From Interactivity By Design: Creating & Communicating with New Media by Ray Kristof and Amy Satran (1995, Adobe Press; ISBN 1568302215; Amazon | B&N.com) TEXT FEATURE PAPER WORLD SCREEN WORLD Size High-resolution commercial typesetting systems produce crisp, easy-to-read type at all sizes. Eight-point and smaller text is common, with 8,10, and 11-point the most common sizes for… Read More »
From Interactivity By Design: Creating & Communicating with New Media by Ray Kristof and Amy Satran (1995, Adobe Press; ISBN 1568302215; Amazon | B&N.com) Critical Tasks of Information Design Define goals for the product Define what the audience wants to do Decide how the product will reach its audience Choose the authoring tool Create a content inventory… Read More »
Almost all of the notes for this lecture are derived from the book Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Site by Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville (1998, O’Reilly & Associates; ISBN 1402874545; Amazon | B&N.com) Information architecture can loosely be defined as organizing content, especially organizing into classifications, and creating a labeling system… Read More »
From Rocking the Ages by J. Walker Smith and Ann Clurman (1998, HarperCollins Publishers; ISBN 0887309003;Amazon | B&N.com) The following table is based on the thesis that each generation’s values were determined by the events, influences and attitudes of that generation’s formative years – teen-age years to early adulthood. MATURES BOOMERS X’ERS Defining Idea Duty Individuality… Read More »
From Alison J. Head’s DesignWise: A Guide for Evaluating the Interface Design of Information Resources (1999, Information Age Books; ISBN 0-910965-31-5; Amazon | B&N.com) Individual pages of a site have a consistent and simple layout so that users with visual impairments or blind users using screen readers can more quickly navigate through a page and find the… Read More »
From Robin William’s The Non-Designer’s Design Book (1994, Peachpit Press; ISBN 1566091594;Amazon | B&N.com) Contrast The idea behind contrast is to avoid elements on the page that are merely similar. If the elements (type, color, size, line thickness, shape, space, etc.) are not the same, then make them very different. Contrast is often the most important visual… Read More »
From Alison J. Head’s DesignWise: A Guide for Evaluating the Interface Design of Information Resources (1999, Information Age Books; ISBN 0-910965-31-5; Amazon | B&N.com) To ask about the resource: What main tasks does the resource support? What level of users is the resource aimed at? Is the resource a tool for users with specific expertise (e.g. professional… Read More »
From Interactivity By Design: Creating & Communicating with New Media by Ray Kristof and Amy Satran (1995, Adobe Press; ISBN 1568302215; Amazon | B&N.com)
2000 Despite projections of doom, the Y2K bug based on year date limitations in old software actually causes few problems worldwide. In January, America Online and Time Warner announce plans to merge. In March, the dot-com crash begins; the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index falls 37% from March to May. In April, Ananova.com launches a lightweight… Read More »
1990 Tim Berners-Lee creates a hypertext GUI (graphic user interface) browser and editor under a program he calls “WorldWideWeb.” (Rejected names for this project include Information Mesh, Mine of Information, and Information Mine.) A demonstrable WWW program is working by Christmas. Mitch Kapor founds the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a free expression action group. Mike Godwin… Read More »