 Christopher Butler Strategy and Resourcing Hi, I'm Chris. I've been working at Newfangled since September, 2004. | Chris Butler's Blog |
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Free People Employee Blog
August 24, 2007 at 3:35 pm by Chris| My sister-in-law is a designer at Free People. They have a blog here. |
Tags: design blogging
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Embedding a Google Map
August 14, 2007 at 4:35 pm by ChrisUntil I found mapgenerator.net, embedding a simple Google map using an iFrame wasn't very pretty since it would include the navigation and query tools with the map. Now, there is an easy and free way to isolate the map (see below)!
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Tags: web-development software google
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Blasting the Myth of the Fold
August 14, 2007 at 3:45 pm by Chris
Eric linked me to Boxes and Arrows, which is currently featuring this article. Please read it! I completely agree that most users are very comfortable with vertical scrolling and have likely come to expect it of their web browsing/reading experience. The author cited this article by everyone's favorite web guru, Jakob Nielson, which is also worth a read (if you can bear to look at it without crying ;-) ).Update: This was also a helpful article describing the new roles of the hompage.  |
Tags: web-development user-interface-design design
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It's All About Video!
August 7, 2007 at 4:00 pm by ChrisThis year seems to be all about video. The good thing is, we know it, and our clients know it too. But more importantly, our developers know how to do it well. Below are three examples of video applications for three very different clients.
On the left is a screenshot from www.geiconsultants.com, a website we built that went live in June. GEI is a large consulting firm that wanted to use video on their new site to showcase their people and give visitors a better sense for who they are as a company. While video is showcased all over the site, some pages have a special two-video module, which our developer, George Wamichi, built using ajax to allow a user to toggle between two different videos. (Try it out here.) Another cool aspect of what George built is that the video player and video files are both pulled from another database that the client controls and matched up using our tools. This way, the flash player interface and the video files can stay separate and not clog up the site's bandwidth. We also worked with Studio Module on this project, which is why it looks so darn good!
Pictured to the right is the homepage for a website we just built for Rottman Creative Group, an agency in the Baltimore area that focuses on work for non-profits and associations. Their portfolio is full of awesome work, which they can upload to their site in almost any format (quicktime, flash compositions, flash video, images, etc.) thanks to our developer, Steve Brock. Being a creative agency, Rottman designed their own site and had the zany idea of slightly rotating many video files that appear on the site, which left Steve scratching his head as to how to program the site to do what they needed. Of course, Steve always comes through- even if it takes him all night! This tool allows Rottman to upload any kind of video at a normal size and aspect ratio, and it appears skewed to fit the playful design without any degradation of quality. 
Pictured to the left is the video player on the homepage of www.ineoquest.com. IneoQuest creates hardware for IP video, so they naturally wanted to use video on their site to promote their products. What they needed was a simple flash-based video player that served up videos as they produced them, and which allowed the user to select them from a queue. Our developer, Forrest Oliphant, built this player, which became the basis for a NewfangledCMS video component that we offer today! The visual design was created by our own design team, led by Creative Director Justin Kerr. I have a feeling that we're just now scratching the surface of how video is going to impact what we do at Newfangled. Don't believe me? Check out how many of Eric's newsletters have been about video (or use video)! Good thing Eric knows how to predict the future... |
Tags: user-interface-design software video newfangled
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Predicting the Future
August 6, 2007 at 12:00 pm by Chris
In his 2001 book, Time Travel in Einstein's Universe, astrophysicist J. Richard Gott includes a chapter on predicting the future based upon the current length of a phenomenon's existence. The idea, based upon the Copernican concept that, as observers, we are looking from a non-special vantage point, proposes that one can determine with a 95% rate of accuracy the future span of existence for any phenomenon.Gott realized this during a 1969 visit to the Berlin Wall, when it occurred to him that he could make a guess as to how much longer the wall would exist based upon knowing that it had already existed for 8 years. He reasoned that since there was nothing special about his visit, he was observing the wall at some random point int time between the beginning and end of its existence. To play it safe, he speculated that there was a 95% chance that he was observing the wall during the middle 95% of its existence (or in other words, that there was a 95% chance that he was not viewing the wall during the first 2.5% or last 2.5% of its existence). Ok, so what's so special about that? Gott reasoned, then, that he could use these percentages relative to the amount of time the wall had already existed to predict how much longer it might exist. 
Left is a diagram of several phenomena and their potential future lifespans based upon Gott's Copernican prediction method, which he submitted for the January 2000 issue of Time magazine. He uses the 95% chance that (in the year 2000) he was observing these things from a random point during the middle 95% of their existence to estimate how much longer they might exist. According to this method, the internet, based upon its 31 years of existence in 2000 was 95% likely to exist for more than .75 more years but less than 1,209 more years. I have added Newfangled Web Factory with today's 2007 predictions to the list. According to this formula, Newfangled will have a greater potential future lifespan in 2010 because it will have existed for longer then than it has now.Note that the longer something exists, the longer it is likely to exist! As Gott puts it, "Things that have been around for a long time tend to stay around for a long time." Incidentally, he cites the original list of the 7 Wonders of the World, cited in approximately 150 C.E. during the time of Antipater of Sidon, as an example: "Two of the Seven Wonders (the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Colossus of Rhodes) no longer existed at the time the list was made, but five still did: the statue of Zeus at Olympia, the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Pharos of Alexandria, and the pyramids of Egypt. Of the first four wonders that had each been in existence for less than 400 years at the time the list was made, not one is still here today. But the oldest, the pyramids, which were then 2,400 years old, have survived." I'll take this opportunity to point out that Newfangled's 12-year lifespan puts it in 'pyramidian' scale in terms of web development companies! |
Tags: books newfangled the-future
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