In my last post, I reviewed the code architecture of my playground site. In this post, I’ll explain its design.
I fear that the site will have all the charm of exposed pipe for the average Flash designer. My fear is based partly on my primitive graphic-design skills, but mostly on the unusual nature of […]

I always figured it was laziness when Flash designers omitted the back button…until I considered implementing one myself. Then I realized that this is another case where the wide-open freedom of Flash leads you directly to ground-up difficulties.
The back-button works so naturally in a browser because HTML presupposes one kind of transition: one page replaces […]

Everyone is pulling in the same direction: the web application, but nobody is quite sure where we’re going designwise.
Yahoo’s portal redesign is a milestone: the first major long-standing site to take definite, Ajaxed steps from hypertext to web application, and it’s made me review some very basic principles.
What is hypertext? It’s a networked cluster of […]

Inspired by Chang Heavy Industries, I’ve been experimenting with RSVP (Rapid Serial Visual Presentation), which flashes words or images in a rapid sequence.
So I’ve been wondering, what kind of picture is grasped most readily–a line drawing or a bitmap?
The research indicates that our minds turn the continuous bitmap known as seeing into a series of […]

The designs I've been playing around with lately have all put navigation controls at the bottom of the screen (like the Mac Dock).
I was wondering why. A hypothesis: As I've become more comfortable with computers (I'm a late convert), I've started using keyboard shortcuts extensively, so in placing controls at the bottom of the screen, […]