kuniform

Yup, I pulled down the ‘kuniform is dead’ page even though the new version is not up yet. I had to! It was time to announce the launch of kuneshdesign.com, the presence of my new consulting gig.

I’ll be posting here again shortly to talk about some of the decision-making and technology that went into creating kuneshdesign.com, including some thoughts about why I’m launching a contracting business, plans for the biz, and a bit of the technical tricks behind the portfolio section.

I said I would be working diligently on a redesign for this site. That was a fairly big lie. Instead, I joined a startup, that I then left to pursue a passion of mine: organic, local, sustainable food. I’ll be updating this blog on occasion, but it will be fairly rare, I’m afraid, as I blog about gardening, organics, and sustainable living at the YumLocal site.

The boys at 37signals posted a really good “sunspots” today. The Elliot Noyes: father of corporate design, the Wall Street Journal article on social sites creating hidden influencers and the restaurant article from satisfaction are great takes on the importance of design and respecting the customer as an input to great design.

In particular, check out the getsatisfaction blog, as it’s chock-a-block full of good insights for customer service.

I’ve been busy lately, so I haven’t had as much time to post as I would like. I’ll make up for that with a post full o’ links today! A plethora. Plethora.

First off, in the spirit of the never-ending redesign, here’s a great 15 tips blog post on choosing a type face. I am a type amateur, but I love reading and learning about it. This Spiegel article is ancient in our 24/7 newscycle, but here’s a community that has done away with traffic signals. This is reflective of Christopher Alexander’s maxim to always design scaled to the user. It also shows how, though human-designed systems are good, human nodes in an amazing complex physical, emotional, and spiritual system called the world possess an innate ability to regulate themselves and their behaviors absent the enforcement of other humans. Libertarian moment over… now.

From a time slightly after the Spiegel article came out, i.e.—right after the dinosaurs started becoming oil—Tim O’Reilly felt compelled to redefine Web2.0 with a more compact definition. It’s a good read, but the Hype Curve has sailed on that one, Tim.

Some random accessibility stuff about video captioning, Dutch law and a new effort by Joe Clark to make media uniformly accessible.

Garrett Dimon has an interesting article about markup as craft. I’m pessimistic today, so all craft feels dead to me. Happy Valentine’s Day. However, Garrett’s 21 points are right on. They’re the implementation details of these 15 research article-derived design tips. What the heck is up with 15 being the magic number of tips? Who the heck knows?

Where did I get all this great stuff? Lots of it came from the Web Standards Group mailing list. This maxdesign guy put out the links for light reading weekly. Highly recommended.

In the file under random portion of our post, I’m beginning to research buying a hybrid, and this Jamis Buck article on concerns in activerecord in Rails hit the spot, oh, a month ago, when I began this post, back when my life was far less chaotic.

Here on rail one, we have Amy Hoy’s article on using script/console to do debugging. It’s chock full of tips and tricks, and was super-useful when I was tooling around over vacation. It’s Hoyesque! You know you’re rockin’ when you become an adjective or an adverb. At least, a positive one. Don’t even ask what Kuneshesque has been used for.

Over on rail two we have some n00b picture of Rails model associations. Given that I am a n00b, I like it. It’s nice. Nice, not earth-shattering. So, on to earth-shattering. Holy crap! It’s Matt Biddulph’s hackdiary. I saw Matt give his presentation at RailsConf 2006 and thought, “that’s one smart cookie.” Then I saw this script, and thgouth, “that’s one smart CAKE!”

Check out this script which lets you take a Rails app, converts the associations to a GraphViz format that you can then import into OmniGraffle. Since the mac lacks a decent entity relationship diagramming tool and I am too lazy to create one by hand, this is a lifesaver. It totally justified hours of web browsing and and reading on New Year’s Day.