Bits 0' NewMedia

Bubbl.us - Online Flowchart Application with Some Much Needed Simplicity

In the past, admittedly dragging my feet, I’ve been put a position where I’ve had to research flowchart applications for clients. I’ve never really liked flowchart software. In my opinion using complicated flowchart software to plan a project only delays starting actual work and, by the end of the project, show us how arrogant we were to assume we could foresee every possible pitfall. In short, the benefits of planning for two hours tend to be about the same a planning for a week. The efficiency curve drops dramatically somewhere early on in the planning phase.

That being said, planning is still very important. We should be looking for tools that make the planning process more efficient (especially for those of us who are planning junkies). Bubbl.us is definitely one of these tools. A Flash based (so passe, I know) free online application, Bubbl.us presents an intuitive set of tools to create fast and easy flowcharts and share them with the world. That’s it! No junk features. I definitely recommend it and hope that the creators stick to their original vision as the pressure mounts to complicate the wonderfully simplistic tool.

New Design for Bits O' NewMedia

Someone Else to Whistle While You Work

If you’re like me, listening to music while you work helps spark creativity and makes the work day seem more enjoyable and laid back. On that topic, I just wanted to make a couple of quick web site recommendations.

For online radio, you just can’t beat pandora.com in my opinion. Just enter artists and albums that you like and it starts playing music. As you listen and give songs a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” Pandora adjusts the playlist to better match other users who have the same opinions about music as you. Before you know it, you have a radio station that only plays good songs.

We’re not always in front of a computer, though, so we need a good resource to fill the old iPod. I recently rediscovered lala.com. It’s been around for awhile but some recent feature updates have made it one of my favorites. I won’t go into detail. Just check it out.

Remember, the IT Aspect of Web Design is Inconsequential

This is kind of a follow up to a post I wrote a couple of weeks ago entitled “Don’t Send Me Your IT Department”. After writing that article, I started becoming more aware of my own attitude about the programming and IT aspect of web design.

I realized that I am spending too much time explaining technical details to clients in my initial consultation meetings. To the client who knows absolutely nothing about PHP or HTML, the programming part of the project is of no consequence. All they understand is the “face” or outer shell they interact with. The engine behind the face is perplexing and confusing.

I still believe it’s important to throw in a few esoteric details to demonstrate competency in the more technical areas of our business but that’s where it should stop. When we present ourselves as purely IT, that’s exactly how we will be treated. If we present ourselves as result oriented visionaries…

More Mashup Tools Thanks to Yahoo!

I’ve featured some cool mashup tools on Bits O’ NewMedia in the past. Dapper.net is one of my favorite and the driving force behind my experimental site midessamashup.com. The number of free mashup tools continues to grow, though, and now Yahoo! is entering the ring with Pipes. 

I haven’t used Pipes on a project yet but I have to say that I’m pretty impressed with the features. In addition to the features Dapper.net offers, Pipes has an RSS feed combiner and a some geocoding stuff that looks really cool. Plus, you know that Yahoo! has the resources to maintain the Pipes service and continue to improve it. It will be interesting to see where it goes in the near future.

Breaking Down the Colors of the Top 20 Magazine Covers

Vitamin News posted a link to an article on colourlovers.com that shows the top twenty magazine covers of all time along with their color palettes. It’s an interesting study at least and a great point of inspiration at best.

Don't Send Me Your IT Department

“Get to the Point” a daily email newsletter from marketingprofs.com recently had an article entitled “Information Technology is from Mars, Marketing is from Venus”. The title immediately struck a chord with me. Many times I’ve gone to consult with a company about their web site and they sent their IT guys out while their marketing department was AWOL.

The issue is that these companies see their web site as falling under the domain of IT which, by nature, is the polar opposite of marketing. Right? Of course, we know differently and now I can say from experience that companies with this type of attitude should be avoided like the plague! It seems like a small oversight on their part but, in reality, it’s the first indication that this is going to be the project from hell.

Writing Well is Never Bad

In new media we frequently find ourselves in situations where we are forced to wear more than one hat. The fact that many clients use us as their complete ad agency solution is just the nature of the business. Because of this it is important that we are reasonably good writers. Common grammatical errors which are easy to avoid can be deal breakers when you are emailing a client, writing copy, or blogging.

No need to go back to school for a degree in English, though, just checkout the Grammar Girl podcast for quick tips that can save your life (Your professional life anyway). I know it’s effected affected me.

What Does Your Design Really Say?

As designers, whether we realize it or not, the products of our labor have a huge effect on culture at large. Specifically, web designers decide how linguistic data should be presented to the population which affect how they will interact with that data. Wow! Design matters.

A perfect example of this is the recent project of design gurus Pilipp Steinweber and Andreas Koller called Similar Diversity. Essentially, Similar Diversity is a graphical representation of the common word usage in the writings considered holy by the major world religions. It portrays all religion as a huge nebulous blob of similar thoughts and ideas.

This design is saying something and affecting the way people think in a very tangible way. It reminds me that every decision I make in my design process should be evaluated carefully so I can better understand the message I am conveying with my design. Can theology really be reduced to a mechanistic chart of similar words ripped from their original context? After all the meaning of a word changes dramatically when you change the words around it. No. Religions are opposed to each other in concept not in common use of language to express those concepts.

Large File Tranfser Part 2: Paid Solutions

After the previous post about transferring large files, a reader brought to my attention the fact that there are paid services like LeapFile out there that basically do exactly what I am describing.

If you are a web designer that likes to leave the hosting up to the client, then these solutions will be great for you. On the other hand, if you resell hosting, which I assume a lot of you do, then you are already paying for storage and bandwith so it makes more sense to have your own solution.