kristopher louie

As a lot of you might have read, the Future of Web Design 2008 conference was held at Roseland Ballroom, New York, NY. I was one of hundreds that went, and it was money well spent. Why, you ask? Here’s the list of speakers (in the order that they went): Ryan Singer, Hillman Curtis, Dan Mall, Paul Boag, Karl Swedberg, Mike Kus, Patrick Haney, Nicholas Felton, Derek Powazek, Nick La, Joe Stump, Liz Danzico, Chris Lea, Ryan Sims and Daniel Burka. For more information on what you missed, visit the event’s website FOWD08.

Out of the list of speakers are a few icons / idols of mine (they’re italicized), and getting to listen, speak and even just shake hands with them was exciting. I definitely felt like a groupie next to some of them. For the most part, the presentations were great. There were one or two that I thought fell behind in quality in comparison to others. But overall it was an excellent conference, and I was disappointed to find out that there weren’t a lot of college students there (at least, undergraduates).

There were a few highlights I wante to share with everyone:

• Designers and Developers must work together. Instead of designers handing off a photoshop’d design and hoping that the developers will keep the design intact, developers and designers should collaborate together. (Ryan Singer states that the “waterfall” hand-off effect should be replaced by designers and developers having a shared iteration of the source code.)
• Designers need to explain their choices. A lot of times, designers make choices in their design that aren’t made for a specific reason other than the fact that it looks pretty. Designers need to ask themselves “Why?” when adding an element, choosing a color, etc.
• Progressive Enhancement. Designs should start off simple and be able to support everyone. Once that’s achieved, elements that will enhance the user’s experience should be added.
• Designers need to step away from the computer more often. The longer we are at the computer, the small the rest of the world becomes to us. To quote Nick La, “The internet is smaller than your environment.”

At the end of the conference I found out I won the ThinkVitamin contest =) We were asked to submit tips that would help other designers and developers. I was shocked that I won! I wonder how many people entered. The cool thing is that my tip is going to be featured on their new feature “Daily Dose”. As Ryan Carson said, “It’s good PR!”

Also, the next article fo the Blog series is being written!

Tagged as Designers, Developers, FOWD08, Future of Web Design 2008

Spending the last few months redesigning my blog, I encountered a lot of questions and issues that required a lot research in order to solve. I’ve been creating blog themes ever since I started on Xanga, but this theme took me longer than normal. Not because I didn’t know how, but because I wanted to have a complete grasp of a concept before I started (and not to mention I got backed up in client work). I’m glad it took as long as it did because I learned a lot and in the end improved on some essential skills.

With this article, I want to share with you the resources I discovered and hopefully provide a better understanding of the blog design principles. As a note for readers, this article is about blogs that use Wordpress. In this article we’ll be covering Design Standards and Validation, the Header and the Navigation. The following article(s) will cover the Content area (including the Header, Post, Post Footer, Comments and Trackbacks), the Sidebar and the Footer. Eventually forming a complete and solid guide. Read more

Tagged as Blog Design, Design Standards, Header, Navigation, Web Standards, Wordpress

Finally, after several months of creative block and getting backed up with client work, I finally managed to finish the crunch work on my own site and project. It’s taken far too long to release this new version, and failing to block it off, the design isn’t entirely ‘fresh’ to some people.

I’m entitling this design Fresh & Me which might sound a little…lame to some, but I thought it was appropriate. It’s my second entirely hand-made WP theme, using some advanced techniques that I’ve learned along the way. I tried to keep it very simple, and then I was running into a ‘I really don’t like it’ so I changed it up some and this was the final concept.

The main color of choice is Pantone 380 C and the three fonts presented are Violation Script (logo), Gill Sans (headlines) and Helvetiva Neue (content). I was original going to use SRG Clean Archives but then stumbled upon an old post from DevLounge “Custom Archive Queries For WordPress” which came as a blessing, and now my Archives page will be simple and clean. Something that I’m looking forward to updating is my directory page. Other than linking to friends and designers that I admire, I’m hoping to compile a large list of resourceful sites for designers, old and new. Unfortunately I haven’t touched the portfolio section, but rest assured it’ll be there in the near future. I promise.

I thought I was finished with this theme a little over a week ago, but while reading digg and reading articles on design, I landed on an old article that made me realize that I had a lot of flaws. If you haven’t read RA Project’s “Things to Avoid: What Makes Me Nervous When Reading Your Blog” then you might want to read and double-check (followup with DevLounge’s “15 Design Decisions That Annoy People“).

With earlier designs, people had told me that my earlier designs had font sizes that were too large, so I returned to the  font-size of 12. One of the things that I agree with Simonne is the fact that a lot of sites do have small font sizes, and to me I kind of feel like 12 is small on the screen. I increased the font-size to 14 and I feel somewhat comfortable with that size.

The next object on the list was the RSS feed. I didn’t forget it, I had it on the sidebar as just a text-link. While digging for inspiration few months back, I had seen a lot of sites with kickass RSS feed buttons, and so I figured that I’d try creating my own and it might not be the best button ever created but it works, and it’s there!

I spent the a few hours Labor Day weekend configuring my comments section so that they appeared cleaner, and then I learned that I was one, of many, that did not have a “subscribe to comments” feature. I was getting frustrated when I couldn’t find out how to do this on my own via wordpress.org, but luckily I found Mark Jaquith’s Subscribe to Comments plugin.

And the last thing that I never really used was “Related Posts”. For something that doesn’t take a lot of effort (it’s a plugin for christ sakes), I really don’t know why I never bothered with it. I guess my reason was being lazy, and that’s not a good reason.

And with that said, I am planning to write an article on (Re-)Designing a Blog. It’ll be my first real article! Also, my previous readers of my personal blog faraway words, you’ll have to register in order to view my daily rants. I apologize for the inconvenience, however I want to make my blog more professional.

Tagged as Blog Design, Fresh & Me