Designers vs. Developers » Bob Holt

Pretty Forms

Bob Holt — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 19:18:18 +0000

If you haven’t seen the signup form on Jeremy Keith’s Huffduffer, go there now. I’ll wait.

Pretty, isn’t it?

Not only does it look good, but evidence suggests that it is more effective than traditional box-filled forms.

Maybe it’s time to start thinking about other ways to present form fields. Not just text fields, but dropdowns, checkboxes, and radio buttons as well.

Infographic Coins

Bob Holt — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 22:05:45 +0000

Petitinvention has some designs for infographic coins (found via beginbeing). I would be very happy if this were the currency of the future:

The Future of Designed Content

Bob Holt — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 15:17:13 +0000

Robin over at Snarkmarket has put together a nice post advocating the use of designed content and runs through the mental exercise of imagining if an online magazine like Gawker implemented this approach.

Needless to say, we like this idea.

Victorian Infographics

Bob Holt — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 16:24:52 +0000

We’re always on the lookout for new ways to display information. Paul at BibliOdyssey has put together great examples of some old ways gathered from the David Rumsey Map Collection.

Fantastic.

International Year of Astronomy

Bob Holt — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 17:14:56 +0000

Check out these posters that Simon Page made for the International Year of Astronomy. They’re retro and geometric, and so—almost by definition— I think they’re awesome. They’re also for sale.

Creative Review had their favorites:

And thumbnails of all 10:

You should take New Media to lunch now

Bob Holt — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:11:19 +0000

When we build websites, we often think of creating a “call to action” for the user and enticing them to follow certain links on a page.

One person has done a little empirical research to figure out how the language of those calls to action impact the click-through rates of the associated links.

In short, more forceful language seems to create higher click-through rates.

So, we’re hungry and you should buy us lunch. Now. Let’s go.

Research Magazine 2009

Bob Holt — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:35:49 +0000

Research at Boston University 2009 is the annual magazine highlighting research done at Boston University over the previous year.

New Media integrated the 2009 edition into the existing BU Research website.

University Honors College

Bob Holt — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:29:35 +0000

University Honors College is an honors program for the highest-achieving and most creative students that draws on the full range of resources at Boston University.

Google Fixes the Internet

Bob Holt — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 19:56:42 +0000

Have you ever had that friend who would just notice when your lawn needed mowing or your house needed painting and would just come over and take care of it for you?

Me neither.

But Google is that friend! For the internet!

Introducing Google Chrome Frame: Run the Google Chrome User Agent as a plugin to Internet Explorer 6, 7, or 8. This means you can render web sites as they were meant to be seen – even in an 8 year-old browser.

I’m interested to see how quickly this gets adopted by the IE user base. Perhaps soon, those of us who build web sites will be able to actually use modern code, even HTML5! We can only hope.

Website Finger Hold

Bob Holt — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 19:38:43 +0000

Hi folks – new guy here.

There’s an undercurrent of strangeness involving graphic designers who choose to show off their poster designs in a very specific manner.

Thankfully, we have Jason Santa Maria (the brains behind the previously-mentioned Typepedia) to create a web-centric response. He posted a single photo to Flickr of a person finger-holding a laptop. Then, some very funny Germans took the idea and ran with it.

And now, here on 9/9/09, Jason has created a single source for all uber-hip web designers to show off their best work:

Behold! The Website Finger Hold Flickr group! It’s new and different.