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’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.

Sketching grids, looking for ideas, here comes the kuniform redesign? Heck no, here’s a post about grid resources online. Khoi Vinh has some ideas ‘bout grids here and here. The second one is better, the misnamed “Grid computing and design.” He has the brilliant idea of using your grid as a background image for your pages while designing. I’ll be trying that out, certainly.

Mark Boulton has a 5 part series that is really informative. I can’t wait for his book to come out. I used this series in conjunction with Thinking with Type in teaching Web Design 2 at the Art Institute this fall. Cameron Moll has a follow on article entitled Gridding the 960 that sums up a lot of these approaches, and even references the Yahoo! User Interface Grid CSS Builder at Dav Glass’s site. If you check out Cameron’s article, be sure to check out Christopher Fahey’s bit of perspective in the comments.
For a prototype site I’m working on for a non-profit, I went the YUI Grid builder route. It went ok, but it’s a site I’m grinding out, so getting it out was as important as making it pretty. For my own site, I’m trying to do something a bit more compelling, as I’m tired of seeing the same column widths and alignments across a bunch of blogs. We’ll see if what I want to do is possible, I sure hope I can pull it off.