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James Wanless

designer :: collaborative technologist :: endorphin junkie

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design archive

Customizing menus and widgets for my new WordPress theme

I have a history of somewhat routinely tweaking or fully redesigning my theme, but it’s usually just a matter of moving some elements around, changing a colour here and there and calling it a day. With the release of WordPress 3.0, I took a slightly different approach this time. This release brings with it some [...]

August 22nd, 2010 :: design, technology :: 10 comments

Anticipating intentions and meeting expectations

This week was a frustrating and interesting experience at work. At the end of the week prior, I finally launched the new design of our program catalogue. It’s a little hard to explain or show what this means. It’s a new interface for a specific kind of site that will blend two sources of program data together once program staff update their content …

June 13th, 2009 :: design :: 0 comments

Can you really design experience?

I don’t think so. I often think of the way we phrase things or the terms we use to refer to things. While ‘user experience design’ is actually in my own work title, I don’t think it applies to what I do …

April 30th, 2009 :: design :: 0 comments

Web trends interactive map

This came by way of a couple intermediaries, but it’s cool nonetheless. In the embed above, you can zoom in as deep as you want and pan and drag to see web domain trends and more. A great way of visualizing the state of the web …

April 8th, 2009 :: design, technology :: 0 comments

Is it Cancer or Walmart?

This is actually a still that I pulled from here, but you’ll find it more interesting if you go to the Flash animation …

March 27th, 2009 :: design :: 0 comments

A facelift I can probably stay with

I’ve always been a little schizophrenic about the designs I slap on my web sites. I really like mucking around with XHTML and CSS, but don’t have time to play with it in my spare time anymore …

March 19th, 2009 :: design :: 0 comments

Don Norman from TED2003 on design

What makes for good design? Don Norman has an interesting take on what design is. For him, design works (or at least it did in 2003) on three elements – visceral, behavioural and emotional …

March 9th, 2009 :: design :: 0 comments

Low Fi Concept Demos

Originally got this at Konigi. Very effective.

March 2nd, 2009 :: design :: 0 comments

Ridiculous rollovers add nothing

Sometimes a nifty CSS or Javascript trick to provide contextual information or a useful visual cue to your users adds a real touch. The web is full of good examples. Below are not three of them. Sure, Web Designer Wall has some good tutorials, the requisite colourful background, drop shadows and is a nice looking visual piece of art. It seems to suffer from a general lack of focus that often happens (at least for me) when everything is colourful. However, that’s not what I’m driving at here …

February 16th, 2009 :: design :: 2 comments

Siftables, a brilliant interface

I already bookmarked and tweeted this, brought to my attention by one of my RRU cohort. However, as I thought about the educational implications for such a usable human-computer interface, the possibilities seem only limited by programming and concept …

February 13th, 2009 :: design, technology :: 0 comments

Slight re-design launched

It’s not a massive change by any means, but I made some template adjustments over the past couple weeks and published them today. I don’t do a lot of colourful Photoshop work, so that’s not where I focus my efforts. I’ve found the variety of ways I’ve approached my own site design in the past haven’t really leverage my personal domain as a digital hub, so I’m hoping now I’ve done a bit better job of that …

December 10th, 2008 :: design :: 0 comments

Testing designs on non-functional prototypes

I find myself grappling with the odd project management and user feedback issue as I trundle through the big project that takes up the bulk of my working day at present (and likely will through to next summer). In particular one issue has been eating at me for a while. I find it challenging to [...]

September 16th, 2008 :: design :: 0 comments

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