Pizza Hut Box Copy
6pm, Sunday January 17th, 2010
Comment
Tags: design, pizza
Oops!
You shouldn’t have turned it over until you’d finished!
I love the copy on the bottom of this Pizza Hut box. Clever, friendly, perfect.
Posts Tagged ‘design’
CommentTags: design, pizza
St Paul’s School Intranet
4pm, Friday November 6th, 20094 CommentsTags: code, design, online, portfolio, programming, web
St Paul’s School updated the installation of their Content Management System, Firefly.NET, . Along with this update they included a new template that I built, changing the layout of the Intranet which had been there since, I believe, 2001. Here’s a few screenshots to compare the two:
This redesign made use of Firefly.NET’s template architecture, so the template files were built with XSLT and various stylesheets. While the old template was built using tables (back in 2001, I imagine this was fairly common), the update changes to use <div>s and more common stylesheet positioning instead. It’s technically HTML5, in that the first line of every document is <!doctype html>, though this doesn’t really mean anything for the time being. My favourite part of the redesign? The name of the school now has a proper apostrophe (St Paul’s vs. St Paul's). Apparently I can be a little picky.
Firefly.NET is the system St Paul’s has been using to manage content on its website and Intranet for quite a while now. It was developed by two former pupils of the school, Joe Mathewson and Simon Hay. You can read more about their work and their clients on the Firefly Solutions site.
Open Leeds & The Leeds Hack Space Hack Day (Phew)
3pm, Saturday October 17th, 2009CommentTags: code, design, leeds, ui, uk
Last Saturday, I went to the Hackspace::Leeds Hack Day, organised by the Leeds branch of Hackspace, and supported by the Hackspace Foundation.
The day was split into hardware and software, and I went for the latter. Hardware’s never particularly appealed, requires far too much dexterity. I worked with Chris on the UI and front-end for The Open Leeds project, which is a group of people who are just getting started, making historical data about Leeds accessible. (If someone wants to work on something like this for London – or if something like this is already going on – I’d love to get involved).
I wish there’d been more time, as we only managed to end up with a basic structure and layout for the site, and a promise that we’d all continue work on the mailing list. Below are a few screenshots as the day progressed.
“600 Happy Users”
10am, Thursday July 9th, 2009CommentTags: design, maths, portfolio, university, web, york
Last night, my redesign of the internal Maths department VLE at the University of York went live. When I started at the department in October last year, it looked a little like this:
Click the image to view it in all its glory. I'm not going to draw your attention to some of the things I've come to love most about it, because frankly it speaks for itself.
As you might expect, looking at that got boring and started to hurt my eyes pretty quickly. In May, I went to see Henning Bostelmann, the guy who looks after all things Maths & website there, and offered to try my hand at creating something. This is what's happened over the last couple of months:
Leaving Henning's office last week, he remarked how there would now be “600 happy users” in the department – thank you, Henning, for your help testing, fixing, testing, updating, and more testing.
I love university; there's so much freedom to do anything and everything to improve departments, societies, colleges, the list goes on. I hope I don't sound too much like a naïve little first year, but I really do think it's the case – here's something which will (hopefully) outlast the time I spend at York, and that means something to me.
The boring interesting stuff: it's a fairly hacky CSS job (so no judging my [lack of] coding skills from here, please), using the gorgeous Silk icons from famfamfam – so many thanks to Mark James for providing his icons free of charge, they're such a great resource. Moodle, the open-source (!!, ♥) learning environment that we're using, is actually impressively easy to mess about with. This seems to be one of those “20% of pages used 80% of the time” situations, so it's nowhere near finished and there's always room for improvement; might do the same thing again next year to just tidy it up.
What follows are a few parts that I'm really happy with…
National Express Waste, Waste, Waste
12pm, Saturday July 4th, 2009CommentTags: design, train, transport, web
Dear National Express,
Brill, you’ve finally failed. Now instead of money-grabbing like you’re so used to, why don’t you think about cost-cutting for once? For example, I was having a think about those great tickets of yours…
This is what gets printed for me if I book a return journey from London Kings Cross to York:
So, how about we rejig a few things. Even if you guys don’t save any money from printing, you’ll get that fuzzy warm hippy feeling from using less card or paper.
See, what I did there is applied a very complicated design process called “make the stuff that people actually care about really big”. Unbelievably, it doesn’t matter to me what that long number is, so I made it small. Are you catching my drift yet? “What’s a ToD?”, I hear you cry. I have no idea. I also don’t care.
Using the first, we’re down from five tickets per return journey to three. Now let’s suppose you make the collection receipt optional (I’ve been on your service every couple of weeks since October last year, and I’ve never needed one) and uncheck the box by default. Two tickets per return journey instead of five.
The second’s probably a little ambitious, but wow, imagine the possibilities of a company actually removing stuff that isn’t useful on 99% of journeys (this statistic was very accurately calculated using a technique known as “making it up”).
Yes, I’m sure there are reasons things haven’t changed. National Rail probably set up some beautiful unified system in 1994 that every train company can use to print tickets, or whatever. Once again, I’m reminded of how big business and IT (or the web) are a match made in heaven.
2009
4pm, Thursday January 1st, 2009CommentTags: design, life
Happy New Year all!
Seeing as New Year’s Day is a quiet one in my house, I thought it’d be worth doing a little bit of work on the blog. New year, and a few tweaks to the way it looks.
Have a great day, week, month and year. All the best.
FaceYourManga
1pm, Wednesday September 10th, 20083 CommentsTags: avatar, design, website
Been around for a while, but I only just saw it on the RealMac photo stream.
I don’t need to say anything more… the image accompanying this post does it all.
Grab one from http://www.faceyourmanga.com/.
I wish I could draw – might be something to practice and learn this year.
My name’s Alex Muller.