New photoshop functions to make designers obsolete?

Posted on April 12, 2010 by IdeaMonster

Designers will loose their jobs?

Or are they? So content aware fill, puppet tweaking and many more things that seem to make very hard and complicated tasks oh so easy. So now anyone can retouch a photo easily or remove a person from a photograph while preserving the background. So is it the end of designers? Will the clients do their work themselves now with all those “easy to use” automatic tools?

No, not really

Do you bake your own bread? Even though it’s not that hard now is it? Do you print your own business cards? Nah, I didn’t think so. The tools are still for us designers to use and abuse (because the abuse is actually the path to using the new tools creatively and not just as automatic gizmos). It is still up to us, maybe until apple starts to attack Adobe even more and buys Pixelmator or something to create a competition ;)
Don’t be evil, right?

New, easier tools will make our lives easier but they won’t make us disappear. So don’t worry fellow designer! You’ll keep your job. Better worry about paying Adobe their share and as usual it ain’t cheap…

HTML5 – is the end of Flash near?

Posted on April 9, 2010 by IdeaMonster

flashvshtml5

HERE is an awesome demonstration of HTML5 capabilities. This including the online video streaming and better power / resources usage might just be the thing to tip adobe flash over the edge and into obscurity. Let’s see what they respond with, but it seems like HTML5 is the future standard. Too bad 3/4 of people still use IE6 and will be unable to see it. So is Adobe counting on people staying with IE6? Probably so ;)

The end of paper?

Posted on April 6, 2010 by IdeaMonster

Ok, so the iPad is here. It might not be the most amazing tablet device feature wise, but it will clear the path for both itself and other companies. Just like people buying ipod clones, and iPhone wannabes with better cameras and usb slots ;) The point is we’re seeing a media revolution starting right now. And the behemoths of press are of course jumping right in.

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Adjusting the technology

Posted on March 28, 2010 by IdeaMonster

This is actually more of a “thinking” subject than plain facts, but it’s pretty interesting and has been in my head for quite some time now. Let’s think about an evil example first. Do you think that macromedia making flash (well, making, buying whatever ;)) thought for a moment that it’ll cause a mass of screen blocking, full blown ads all over the internet? But on the other hand they didn’t probably think about how complicated and amazing the flash games can be, and that youtube made online video possible thanks to that technology. So basically it’s nothing new – a technology is a tool, a path that we can use and misuse (which is way more fun) to make something out of it that wasn’t originally intended.

So where else can we find an example of that? Well one thing are the LOMO cameras. Those cheap, old, film-based russian cameras became an instant hit for trendy hipsters, emo kids, and artistic souls. Taking blurry snapshots of a moving arm, a shoe, a fruit bowl. Then posting it everywhere. It all became a sort of artistic revolution, because the camera’s faults made up for the originality of the outcome. And that’s what matters.

And since we’re talking pictures – there’s the iPhone. Sure 90% of the phones in the market now have better cameras. That’s beside the point. iPhone has a bad, cheap camera but it has one advantage. Apps! People made hundreds of photography apps, both “new camera” apps and photo retouch, editing, effects, filters etc. So you can have an iPhone Lomo, an iPhone HDR (well sort of) and plenty of amazing looking pictures (and if not amazing then at least creative). Because the built in camera “thinks for you” while taking a shot. But with some clever apps and an open mind you can do exactly what you want to, when you want to. And since you have the camera with you because most of us carry our phones with us all the time, you can take a photo anytime, anywhere.

Iphoneograpy is the term for the iPhone app’s photograpy and it’s represented by sites such as :
Iphoneography.com
And also our friends from hype4.com have made a photoblog with their iphone pictures (some unaltered) at
CreativeBuzz.org
Be sure to check those out!

Facebook as the second internet

Posted on March 24, 2010 by IdeaMonster

The threat!

So here’s the deal. Right now A LOT (that’s an estimated number ;) of people are facebook users. And they share A LOT (also an estimate ;) of data daily. That is pretty impressive. But why? What’s so cool about farms, mafias and all those other stupid tests? Sure they work for a while but how to draw people in and keep them in ?

More than 200 million people?about one-fifth of all Internet users?have Facebook accounts. They spend an average of 20 minutes on the site every day.
By Facebook’s estimates, every month users share 4 billion pieces of information?news stories, status updates, birthday wishes, and so on. They also upload 850 million photos and 8 million videos. All of that is carefully shielded from Google.

Well they got it all figured out with external links that are viewable inside the facebook web app. Basically you can listen to a soundcloud song file, view youtube (and other) videos and read some news stories without ever leaving the page. And how do you get that stuff? Well your friends post it, and your friends are pretty much the only type of advertisement you as an experienced web user trust anymore. Aren’t they?

So basically you get all your funny videos, and all your most recent news from one place and you can comment and “like” it all in that one place, allowing other your friends to see it and spread the word. So facebook is becoming slowly a way to discover the internet and not only the social network of friends. Because before that we used aggregating websites to find certain type of content (funny videos, marketing tips, games) and right now they can all be embedded to become a part of the facebook machine.

Who should be scared?

The analysts at Hitwise claim that celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton now gets more traffic from Facebook than from Google – more than 7 million pageviews from Facebook alone. If that trend increases, then the current wisdom about web traffic is about to get turned on its ear.

Yes, it draws people away from google, and I think they’ve noticed (a little too late probably) and launched Orkut / or whatever it’s called now. Google Buzz? That’s it! It has potential of course (because it’s google) and it’s gonna be plenty useable combined with all the google cloud apps but it’s hard to break something that already works fine. And what’s more important it’s SUPER HARD to change the habits. Maybe they’ll succeed. Or maybe in a few years the internet will be facebook and content supplying “facebook apps” for it. Let’s all hope that won’t happen!

The problem with google is that it’s just a machine based on probability and algorithms to deliver you content. And social networks are based on the idea that no machine stands between you and the content. No. It’s chosen by the people you know and trust, and that’s why it’s actually better tailored to your tastes (well unless you’re spamming for thousands of friends you don’t know that is)

The rate of (r)evolution

Posted on March 21, 2010 by IdeaMonster

colors

How many of you remember adding “back” arrows in your websites about 10 years ago even though browsers back then had a “back” button? Or when gradients came into play and became super-popular around 2002 didn’t we abuse them for a while? Now they’re either used with style or are an example of a lack of thereof.

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The web design model transformation

Posted on March 17, 2010 by IdeaMonster

Yeah. I have noticed recently that the previous model of how things are done in the web design world has shifted slightly. What’s more important, it appears to be still moving in that direction, thus making an impact that will probably be visible in a couple of months. The current division on a bell curve would look somewhat like this:

curve1

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How much is 2 + 2? 4? More than 4? Less?

Posted on March 5, 2010 by IdeaMonster

math

I was watching TEDx Warsaw today and the main topic of the event is 2+2>4. Meaning that if we stick together we might achieve a lot. But is it really true?

There’s no I in team. Or is there?

One of the speakers – Sandra Bichl mentioned an interesting point. There are three types of people who enjoy working in teams. One is the people who found a group that they can really well work with (which is very rare). The second one is people who cope nicely with not meating deadlines and team tensions. And the third one is the ones who are just lazy and they want others to do their work for them. But how often does team work actually influence a positive change? I can honestly say that based on my experience it’s about 25% of good team work that will eventually wear out in time anyway, and 75% of good work done in one person “teams”.

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Attention span vs Viral Videos

Posted on February 28, 2010 by IdeaMonster

attention

Attention!

As we all know the web is not a place to indulge fully. People scan websites instead of reading them. And even if they read a large part their attention wanders off after a while and they either leave the site or switch to some other article. This is how the modern world works and it’s now common also in newspapers, magazines and other non-digital media. Except for books maybe but they’re beginning to be less and less popular unfortunately. Which makes our imaginations want more digitized fast paced action or we get bored. So basically the wheel goes round and round.

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So you’re a web design agency are you?

Posted on February 27, 2010 by IdeaMonster

agency
There are some trends that are common of course, but they are changing constantly and evolving. Sometimes it just takes one Steve Jobs to say “Flash is a technology of the past” to turn some heads around. Unfortunately for the industry, sometimes it’s easy to shape the minds of potential customers. And that might lead to them leaving the site without ever clicking “contact us”. So what are they looking at ?

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Let’s think outside of the box

Posted on February 9, 2010 by IdeaMonster

We are bound to repeat something someone else did before one day or another. Actually it’s more often than we think. Sometimes we do it knowingly, and that’s called being inspired (or stealing, the line is thin) and sometimes we simply think of something very, very similar to someone else’s work without knowing the person or the work. Maybe there’s an universal mind somewhere up there that’s sending in ideas and has mixups from time to time. But even aside from all that, it’s important to try and rethink how we can do things that CAN be done creatively. Some things are supposed to be just useful and standard, so the end user won’t get lost in them. But sometimes we can run wild and unleash all our ideas on the world. So which type of projects should we do? I believe doing a bit of both balances both the worlds and keeps the wit sharp. Soon we will post some new textures, tutorials and insights into the web 3.0.

Is it the end of Flash online?

Posted on February 3, 2010 by IdeaMonster

It seems like Apple is trying to kill Flash in it’s mobile devices, and looking at the percentages it seems almost as if flash already IS dying on the web. But the truth is, apple selling millions of those portable devices changed the scales a little bit. But do we really miss flash ? Bloated, slow and cpu heavy websites? Well sometimes they’re a must, like in web games, animation, cartoons, children games etc. But in many, many cases the initial overexposure of flash it slowly starts disappearing from many sites in which it was used as an addition. Sure there are those big, in-site banners communicating stuff and that sometimes is still useful, but sites totally in flash? Nope, thanks. They’re sluggish, with poor text support and weird anti-aliasing. So yeah, maybe it should just be limited to those cartoonish-game things and stay out of serious sites. And then maybe adobe would get off the couch and do some work on a plugin that works well on a mac. The windows version of the flash plugin is very stable and reliable, can’t be said about the same thing they made for the mac tho. Will Flash go away? Tell us what you think.

Working hard

Posted on January 30, 2010 by IdeaMonster

I’ve been extremely busy lately, doing a couple of projects at once and I realized a pretty good way (aside from the treadmill I use to “take a break”) is to open up all the projects, however different from each other they might be, and work on each for a couple of minutes, adding touches and changing the overall user-perspective. It really can help you look at your new business layout (no people in suits please!!) in a totally new way.
We reached 10,000 views on our iPad parody recently, and currently we’re working on the next “visual” thing that will be available really, really soon (probably on monday).
There are some new authors around here, so keep the RSS feeds handy, since each one is an expert in his field, and we can all learn a lot from that collaboration.

Turn that design upside down

Posted on January 22, 2010 by IdeaMonster

designupsidedown

Where do you usually start when designing a website? Pasting a logo into a blank document, building a header around it? Think about this for a second : forget the logo and header. Sure they’re the eye-candy and eye-catching things, but once in a while it’s nice to do it differently. Take the content. Paste it all over a solid background. And then play with it. No menu, no logo. Just the content, columns, tables, charts, images. Put them in an order that makes them fit into each other. And after you’re done playing with it – THEN add the header and logo. You’d be surprised by how good the content looks now. Usually, with the “normal” way of doing this, you’d make an awesome header and logo, with really great graphics that you like, but often you’ll feel like something is lacking just below that great header graphics. Maybe that is the point – try and organize the substance before the form. You know, that age-old struggle of form vs substance ? Maybe it’s not so corny after all…

Think before you design

Posted on January 13, 2010 by IdeaMonster

creativity_usability
I recently give a lot of thought to two things: usability of a project (be it a website) and creative communication so the ideas are easy to grasp/read for a majority of readers. The time of “pweety weebsites” is over. It’s time for thinking at least as much as the design process itself. Think what you want to say in a claim, before you type it and add a dropshadow. Analyze other successful projects and copy only what you think is important. And by that I dont mean the 30 layer header background. If it’s a business don’t add people in business suits, unless it’s the suits you’re selling. This is so overused now that for a business to stand out it just takes to come up with something different.

Think about mobile use, it’s growing at an unbelievable rate, you don’t want to be the last on the wagon do you?

And remember that form and function should be equal without one praying on the other!