Archive for June, 2006
Designing the HoudahSpot Icon Tuesday, June 27th, 2006 by Mike
Back in February, I came in contact with Pierre Bernard, a Mac OS X developer in need of an icon design for his search tool, HoudahSpot. Pierre’s search tool is really an alternate front-end to the Spotlight engine, offering features such as live queries, manipulations of files within search results and an easy to use interface for searching with complex criteria.
Concepting
Pierre had ideas in mind for the his icon — his signature elephant, a set of binoculars, and sheets of paper. I was selected to offer alternate ideas, refinements and provide design guidance in bringing this icon to life. 
After some initial questioning about the application and Pierre’s idea, I began as I always do, with pencil sketches in my Miquelrius notebook.
Sketches, Round 1
I felt there needed to be something tying the loose papers, binoculars and the elephant icon together, when I realized that if you were on safari, you would carry papers in a binder.
So, with this idea in mind, I sketched out a a heavy duty leather binder with the Houdah elephant icon embossed on the cover, and binoculars laying on top of the binder. Pages would be coming out at odd angles to suggest chaos often present on a user’s machine. I also included a small compass to complete the image.
Sketches, Round 2
Pierre and I both quite liked the binder concept from the first round, and wanted to refine the idea a little bit more. I sketched out a second round of pencils, exploring variations on sketch 5 and a runner up, to make sure we were going along the right track.
On this set, I moved the binoculars down and right on the binder cover to reveal more of the Houdah elephant character, removed the compass, which felt unnecessary. I then rounded the leather binder’s corners and refined the paper positioning to be a little less chaotic. This second round sketch looked quite nice, with pretty good balance and proportions.
Sketches, Round 3
Pierre had one more experiment to try before settling on the concept — sliding the binoculars off of the right edge of the leather binder, to reveal the entire Houdah elephant character. I created an abbreviated 3rd sketch exploring this idea, though immediately Pierre and I felt it threw the balance of the icon off. The binoculars on an angle, laying on top of the binder were better.
Color Comps v1-3
Next up, , move ahead to the Mac, and start building the icon in Fireworks. First, I began in icon 1 with the binder, as I felt this element would hold the icon together. Using a photograph of leather, I modified it in Photoshop and Fireworks as the base texture, adding shade, reflections and seams. You can see I also began exploring documents inside of the binder. In icon 2, the binoculars were built using reference from Leica binoculars. In icon 3, I move to defining the documents in the binder in more detail, widened the binder and corrected the angle and skew of the binoculars.
Final Icons
Next, I brought the final icons from Fireworks into Photoshop, for final tweaks and export to .icns files which Pierre could bundle into HoudahSpot. Pierre wanted to remove the highlight on the left edge of the binder, and other small tweaks I found were made to the icon before final export.
I used the binoculars art from the master application icon file to create a complimentary document icon, using the leather binder texture on the top edge of the document to carry over the look and feel of the main icon to the document icon.
Conclusion
Pierre and I are both very pleased with the final application and document icons. They’re warm and inviting, capturing the idea of HoudahSpot well. Yoram Blumberg, a German designer liked the icon quite a bit:
When I stumbled upon HoudahSpot at MacZOT.com my first thought was: «I really love that catchy icon, I don’t care what the app is for — I wanna add that icon to my dock!»
Thanks Yoram! :-)
Special thanks go to Pierre Bernard for choosing to work with me and MakaluMedia on this icon. His help and collaboration through the entire project made the HoudahSpot icon a pleasure to create.
I hope my description of my icon design process is interesting and helpful, especially for developers who are curious what goes into the development of an application and document icon. If you need an icon designed, drop me a line.
If you’re interested in exploring an alternative approach to search on your Mac with the power of Spotlight under the hood, give HoudaSpot a try.
Related Links Designing the endo icon Kula 1001 Icon MailDrop 2.0 Icon Story
Email Nirvana Thursday, June 15th, 2006 by Matt
Well Alex’s winning of the Slashdot redesign contest is doing more for MakaluMedia sales than a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal. Which brings us back to Global Warming, and my email problems.
Even though I still spend way too much time processing emails, a couple of very cool plug-ins for Apple Mail helps keep things manageable.
About a year or so ago, I began to realize I was spending too much time in the simple act of “filing” email messages into a hierarchy of folders. Click-Drag-Drop. Click-Drag-Drop. Over, and over. I ended up addressing this problem by closing my eyes, taking a leap of faith, and flattening my hierarchy of nested mail folders into four:
- @inbox
- @waiting for…
- @holding
- 2006
A couple of times per day, I go through Mail’s inbox, and I immediately file all messages into one of these four folders. Actionable messages (i.e. messages that require me to take some action) go into @inbox. Messages containing things I’m waiting for (like a request for more information) go into @waiting_for… Messages that I want to reply to, but are not high priority, go into @holding. All other messages go into the big 2006 folder (until next year, when I’ll archive this folder, and create 2007.)
Efficient filing of messages is made possible by the Mail Act-On plugin for Apple Mail, which allows the binding of key shortcuts to Mail’s processing rules. I have four shortcuts setup:
- [control]-i sends messages to @inbox
- [control]-w sends messages to @waiting for…
- [control]-h sends messages to @holding
- [control]-a (”a” for archive) sends messages to 2006
Once per day, I go through @inbox, replying to messages that need a reply, creating tasks for myself for messages that require some action, and further filing messages, usually into 2006. My objective is to have @inbox empty at the end of each day.
Periodically (maybe once per week), I review @waiting_for… and @holding.
This system has worked out surprisingly well, and I’ve been quite content with searching for emails in my big 2006 archive, using Spotlight. I would never have thought I could live without a fine grained folder hierarchy.
That said, there are situations in which I would like to see a collection of related mails, grouped together. This problem has now been solved with the addition of Indev’s other email plugin, MailTags.
MailTags allows you to “tag” email messages with one or more keywords, assign mail messages to “projects”, and annotate them with “notes”. (It additionally allows you to create and manage todos in iCal, but as I use Daylite for task management, I’ll skip further discussion of this feature.) Once tagged, assigned and/or noted, related messages can easily and instantly be located through the use of Mail’s Smart Folders, since MailTags adds its meta-structures to Spotlight’s list of search criteria.
I’ve created a tag, “open”, that I assign, through some Keyboard Maestro menu selection magic, to the [control]-o key shortcut. I then assigned this keyboard shortcut to one of my Logitech mouse buttons. So, with a single click of a mouse button, I can tag an email message as “open”, which become instantly included in a Smart Folder I’ve entitled, “Currently Open Issues”. (And, of course, one big advantage to Smart Folders is that a message can simultaneously reside in more than one folder.)
Once an issue or activity is closed, I can select all related messages, and with a control-click immediately remove the “open” tag from them all, at which point they instantly disappear from this Smart Folder.
With MailTags and Smart Folders, the sky is really the limit in terms of useful groupings of email messages. To be honest, I really can’t think of much more I could ask for, except maybe less mail!
BTW, if you use Act-On or MailTags, please considering a PayPal donation to Scott, to help support his additional development of these useful plugins.
The Building of Fincalena Saturday, June 3rd, 2006 by Matt
Fincalena, a Belgian-owned builder and property agent working locally here on the Spanish Costa del Sol, contacted MakaluMedia for the development of a website which would give them an edge in the highly competitive Spanish property market. We met with the company, discussed their objectives and concluded that the site would attempt to achieve the following end results:
Project a corporate identity combining Fincalena’s northern European roots with the essence of the southern Mediterranean market in which it operates.
Improve the visitor process of finding a desired property.
Introduce features and services which set Fincalena apart in the market.
Allow collaboration with other agent partners in the area.
Optimize for the Google search engine.
Minimize the cost and effort associated with managing and maintaining the site.
Faced with these challenges, we set off to work. We’re quite pleased with the results, as are Fincalena, and this article describes the process.
Phase 1: Corporate Identity
Fincalena worked with our Design Director, Mike Rohde, in the iterative process of identifying and designing a corporate identity. Our collaborative approach, which you can read more about here and here resulted in a set of outputs including color palette definition, typeface specifications, and a logo mark. In addition to the website, Mike produced a number of supporting print products, including property signage, based on the corporate ID.
Phase 2: System Specifications
After conducting a review of the competitor sites in the context our defined objectives, we felt that we could improve in a number of areas, through both enhancement of “typical” services (like searching for property) and through the introduction of some innovative new features.
We decided to reduce the number of search criteria to three: location, type, and price range. We felt that the tendency to overwhelm the visitor with selection criteria is often counterproductive.
We decided to make use of modern interface technologies such as AJAX, to enhance the user experience.
Realizing that many visitors appreciate a printed version of a property profile, we decided to implement on-the-fly generation of downloadable PDF files.
We decided to develop a mechanism to ease the process of publishing frequent and timely real estate news.
We decided to develop a mechanism whereby Fincalena can collaborate in real-time with partner sites.
We decided to leverage the Content Management System (CMS) framework that we’ve been independently working on as a standalone product.
Phase 3: Implementation
For the past year or so, we’ve been making a gradual migration from development in PHP, to development using the Ruby-on-Rails web application framework. Rails is a highly productive environment, both in terms of the well thought-out MVC model (specific to web applications), and in terms of the underlying language, Ruby. It’s this technology on which we based the generalized CMS product we are internally developing, and to be used in the Fincalena project.
As with most projects (especially those involving customers willing to work in an agile process), we began by developing the core system screens, and expanding outward, including iterative reviews, until we had a full set of site screens. This set of screens represents a nearly complete specification of data (content), services (features) and general layout.
From there, we began the parallel processes of visually designing the site, and implementing the back-end software.
On the home page, we wanted to immediately set the tone for the quality that can be expected from Fincalena properties, the lifestyle available to residents of this privileged region, and to provide the shortest path possible to property identification.
In the interior of the site, we focused on simplicity and removed, as far as possible, distractions that would take focus away from the properties. We spent a great amount of time on the organization and presentation of property metadata (such as price, features, etc.) and tried to subtly integrate features such as the downloadable PDF, and the AJAX-based filtering mechanism, which provides live updates of search results without a page refresh. We decided to use a Flash-based solution for the seamless presentation of the property imagery.
On the content management side, we extended our Rails-based CMS framework to the management of properties. This system reflects everything our organization has come to learn over the years about the design of human interface systems, and may be the focus of a future article. (And special thanks to FamFamFam for their icons released under Creative Commons.)
Fincalena have reported to us that after using nearly every property management system on the market, ours is (in their words), “by far the best in terms of ease-of-use and efficiency.”
Advanced Functionality
We proposed to Fincalena a mechanism to allow the automatic re-publication of real-estate news on their site. The result is a sub-system whereby Fincalena can subscribe to the RSS feeds of partner news organizations, and then selectively publish individual articles on their own site, and via a synthesis RSS feed for subscribers. In other words, we implemented an embedded aggregator.
Fincalena also wanted to collaborate with other local partners, for both strategic and technical purposes. To this end, we designed the architecture of the back-end system to allow seamless integration into partner sites, allowing for the coordinated management of properties, while providing the source traceability required by the individual partners.
We have just recently completed the first such integration, with Fincalena partner Bright SL:
In terms of Google friendliness, we applied a number of techniques, especially in the design of URL structures, to help optimize the site’s representation in the world’s most important search engine.
Concluding Notes
Both Fincalena and MakaluMedia are highly satisfied with the results of this project. Fincalena have a powerful, innovative and future-safe platform on which to build and grow its business. For MakaluMedia, this project represented an opportunity to apply a broad range of cross-discipline skills and experience to a new business area for us.
Gauging Reactions to the Slashdot Redesign Thursday, June 1st, 2006 by Arto
Alex’s win in the Slashdot CSS redesign contest has been making the rounds on the net.
S/D/R — The Big Three
Mere moments after the official announcement on Slashdot, the story made its way to Digg and Reddit. To date, Slashdot’s original announcement has garnered 852 comments. The Digg story has been “dugg” 1715 times and commented on 203 times, while at Reddit the story has gained 110 points.
While we have been receiving a constant stream of private congrats via e-mail, comments on all three sites cover the full spectrum from “love it” to “hate it”; the latter kind occasionally moving on to some disproportionately extreme reactions that may perhaps be a symptom of an excessive disconnect with Real Life(TM). Goes with the territory, and Alex is taking it all in stride, I hope. This much is obvious: had this been a vote, instead of CmdrTaco’s call, I doubt any single one of the proposed designs could’ve sustained a clear majority.
Unfortunately, what contributed to an initial negative backlash of sorts was the fact that when the story broke, the design preview was missing a number of elements, including the actual Slashdot logo itself. Slashdot staff quickly corrected the situation, but the posted comments show that a significant number of people thought the erroneous version was the final design, and were understandably upset.
The press release
OSTG’s press release was published on MarketWire, eventually being picked up by MSN Money as well. It includes this comment attributed to CmdrTaco:
“Alex Bendiken’s entry was selected because his design improved upon many shortcomings of Slashdot’s original design. His design moves commonly-used functions into positions of prominence, and improves the readability of articles. His entry required only minor changes to our core HTML, and breathes fresh life into a site that has remained aesthetically unaltered over its 8+ year lifespan,” said Slashdot founder and site director Rob Malda (aka Cmdr Taco).
Blogosphere reactions
The blogosphere has received the new Slashdot with open arms and an almost unequivocally favorable opinion:
- Steve Bryant posts on his eWeek blog that he thinks he Slashdot redesign “looks pretty damn good. Contemporary, but not so much that it’ll be outdated soon”. He also comments that “all of Google-dom is filled with the name Alex Bendiken” — well, actually, it’s only like 600 entries at the moment, but you, dear reader, are more than welcome to add your contribution to the growing number…
- John Gruber of Daring Fireball likes the new design, calling it “a big improvement that preserves everything that’s good about the classic Slashdot brand.”
- Rui Carmo of The Tao of Mac agrees with Gruber that the new design is “very slick indeed”.
- An editorial in PHP Magazine calls Alex’s design “very nice and well done”, while drawing on their own previous experience to add that it’s no easy task to satisfy everyone. How true…
- David A. Utter, staff writer at WebProNews, details the differences between the old and new designs, without neglecting the runner-up.
- Ryan over at CyberNet News blogs: “I believe that Alex really deserved to win. From the bunch of redesigns that I saw his was the best. He kept the integral parts that makeup Slashdot but he also implemented a slick interface.”
- Philipp Lenssen thinks the design “is cool. The font could be easier to read, tho”.
- Phil Crissman likes the new look, adding “I’m sure I’ll see a lot of comments along the lines of It’s the same, only different (true), you just added round corners/gradients (no and yes — they already had some round corners), and more such complaints. I’m of the opinion that it retains the characteristic slashdotness of the design, but manages to make it look current. Good job, I say.”
- Ronald Heft, Jr. states: “I personally love it. I’ve always hated the current design, and while the new one does resemble the current design, it greatly improves upon it. The site feels less jagged and seems like a more calming place.”
- Michael Angeles thinks the new design ” adds a good deal of white space around the margins by removing the black background and increases height between lines of text, which makes the left nav much easier on the eyes. The previous design always felt cramped to me.”, and goes on to ponder the merits of the font selection and the differences between Arial, Tahoma and Verdana.
- BorkWeb labels Alex’s brainchild “a pretty clean and snazzy design”.
- Scott Troyan blogs that “it looks nice. Very clean, retaining classic Slashdot elements, while rejecting the classic Slashdot ugly.”
- Adrian Lee ponders what makes for an effective website and states the redesign “takes that general look, and makes it much smarter and cleaner. Much easier to read and skim over, generally nicer on the eyes and I don’t feel like my attention is pulled around as much. Generally I’m impressed.”
- S. Shreyas calls the new design “a very decent layout and 100x better than the older one”, though critizing aspects like the grey color and whitespace usage, goes on to lament that the runner-up’s, Peter’s, design was slashdotted and unavailable for review.
- Darren Foong is short and succinct: “it’s extremely awesome.”
International coverage
Here’s a quick sampling of reactions from the non-English part of the blogosphere:
- Chinese: Solidot, Gea-Suan Lin’s blog.
- Danish: Cssdesign.dk
- Dutch: Bakje.nl Jatlog, UZY.nl
- French: Scrapbrain
- German: Macelodeon, observatory, praegnanz.de
- Greek: pestaola.gr, Wiggler.gr
- Hungarian: Hungarian Unix Portal
- Italian: Luca Mondini
- Japanese: hirokixs
- Polish: miscz.pl
- Spanish: Abadia Digital, aNieto2K, Barrapunto, Bitperbit, DesdeGuate.com, menéame, Microsiervos, Un Blog Más, Vecindad Gráfica
- Thai: Blognode
- Turkish: Fazlamesai
More buzz in the blogosphere can be found at Technorati and, of course, Google.
Postscript to the Slashdot Effect Thursday, June 1st, 2006 by Arto
The actual slashdotting is now well over, and I’m glad to say we weathered the storm without any incidents. With the help of our sysadmin, Niall, we distributed the load across three dedicated servers in geographically diverse locations, and none of the boxes even broke a sweat.
However, that’s not to suggest the servers were idling; on the contrary, they were each servicing up to hundreds requests per second. I usually keep a monitoring console open to the servers, and when CmdrTaco originally posted the announcement, it was immediately obvious that something had happened. The staff in our colocation facilities noticed, too — it didn’t take many minutes for the first e-mail alert to arrive. (I fancy they heard the dual-CPU fans suddenly spooling up to maximum effect, but of course, their monitoring systems just warned them of a possible DDoS attack.)
Here’s a nice bandwidth graph from one of our servers, covering the first 24 hours. I thought the start of the slashdotting might be obvious enough that I won’t bother to specifically point it out:
On the software side of things, I was especially pleased to discover that no adjustments to Lighttpd’s settings were necessary in order for it to handle massive concurrency.
The load averages remained very reasonable, under 15.0 even with the nightly full backup running, except for a human error that resulted in one of the servers becoming momentarily unresponsive with a load average of almost 500.0 (oops); this was remedied within a minute.
Unfortunately, we didn’t get to test our server systems’ capacity to the fullest under a simultaneous, combined Slashdot/Digg/Reddit assault, since both Digg and Reddit linked to the actual design preview, and the direct links pointing here from the comments didn’t bring in much traffic to constitute a hammering. Oh well, live to fight another day.