text archives

“Twitterative Design”

Jakob Nielsen recently ran a Twitter post through 5 rounds of iterative design to get the impact he wanted. At first blush I was thinking, “That sounds like a lot of effort to optimize a Tweet!” But if you are using twitter as a marketing medium, I guess it makes sense. (Far as I can tell, these were just design rounds; he wasn’t running a user study or anything.)

See his article for lessons learned in each round, from concision to focus, impact, and re-tweetability. (There, I’m making up new words right and left.)

He finishes the article with a notable quote: “Text is a UI. It’s a common mistake to think that only full-fledged graphical user interfaces count as interaction design and deserve usability attention. ... In fact, the shorter it is, the more important it is to design text for usability.”

posted by ted on Monday, Aug 24, 2009 · 2 comments

It looks like you can use XHTML and CSS to wrap and flow text just like you would do in InDesign. I don’t know how useful something like this would be, and I haven’t looked at the cleanliness of the code, but it’s nice to know this is programmatically possible (and in IE6, no less). Check it out.

posted by clifton on Wednesday, Dec 10, 2008 · 1 comment

The IXD snowflake.
I won’t post any more of these (OK—maybe just one more that I have in mind), but I thought this one was cool, given our Interaction Design group’s moniker.

posted by ted on Thursday, Sep 20, 2007

My initials as Art.
Billed as a propaganda symbol generator, this is actually a very cool little widget for creating some nifty designs out of nothing but letters. The dials control how many instances of the characters are used, how close to the center of the symbol they appear, and how they are rotated around the center point.

This is another fine example of what Sam talked about—creativity exhibited by combining existing things in unusual combinations to come up with something new and interesting. Also reminds me a good deal of John’s Cosmic Knot . Also a good example of how Text is Beautiful (or can be), all by itself.

posted by ted on Tuesday, Sep 18, 2007