MyPunchblog

I noticed that Brown University has a cool new homepage with a unique design:

www.brown.edu

I’ve been reading a great book on design patterns. I think Jenifer Tidwell would call this design a type of card stack.

It’s a bit unconventional, and won’t appeal to everyone … for example Matt is used to windows rolling down, not up, so he finds it a bit unsettling. But since I went to Brown, I challenged him to a fist fight for badmouthing my alma mater! He declined. Anyway, it is a great way to fit a lot of information in a single page.

What do you think?

Designing a website is a little like designing airplane seats: One size needs to fit all (… or, well, in the case of most airlines, one size fits all small people).

But in terms of websites, I’m referring to browser size and screen resolution. MyPunchbowl challenges us to design not just for different types of web browsers, but for different screen resolutions (800 X 600, 1024 X 768, etc).

But wait, there’s more - a dimension like 1024 X 768 refers to the area of the entire screen. I don’t know about you but the toolbars and menus in my browser take up quite a bit of space. Oh, and by the way, I don’t usually maximize my browser. So the actual window in which you view websites can be quite a bit smaller than the screen resolution.

I think you’ll find that this article provides some nice insights into this issue.

In the end, like the airplane seat, you can’t please everyone. There will always be some graphic designer with a 12,000 X10,000 pixel monitor looking at MyPunchbowl like this:

… just as there will be someone holding onto their 640 X 480 monitor seeing something like this:

We’ll try to walk the middle road with our design and please as many people as possible.

You’re surfing the web. You click on a link or button. Nothing happens … or does it … wait, is the browser logo moving? is anything happening here?

There’s nothing worse than staring at an idle web browser wondering what’s going on. We sympathize. That’s why we try to give feedback in MyPunchbowl whenever possible. Usually it is in the form of a “spinner” - the fun little windmills that turn after you, for example, press “send email” to share your invitation.

Want to get dizzy? Check out this page of spinners:

http://www.napyfab.com/ajax-indicators/