Posts tagged with "design"
Hey, That's a Nice Map! New Custom Mapping Module for Drupal
Nice Map Module Makes it Easy to Make Beautiful, Custom Maps on Drupal
Putting your content on a highly custom map is now as quick and as easy as putting those same nodes in a list. That’s because the Nice Map module can do the heavy lifting for you by acting as a WMS client that integrates with Views. A WMS – or Web Mapping Service – is a standard that lets applications like websites request a map from a mapping server. Using the WMS standard gives you the flexibility to use a public WMS server or to use your own mapping server where you have complete control over the maps, which is what we’ve been doing recently for our custom mapping work.
Week in DC Tech: July 21 Edition
Talking Tech: Mobiles, Design, and Citizen Bloggers
The lazy days of summer haven't hit the DC tech community yet. There's another interesting and full week of technology ahead for anyone in search of good conversations, fellow techies, and air conditioning. Here are the events we're hoping to attend this week. For a full list of what's happening in the DC technology community, head on over to DC Tech Events.
Tuesday, July 22
12:15pm - 1:45 pm
3G: Mobile Media in Motion: The Media Future Now group will be meeting over lunch to talk about the new 3G mobile network and other advances in mobile technology and what it means for mobile media and communications strategy in general.
Wednesday, July 23
7:00 pm
This Week in DC Tech: May 22 Edition
Dry Off With Some Indoor Get Togethers
It's a soggy start to the week after a weekend of almost non-stop rain that's pouring into Monday. What better reason do you need to go out after work than a weekend spent cooped up inside? Here's a quick look at the tech events we're planning to attend this week.
Monday
7:00 - 9:00 pm
Drupal Meetup: Come out for a night of talking shop with Drupal developers and users and get to know who else is in this open source community over a few beers. This is a great event for hard core Drupal developers and newbies.
Tuesday
5:30 - 9:00 pm
Second Tuesdays New Media Salon: We had a blast at this last month. It's a great chance to do some networking with new media expert over a few cocktails.
Thursday
3:00 - 5:00 pm
Internet Advocacy Roundtable: Look into the future of emailing Congress by listening to one proposed solution on how to deal with the onslaught of email received by Congress each day.
Friday
1:30 - 5:30 pm
Social Rockstar Workshop: No matter what your skill level, this workshop is designed to make you an superstar in leveraging new media, web 2.0, and online social networking for your organization. $15 fee.
Any day
Artomatic: Eight floors of local art absolutely free. I don't think we need to say anything else. Be sure to check out their website so you can plan your visit during live music performances and movie screenings.
Ballyhoo! Posters as Portraiture Exhibit: The National Portrait Gallery has an very interesting exhibit looking back at graphic design and advertising from the last 100 years - a must see for any designer.
See you out this week!
Design and User Experience Track 2008, DrupalCon Boston
Great Design Sessions Lined Up for DrupalCon
Without further delay, here is the lineup for DrupalCon Boston's Design and User Experience track:
- Better Drupal Interaction Design with Flex (Chris Charlton)
- Building Capacity through Good Usability: Lessons from Instructional Design (Tim Lindgren)
- Burn the Help Manual: A Strategy for Self-Explaining UX Design (Bob Goodman)
- Converting Mock-ups to Drupal Themes (Maureen Lyons)
- Creating Custom Workflows for Drupal Applications: Taking Advantage of Core Hooks and Context (Young Hahn)
- Design on the Edge of Drupal (Claudio Luis Vera)
- Designing for Drupal (Chris Fassnacht)
- Drupal and Open Laszlo: How an Open Source Flash Solution Fits with Drupal (Kris Vanderwater)
- Drupal.org Redesign Panel (Various)
- Information Architecture to Drupal Architecture (Owen Barton)
- jQuery and Drupal: A Match Made in Heaven (Kyle Browning and Dmitri Gaskin)
- "No Tears" Methods for User Centered Design (Michael Angeles)
- Report from Formal Drupal Usability Testing at the University of Minnesota Libraries (Cody Hanson)
- Scalable Theming: Theming for 100s of Node Types, CCK fields, and Views (Bevan Rudge)
- Sex, Drupal, and Rock n Roll: A Theming Love Story (King of Denmark)
- What's in a Theme: The Power of Enterprise-Level Theming (Michael Caccavano)
The track has a strong mix of sessions aimed at hardcore designers, novice Drupal themers, and longtime community members and developers. Whether you're interested in customizing Drupal's look and feel for an enterprise-level website like Lifetime TV or looking for a robust
dynamic interface solution using jQuery,
Flex,
or Open
Laszlo, the sessions will provide plenty of opportunities for learning and sharing.
Other highlights include Michael Angeles' start-to-finish program on the right ways involve users in the design process, Bevan Rudge's guide to Scalable Theming, aka "How Not to Get Burned When Someone Adds a New Content Type", and the King of Denmark's Sex, Drupal, and Rock n Roll: A Theming Love Story, which is bound to be a blast even if no one knows what to expect.
Longtime Drupal developers and users should definitely keep their eyes
on Cody
Hanson's session. Cody and several other notable presenters,
including Dries himself, will be going over results from the
University of Minnesota's formal user testing sessions which pitted
Drupal's UI against the dreaded everyday user. The results will no
doubt spark some interesting--and maybe heated--discussions on how to
push Drupal's usability forward to the next level.
Keep your eyes open over the next two weeks for more information on these sessions. We hope to see you in Boston!
What Design Presentations Do You Want to See at DrupalCon?
Only One Week Left to Place Your Votes
Everyone should go check out the latest proposals on the DrupalCon Boston site and vote on the sessions you want to see. From Bevan's "Contributing to Usability in Drupal" to the King of Denmark's "Sex Drupal & Rock n Roll," some old timers and new faces are weighing in on how to design for Drupal and how Drupal can be better tailored to designers. Let us know what other sessions you'd like to see by posting here or on the DrupalCon website - or read the goals of the Design Track and post your own session. Today is pre-selection day for the sessions, and there's only one week left for submitting sessions at all. So make sure to weigh in on your top picks.
The Design Track at DrupalCon 2008 will show off some examples of high-powered websites like Harvard's cluster of Drupal sites and TreeHouse's work on Lifetime TV. There is a lot of energy behind making Drupal easier to design for the end user. Steve's work on Garland and the color module and some ambitious ideas I've heard from Kieran at Aquia could make 2008 the year Drupal killed the designer. I've already found a solid life insurance policy.
I'll be pushing the UI and theming advantages of Drupal that are available to developers at DrupalCon. While Drupal is making design easier than ever for end users, Drupal also provides developers with a very flexible and powerful platform for producing custom web applications and tools. I’ll be talking about making Drupal easier and smarter to design for people that code. Keep an eye out for Development Seed's upcoming session proposal "Designing for Every Day Users." It will focus on UI details, how good design and good coding can go hand in hand, and what this means for people building applications with Drupal. I'll be sharing some examples and stories from two recent applications we’ve been working on.
I’m excited to meet everyone in Boston and am stoked by the energy that is in the air right now. I look forward to everyone's feedback!
How an IE Bug Turned Into a Feature
Getting Tag Storm Compatible, Lined Up, and Working with Drupal
While I was redesigning our website, I decided to redo our blog’s tag cloud. I wrote an override to the default tagadelic theme function that added randomized positioning to each tag using inline CSS. Once overlayed on a nice background image our new tag cloud, aka tag storm, came into being.
The only problem left was getting it to work in Internet Explorer. I had suspected that I may have to downgrade the skin to get it working in IE, but for once the opposite happened – IE made it better.
If you look at the image above or at the tag cloud on our blog you’ll see that the tags are spread evenly throughout the space and most of the tags are only slightly obscured by other tags. But at first tag storm behaved pretty erratically, sometimes stacking all of the tags on top of each other in a usability mess, like this.
Conveying A Tool’s Use with an Image
Managing News and Maggie
For the past few months, we’ve had our heads down working on many technical aspects of Managing News, our fully-loaded team aggregator, and we’ve written about a little of that here and here. And as I mentioned last week, we’re also tackling giving the tool a new look. We’re completely redesigning the user interface of the tool and at the same time designing a public website to promote it.
Managing News, Extreme Makeover
Sneak Peak at our Newly Designed Team Aggregator
Managing News – our fully loaded team aggregator – has gotten a makeover. This is part of our work to bring Managing News from a proof of concept to a functional beta release. Currently Managing News is in private alpha testing but is being used by World Resources Institute and RH Reality Check, and the system is based on the work we did on BuzzMonitor with the World Bank.
I’ll post more about what’s in store with the beta release later this week, along with some more shots of the new Managing News design and user interface. For now here is the logo.
Sex Sells Less Than You (or I) Thought
How Sexy Images Affect Your Online Content
We were recently debating which video to feature first on a website we’re building, and after a quick talk we decided to put the one starring the hot girl first. It was almost a no brainer. We’ve all heard that beautiful women sell stuff. Car salesmen have been using this technique since the dawn of time. But I got to thinking, does anyone know if this translates to the online world? Turns out not so much.
Last week I spent some quality time with Google searching for studies and statistics that prove pictures of attractive women on websites increase traffic and conversions. I got a lot of search results when I googled “attractive women,” but no matter how much context I added to the search all I got were results for dating sites. So I gave up. Then, lo and behold, Marketing Sherpa (which is a great resource if you are interested in optimizing your online marketing) posted this article, which reveals two very interesting things about the hot girl theory.
Logo Submission for DrupalCon Barcelona Closed
My Very Late Submission
Ha, I totally misread that the logo summations for DrupalCon in Barcelona ended on the 10th and not on the 15th :)… Voting ends on the 15th… So go vote!. My vote is for the mosaic. It is great to see how fast the conference is coming together!
Here was my (wicked late) idea:
