I read about this guy in the latest issue of Communication Arts Magazine and was blown away! The thing that I love most about his work is that he combines so many different skill sets in his art: sculpture, photography, illustration, animation, etc. His work has a surreal feeling and his characters, while sculpted from trash and found objects, hold uncanny thoughts behind their eyes. Beautiful color, too! Check it out:
A good industrial designer friend of mine (good designer, good friend) once told me that design is a moral obligation. I believe that’s a very accurate way to describe the feelings us designers have. You know those feelings. The feelings you get when you see poorly-set type on the side of a van or on a storefront sign. You have those feelings when a non-profit asks you to make a website for them and they give you terrible logos and materials to work with. You get the feeling when you see anything at all that just isn’t quite made right; it’s poorly put together, the color is off, the pattern is ugly, it’s not anti-aliased, it has lens-flare, it’s loaded with drop shadows, bevels and every other Photoshop effect the creator has just discovered. The transparent gif has a halo; there are way too many animated gifs on the page. High rez photos were resized in HTML rather than being properly compressed. You know the feeling. It’s a tug, deep within; it’s everything a designer can do to keep from yelling out: STOP USING COMIC SANS!!!
As designers, we have to fix things. We can’t stand to watch poor design execution. It’s something we can’t control. We have no choice - it’s just completely inappropriate to live in a world where people can just ALLOW that horrible design to exist! It’s just not right!
What’s with us? Why does it bother us so much? Why must every design be perfect? Why can’t we allow people to use disposable cameras? Why must everything look pristinely crafted? Why not just let sleeping dogs lie?
The answer is, it’s our duty. That’s why we became designers. We know the industry is competitive. We know there are jobs that pay better and have better hours. But we don’t care. We were born to be designers. We have to design! It’s our job; our purpose! Being a designer is not an occupation; it’s a life-long pursuit! That’s why all the charity and pro bono cases pile up on our desks; that’s why we break design budgets. It has to be perfect! Nobody gets sub-par design!
Irony of ironies that we’re never satisfied with our work, either.
But that’s another article.
I was leery of Google’s new web browser. What could they possibly add to it that would make it more attractive than Firefox?? Being a web developer, I am a die-hard Firefox fan, because all the glorious plugins make it so dang powerful! Fireshot! Developer Bar! Firebug! These are my favorite, for sure, and they make building a website a much easier experience. If only I didn’t have to test everything in IE6….
so when the mythical Google Chrome was finally released today, I decided to give it a whirl, but with a negative attitude and a half-smirk on my face. Google just can’t get into everything, right?? So pointed my firefox window to www.google.com and started looking. And looking. You would think since a trillion people a day (no source cited for this), and looking to get into everybody’s computer even further, you wold think Google would have a link right on the home page. Not so. But I was determined, and eventually found it. It wasn’t exactly hidden, but it could have been more obvious.
I downloaded the program and fired it up. First thing about it which I noticed - and liked, was the extremely light user interface. Since I make websites all day, I’m always looking to make a site’s UI easy and intuitive, but also not get in the way of the content. One thing which actually does bug me about Firefox is the very heavy toolbars - they just take up so much space, reducing vauable real estate. I hadn’t really thought about that before, until now… Hmm…
First things first, I decided to check out the CSS3 Acid3 test, just to see how this baby works out for us developers. Well, I’m going to guess a hundred million other designers were trying to do the same thing, because the site kept crashing. I couldn’t pull up acidtests.org on any browser! I was then pleasantly surprised! When the site failed to load, Google offered to show me a cached version from last week!! That was a nice feature.
Speaking of developer tools, Google does have some handy JavaScript viewing and debuggin tools. I wish there was the same for CSS, but, alas. I enjoyed the link, “stats for nerds.” I guess I am. The options section was overly simple, but not very descriptive. You just have to poke around to find what you’re looking for.
The omnibar is another nice feature. This is basically the amalgamation of the address bar and the search bar, into one input field. It seems obvious, and indeed, many browsers will work that way, depending on your plugins. It is nice to have one out of the box.
A couple really annoying bugs: my mouse wheel only worked to scroll a page DOWN! I could not scroll up with the wheel. Also, some pages that prompted for a user id and password before page load would then mess up loading the images on the site. Some would only load half way, others not at all. It was particularly annoying when I tried to load my review site. Not a single image loaded!! Kind of a bummer when you’re trying to view site mockup designs. Another annoying bug, is the browser would randomly lose my login status on certain sites - like now, while I’m trying to save this article…
Since the platform is open-source, I’m certain great plugins will crop up. The bugs mentioned in this article are certainly minor and will be ironed out soon, I’m sure. The UI is nice and minimal, if not glaringly Blue (capital “B”). (I wish it would have incorporated more of the common shortcut keys, though, like full screen.) I couldn’t load the acid test, but all css sites looked as they should.
In short? It’s a pretty good first-attempt, but I don’t see a need for it. I still need some more convincing.
Copyright © Tevi Hirschhorn, 2008. All rights reserved.