Weekly Link Roundup: Wolves of Gysinge Edition
So there aren’t any wolves actually in this post. Alana and I watched some show on National Geographic or Discovery Channel about a Swedish village plagued by wolves eating their children in 1820. I thought it would be documentary, but it was a dramatized reenactment, even better! Anyhow Alana and I decided Wolves of Gysinge would be the title of the first song written by our doom metal band. Onto the links.
- Designing Magazines is a blog about (shocking) designing magazines.
- Michael Symon, Cleveland’s own Iron Chef now has a blog.
- Scientific Web Design: 23 Actionable Lessons from Eye-Tracking Studies
Shorter paragraphs perform better than long ones. Information on your page should be designed for the short attention span of most Internet users. Keep paragraphs and sentences short unless context mandates otherwise, such as descriptions of products on an e-commerce sites.
- Two great articles from Boxes and Arrows, Building a Data-Backed Persona, and Designing for Nonprofits. I used to work for an agency that did a lot of work for non-profits, and it surprises most people to find that working with them is completely different than working with a regular business. In many ways it’s like moving mountains with the layers of people you have to get through, each having a different vision of what a project’s outcome should be.
The most important difference between nonprofits and commercial or government entities is how they do business. This trickles down to every aspect of working with nonprofits and will ultimately affect anyone’s decisions to work or not work with them….Unlike most commercial projects, where I usually work closely with the marketing team, in nonprofits I worked with all the directors of the entire organization…and the expectations from each stakeholder are entirely unique.
- Papa John’s makes the path to order completion a little bit easier, they now take texted pizza orders. I like the idea of this but it sounds poorly executed. The customers don’t get any kind of confirmation message, and what of people such as myself who never carry cash and pay with a card? One of my local places has a POS device they bring with my order, but most places don’t seem to employ this method.
- Lokesh Dhakar, developer of Lighbox, has a (clean, well designed) blog with some cool visualizations.
