video on Vator.tv »

xHTML, HTML5 or back to HTML4.01

Apaarjeet — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 16:53:29 +0000

There’s an interesting discussion going on about the merits of one over the other, here’s Dave Shea’s view, and here’s Cameron Moll’s take on it…

I’ve been using xHTML for a long time, but these two articles make a very strong case for reverting back to HTML4.01. I’m not quite convinced yet, I like closing my tags dammit! There’s a neatness to it, that’s the obsessive compulsive side of me! But in reality, using WordPress and Drupal as much as I do I don’t see any benefit in moving back at this point, who has the time anyway. I’ll keep my clean code and will go straight to HTML5, when….that comes out.

Active denial of taste & 44 shades of blue

Apaarjeet — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:03:37 +0000

Here’s a great article about the absence of design and taste at google: “The extreme Google brain by Joe Clark“. As an earlier reference here’s Doug Bowman’s post on why he quit and the 44 shades of blue, lol.

Transparency at the new Whitehouse.gov

Apaarjeet — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 14:01:17 +0000

Kottke made an interesting post about the differences between the old and new Whitehouse.gov websites robots.txt files yesterday. Robots.txt files tell search engines what to include or not to include in their index.

The new one is :
User-agent: *
Disallow: /includes/

an example from the old one:
Disallow: /earmarks/search
Disallow: /earmarks/query.html

2400 lines of disallows, more over on Kottke’s post.

I wonder if it really alludes to transparency on their part or just a hurry from the dev’s to get the website up in time.

LA Times web revenue meets entire editorial payroll

Apaarjeet — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 15:24:31 +0000

Very interesting for me, it’s been a long time coming. The first website I did was The Economic Times for The Times of India, in…..wait for it…..drumroll, 1995!

India’s not safe either it seems, I heard a rumor that the Hindustan Times is being run by the Times of India now, and that Murdoch is in talks with Sameer Jain, it’s shakeup time for the newspaper industry across the globe.

Newspapers are dead, long live the newspapers!

http://www.latimes.com/

via [buzzmachine.com]

Free Icons, 1300 of them.

Apaarjeet — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:26:56 +0000

Great icons, I’m surprised I never came across these before, the largest set I’ve ever seen and nicely done to boot! Amazingly useful if you work in this field.

Go grab them at Everaldo’s site, he’s the maintainer of the project.

I should have talked about how it would make people feel…

Apaarjeet — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 20:14:00 +0000

Our clients demand results, not labour. Why aren’t we pricing our value as such?

An excellent point made by: Eric Karjaluoto on the value of design.

GoaPress.com

Apaarjeet — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 23:19:40 +0000

I was tired of getting my news about Goa from a bunch of disparate sources all over the place. Since I have a house there now, I like to keep up with what’s going on.

So I created my own page with feeds from a bunch of websites I read, and viola! GoaPress.com lives, I figured I’d get a domain and throw it up.

I’ll probably play with it further and rotate the feeds about as I find more sic*better sites or more relevant news. But as the page stands right now it gives me a great snapshot of all current events, news and happenings in Goa

I also threw in a bit of eye candy, Flickr snaps and YouTube video’s, they are a lot of fun for me, they take me back there. Videos are generally a little too trance-y for me, but a few gems slip in once in a while.

Take a look: GoaPress.com

Landmark Web Design or how I learnt to stop worrying and just build the damn website.

Apaarjeet — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 19:48:01 +0000

A bunch of interesting articles/essays recently, that led to interesting discussions on the topic of timeless web design. All worth a read if you have any involvement in the wonderful wacky world of ‘design‘ and the web.

First Armin Vit writes an essay asking Landmark Web Sites, Where Art Thou? Essentially he asks why no individual web designs/sites have attained any historical significance worthy of being deemed landmarks that lead the way, such as Paul Rand’s IBM Logo.

Dan Saffer posts an interesting unrelated thought on Making Stuff vs Making Stuff Up a day later. He alludes to the problem of creation (thought) and production (implementation) for a designer.

Khoi Vin picks up on both and posts Something’s Missing in Web Design . The interesting points he adds are, “the very best designers are leaving behind the work of actually doing design…” and “that Web design is really boring…”

Joshua Porter picks up on Armin’s initial post and posts a response, Do Canonical Web Designs Exist? His point being, “It’s just that canonical design on the web isn’t as glamorous as some want it to be.”

They are all great reads and the ensuing discussions are absolute fun to read.

As to timeless or landmark web designs, there are many for me, most may not exist anymore, but they did leave a mark on me and is that not the point.