21 May 2010 •Notes • Comments

Notice Anything Different?

I’ve changed the body text typeface from Baskerville (or Times, if your machine didn’t have that) to Old Standard. People always whine about Baskerville being hard to read/harsh on the eyes, and I really wanted to try out Google’s new web font system.

Implementation is pretty much the same as @font-face, but it’s much easier on server load (since Google hosts the fonts), has a whole lot of clever caching features and somehow works on browsers all the way back to IE6. 

Filed under \ fonts \ web \ typeface \ old standard tt \

4 May 2010 •2 notes • Comments
“The most immediate business goal of all Condé Nast websites is to generate print subscriptions.”

(No, seriously.)

In other news, archivists discovered documents from early in John D. Rockefeller’s career saying the most immediate business goal of Standard Oil was to generate more whaling expeditions.

Filed under \ dead media \ print \ web \ business \

20 April 2010 •0 notes • Comments
Worst Alert Box Ever? File this as an unintended consequence of the pop-up blocking age. Confirm navigation windows are lifesavers for web mail clients and web-based collaborative document editors. But they’re also of the last remaining ways to ensure your pop-up message gets seen by the user. This shot, from Chrome running on OS X, is pretty bad. There’s no actual “close” button, and it’s entirely ambiguous whether “Stay on this Page” or “Leave this Page” takes you to the survey—which turns out not to be such a problem because both of them do just that. The language on IE/Windows XP is arguably more confusing, but for me, is less horrific in practice. The “X” closes and takes you to the survey, OK takes you to where you had intended to go, and “cancel” takes you to the survey. While none of the links in the IE rendering allow you to cancel accidental navigation away from the page, at least strict adherence to the written instructions and standard workflow of “confirm navigation” windows allows you to negotiate this pop-up more or less without incident. I should add that I am not entirely blameless in this. This pop-up appears on a site that I am affiliated with, though I hasten to add that it was a) conceived of above my pay grade and b) implemented by a contractor. Still, sabotaging it is a near-daily contemplation.

Worst Alert Box Ever?

File this as an unintended consequence of the pop-up blocking age. Confirm navigation windows are lifesavers for web mail clients and web-based collaborative document editors. But they’re also of the last remaining ways to ensure your pop-up message gets seen by the user.

This shot, from Chrome running on OS X, is pretty bad. There’s no actual “close” button, and it’s entirely ambiguous whether “Stay on this Page” or “Leave this Page” takes you to the survey—which turns out not to be such a problem because both of them do just that.

The language on IE/Windows XP is arguably more confusing, but for me, is less horrific in practice. The “X” closes and takes you to the survey, OK takes you to where you had intended to go, and “cancel” takes you to the survey.

While none of the links in the IE rendering allow you to cancel accidental navigation away from the page, at least strict adherence to the written instructions and standard workflow of “confirm navigation” windows allows you to negotiate this pop-up more or less without incident.

I should add that I am not entirely blameless in this. This pop-up appears on a site that I am affiliated with, though I hasten to add that it was a) conceived of above my pay grade and b) implemented by a contractor. Still, sabotaging it is a near-daily contemplation.

Filed under \ alert \ pop-up \ ui \ ux \ web \