Monthly Archives:

June 2006

Posted on June 21, 2006 by Chris LoSacco

Designing For The Common Good

As designers that define product, we want to make everybody happy. Unfortunately, the larger your user population, and the broader your set of user profiles, the more difficult it becomes. The following experience highlights the danger of being everything to everyone in design.

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Posted on June 14, 2006 by Richard Ziade

Which "Design" Are We Talking About?

One of the themes we constantly hammer home to our clients is the value of design. It's a topic that cannot be summed up in a few sentences but rather requires a long and hopefully engaging dialogue about why investing in design is good for business. An initial hurdle we have to tackle before that conversation can happen is what exactly we mean by "design."

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Posted on June 8, 2006 by Richard Ziade

25 New Ways To Use RSS

Over at the arc90 lab, we've posted 25 alternative uses for RSS. Most people view RSS as a neat technology that makes it easier to track blogs and news feeds. We see a lot more than that. More broadly defined, it's a push technology that allows you to let a content or information provider know that you want to be on top of their information. That information can be just about anything: sports scores, tracking packages, ebay auctions. Anything worth being notified about can find a potential use in RSS.

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Posted on June 6, 2006 by Chris LoSacco

Good Interface Design = Money

As a total devotee of next generation design methodologies and web technologies (and other cool sounding -ologies), I'm psyched about blog.arc90.com and the opportunity to bring some of my insights to the party. You can call me Chris LoSacco. I'm an interface designer (among other things) at Arc90. Today, I want to step back and talk about why interface design is important at all.

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Posted on June 2, 2006 by Richard Ziade

A Simpler, Hosted Version of Sidenotes

The kids at Arc90 simply wouldn't leave well enough alone. The response to Sidenotes has been great, but we've found that a lot of people had trouble incorporating the script into their blogging platforms.

So we've whipped together a hosted version that requires one line of code to be added to your blog templates. Anywhere in the <head> portion of your template (whether Blogger, Movable Type, Wordpress, etc.), add the following line of code:

<script language="JavaScript" type="Text/JavaScript" src="http://arc90.com/lab/tools/c/javascript/arc90hosted_sidenote.js"> </script>

That's it! No need to upload javascript files or tweak CSS. Just add sidenotes the same old way as instructed in step 3 of the Sidenotes instructions. Also, be sure to rebuild your entries after you've updated the template.

Happy sidenoting!

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Posted on June 2, 2006 by Richard Ziade

A Super-Snazzy Syntax Highlighter

Some people have asked us how we made our code examples in the lab look all snazzy. It's some slick unobtrusive javascript that lights up your conventional <textarea> so your code is nicely formatted and color-coded.

The script is called dp.SyntaxHighlighter. It’s a free download licensed under LGPL. It’s extremely easy to implement so have at it.

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Posted on June 1, 2006 by Richard Ziade

Unobtrusive Sidenotes : The Aftermath

The response to Unobtrusive Sidenotes has been great. The tool is spreading like crazy (due in large part to Kottke.org and the Digg effect) and the feedback has been great.

Two things we're gonna rack our brains on (over some alcoholic beverage) are:

  1. How do we make the sidenote text work (if possible) or at least gracefully degrade in the RSS feed.
  2. How do we make it ridiculously easy to integrate this into the popular blogging tools. Now we're not saying "Wordpress Plug-In" or anything like that, but who knows...

We'd love to stop everything, take in that feedback and do more stuff but there's all kinds of other tools, experiments and ideas we're queiing up.

Thanks again for all the support. Again, the easiest way to find out the goings-on at Arc90 is to subscribe to the blog & lab feeds (links are in the footer below).

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Posted on June 1, 2006 by Richard Ziade

The Spirit Of Web 2.0

For the past couple of months, we’ve been grappling with how best to market what Arc90 actually does. Are we a design firm? Are we a “web shop” (*shudder*)? Are we all about strategic consulting? It’s hard to distill all the different angles of what we do into a few words (or some sort of “process diagram”).

Luckily, we have a blog that allows us to ramble on and (and on) about all the different aspects of Arc90. After some debate, we begrudgingly agreed to slap the “Web 2.0” label on ourselves. Now, there isn’t an agreed-upon Web 2.0 definition out there. And we’re not only about a laundry list of technologies like tagging and RSS. As a “Web 2.0” consulting firm, I think we’re more about the spirit of Web 2.0 than anything else.

Which of course leads to the next question: what in Sam Hill is the spirit of Web 2.0? Well, for us it’s about:

  • A strong emphasis on good, intuitive, simple, user-centered design.
  • A willingness to question and defy common ways of solving problems.
  • An overriding passion about technology – from design to architecture to development.
  • Having the guts to not only meet client needs, but help guide them to bigger and better things (this is a side-effect of the whole “passion” thing).
  • Evangelizing the notion of “architectural readiness” – helping companies ready themselves for changes to come, and not just react to them.

What excites us about Web 2.0 is that it is a truly organic creation. It’s not borne out of some standards body or anointed by some big corporate behemoth but just sort of sprung out of the intelligence, curiosity and enthusiasm of a widely connected community. RSS. Ajax. Simple APIs. They’re not just technologies but powerful statements against bloat, over-use of technology and beuracracy.

It’s an exciting time to be in technology and we’re glad to be in the middle of it.

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