Binary Bonsai

In laying down this new design — Kalamari — I decided to try and go with a fluid-width layout for once. Traditionally I haven’t held it in particularly high regard; but I experiemented with it for a few hours, and ended up somehow finding it a natural fit alongside the ‘book-like’ typography.

What’s interesting about fluid-width designs, is that for me, they actually only make sense under OS X. After all, under OS X, no window can be maximized and locked to the screen. Quite the contrary in fact. Not only are windows rarely sized to fit the full size of the screen¹, but all windows are movable at any time. And the ace in the hole, is that you cannot move the upper edge of a window above the lower edge of the menu bar, and you cannot resize a window to be bigger than the size of your screen.

Combined, these factors are very significant, as they directly influence the way you work your windows.

Contrary, on Windows, un-maximized windows most often differ in size and vertical position from window to window. And without the menu bar blocking vertical movement and the screen-size dictating the size of windows, it isn’t quite that easy to quickly move and resize a window, while retaining a tidy workspace; and so I most often simply maximize all windows.

Hang on, I’m approaching the point.

Because of this, I work much better with OS X’s windows paradigm. Much better. My work environment simply remains more fluid than when I’m working on Windows, and I often find myself resizing windows to fit whatever content they contain.

In turn, because I do that², Kalamari felt more natural on OS X, since I find myself resizing the width of the window to where it feels ‘right’. But at work, on Windows, the window was maximized, and… well, it looked almost grotesque actually, because of the vast wasteland of whitespace on either side of the column in a maximized window.

So I have to come up with some way of countering that I suppose.

Yay.

1. The lack of a maximize button in OS X has been known to drive some people to the brink of madness. ↩


2. Well, and because Baskerville looks amazing in Safari on OS X, and Georgia looks like shit in Firefox on Windows ↩

Please, fellow interface designers, look into your hearts and face the fact that pagination navigation has newer stuff on the right and older stuff on the left. Not the other way around.

Consider a blog like a diary. You start writing on the first page and then go towards the right. And since the first page of a blog is the latest entry, to go to the older entries, you have to press the arrow that points to the left.

Left = Old.

Except if you read right-to-left, in which case:

Please, fellow rtl interface designers, look into your hearts and face the fact that pagination navigation has newer stuff on the left and older stuff on the right. Not the other way around.

Consider a blog like a diary. You start writing on the first page and then go towards the left. And since the first page of a blog is the latest entry, to go to the older entries, you have to press the arrow that points to the right.

Right = Old.

Thank you.

Early this year, I spent some time with a bunch of other people setting up a direction for Habari’s administration interface. It was mostly blue-skying, but loving interface design as I do, it felt like time well-spent.

In fact, it felt good.

It was a little early to start implementing stuff like that, when the platform itself hardly even existed at the time. So I went off and spent most of my time on K2 instead. But now that K2 is nearly done, I’ve started working on Habari designs again, and just submitted my first major patch (with no assurance it will be accepted of course).

Habari is like the promised land in terms of the kind of interaction design I’ve wanted to see in WordPress for years. It’s like a digital catharsis to finally apply these thoughts and frustrations.

It’s based on, and comes pretty damn close to these reference mockups, and looks like this in motion (Full resolution):

Whether all of this will work in practice, no one knows, but it sure feels good.

I’ve had some web design dealings with a local company here in Copenhagen. They’re looking for a good web designer (to replace me, since I don’t have the time), and I promised to help them find one.

They are preferably looking for one living in or around Copenhagen who is capable of stepping up as soon as possible.

Drop me a mail at heilemann@gmail.com for questions and interest.

Andy Budd asked me to throw some traffic towards Brighton’s d.Construct 2006, and since Andy such a swell guy you should go check it out.

d.Construct is an affordable, one-day conference aimed at those building the latest generation of web-based applications. The event discusses how new technology is transforming the web from a document delivery system into an application platform