Boxes and Arrows posted an interesting article today by Anders Ramsay and Leah Buley on Prototyping with XHTML. The article delves into the process and benefits of prototyping with a combination of sketching and code—instead of the usual wireframing, comping, coding and so on. As a designer and developer who usually works alone, or with a small team, I’ve found myself doing this a lot in the last year. One of the pitfalls of this method, is that my designs tend to get very locked up and boxy, since I don’t draw as much before I start the process. However, it is nice to actually show your client a working prototype. Sites just look different in the brower, then they do on an Illustrator artboard!
The Tutorial Blog has just posted a short introduction to the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar. I do almost all of my CSS development in the toolbar, and I would be lost without it! It is one of the major reasons why Chrome, despite its speed, can’t replace FF. If you haven’t added this powerful tool to your arsenal, I strongly suggest you do so today.
MTV launched MTV Music yesterday, and the site looks great. It’s clean, functional and hip, which is a dramatic departure from the main MTV site, which in all of its iterations, has tried to fit too much into too little space.
Whether MTVM be able to challenge YouTube’s dominance as the viewer of choice remains to be seen. YouTube has mind-share going for it, as well as its overwhelming selection, but a lot of music videos have embedding disabled, and the quality is generally low. MTVM has fairly high quality videos, and enables embedding in all of their videos-which is great for bloggers. Also, sifting through all the dross on YouTube is sometimes tedious, especially when other sites, like Vimeo have such stellar selections. Will these niche sites topple YouTube? Or does the convenience of going to only one site for all your time wasting needs triumph?
P.S. I’ve also posted over at Kindrapolis on this topic.
Hello devoted readers! I haven’t posted in awhile, because I have been mulling over the organization/purpose of this blog. You see, right now, this blog is just a mish-mash of personal and web design stuff, and it just didn’t feel right. So, I have separated the mish from the mash, and have created a new blog over at kindrapolis for all of my personal blogging, while this blog will focus on things that are relevant to designers and/or clients.
Stay tuned for further posts, and I hope to see you over at kindrapolis as well!
