On not (yet) seeing blue

5 May 2008, 6pm

Where I grew up there was enough damp, acidic soil to support oceans of u-pick blueberry operations, where we used to get them by the hamper. As I understand it they’re native only to North America, which is something of a drag; myrtilles are very hard to find hereabouts, usually only available in tiny, sour, frozen, Swedish form. 

Herself planted these bushes two summers ago, and the yield then was about 1¾ muffins worth. Last year we did rather better. This year I hope to walk around blue-lipped for most of July.

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On (not) seeing red

4 May 2008, 4pm

Say, did you know that people who design web sites who write on their own sites about the changes they’ve recently made to their site design have no idea whatsoever that you couldn’t give a flying roll of monkey doughnuts? Bless their little cotton socks.

Moving on: apologies to the 7–10% of you so rudely disrespected since the relaunch of this here site. In one of those regrettably too-clever-by-half design decisions, influenced by the hardcore tradesman’s printing shop belief (which indeed goes way back to scribal rubrication) that the universes of thought conveyed through text need never arrive in any colour but black, or sometimes red, I had chosen to differentiate hyperlinks within text with that sometimes colour.

It’s always good design practice when indicating differing kinds of text to change one parameter at a time: what patent disrespect to both writer and reader to go too far, as many designers do, and interrupt the simple process of reading to pile on multiple indicators (weight, decoration, size, colour, background colour, popups, whatever) just to flag that some text is clickable (imagine driving along a smoothly paved road, then being on a block with an Olive Garden on it, information conveyed not only by the Olive Garden sign but by the road suddenly being paved with thin red sauce and shitty cheese).

Hover over a link for a before-and-after.

My one parameter shift, however, didn’t take into account the sizeable percentage of people unable to easily differentiate red from black, effectively rendering the parameter change to zero. Any designer who ignores this sort of accessibility issue must go to bed without dessert.

Much as I prefer the red from a text design perspective, these chalky underlines will have to do until some night next week when I’ll no doubt wake up remembering underlines cause shingles in badgers or some such.

But is it advertising?

4 May 2008, 12pm

Yes, it is. Short behind the scenes video here.

Perhaps you share my reaction to clever ads: as soon as I see one, a filmy layer of distrust and seething hatred gets in the way, and I can’t think of anything other than some bearded agency doucherocket receiving an award for being ‘clever’ and subsequently feeling on top of the world because he gnarled whatever wit and narrative grace he could muster into the successful injection of a brand into an ecosystem that, milliseconds later, does not care.

This ad for metal prongy things to hold up paper rolls, however, has just enough DIY dorkiness, and a complete absence of the sort of knowing, winking, preening aspirational slumming with which bearded agency doucherockets brush their teeth, so: goodonya.

My father is visiting

2 May 2008, 3pm

Eleven random biographical notes:

1. When I was very small he worked two jobs at once; one was in a sawmill
2. On his fortieth birthday he got a perm
3. He used to drink too much, then one day he just stopped
4. He can be stubborn as a mule who’s just graduated stubborn school
5. Though born in Alberta, his veins practically pulse with sea water
6. On a hot day out in a boat near North Pender Island, he dared me to dive into the water to cool off; a week later I developed pneumonia
7. When she had decided their marriage was over, I helped move out my mother’s stuff while he, completely unaware, was out fishing
8. His own father was seriously injured when a drunk woman, unable to find her chauffeur, plowed her car through the crowd at Lansdowne Racetrack
9. We got into a fistfight when I was sixteen and he had me down in seconds
10. He has a new hearing aid, and a new hip
11. He is sixty nine years old

Embedded video is broken

1 May 2008, 3pm

The highlights of my first trip to Europe, at the age of nineteen, were as follows: getting mugged at knifepoint by a tweaking mass of dreadlocks in Amsterdam (followed by a delightfully sleepless, dehydrated night in a hostel built by Satan himself); hearing, with stunned disbelief, a person of Japanese heritage speak in a cockney accent; and sitting on a Tate Gallery bench staring at the paintings of Francis Bacon, whose work I spent all my late teens and early twenties pretending to understand (still don’t, twenty years on, but continue to enjoy the hell out of).

I was going to tell you about this magnificent South Bank Show on Bacon, made around the same time as that trip (the best bit is the lunch, but do watch all six parts), and now that I’ve done that (just there, a few words back) I realise it’s been, what, twenty seconds since I rattled on all high and mighty and finger-pointy about some user interface issue, so let us then consider for a moment that embedded video is broken.

To my mind the point of failure lies at offering only two options to the viewer: stay locked onto the web page, which, no matter the site, is like watching a dancing bear on a television being carried by a dancing bear, or go full-screen, which, given both the resolution thang and one’s god-given ability to perform more than one activity at a time, is rarely attractive.

I know it’s possible to sneak in the back door of some video sharing sites and download files to watch on a standalone player, but that’s no solution to the problem.

This happens several times a day: I find myself at Youtube or Vimeo or Brightcove or wherever, begin watching something interesting, and immediately start looking for a way to put that in a corner of my screen so I can continue working or doing, um, research, and cast my eyes back to it whenever interest demands I do so. This evidently can’t be done using any of the popular embedded video gear, so I end up resizing the browser window (which results in layout chaos) and opening up a fresh window to resume what I was doing before. This is lame, this is broken.

Please Mr Internets, make a standard embedded video solution that allows us to pop up an actual-size window in which to watch the dancing bears while we continue to save the world. Thanks in advance.