Whimmydiddle ... by Spencer Winters http://www.spencerwinters.com/blog/ Whymmydiddle is the personal weblog of none other than Spencer Winters, of Spencer Winters Design. I love you. en-us Zeldman Redesigns Wow, the zeldman.com redesign. What a suprise, to come home after a night out, and see the site totally rearranged. An exciting change.

What I like

  • The General Concept. I like the large heading, the centered content/sidebar, and the offset tabs.
  • Less minimal. He got away from the standard css buttons for nav, and went with something more visually pleasing - the upsidedown tabs.
  • Typography. I’m really into the revisitation of typography in the new layout. I like the all caps in the post headings, as used in the new ALA.
  • Relative Font Sizes. The fact that zeldman made the plunge sets a good exambple for all of us. I know I’ve always just stuck with pixles, but if zeldman’s going with font size keywords (coupled with the box model hack), there must be something to say for it.
  • The Banner. I’m digging that banner. Recomendation: Some rotating images.

What I Don’t Like

  • Seperated Nav. I don’t really see the distinction between “daily, dwws, glam, and classics” and “about, contact, externals, and XML.” Yet, they’re seperated into two different nav styles. The first four as tabs, and the second four as the old style of buttons, in the sidebar. I guess the first set is content, and the second set is metadata, but I don’t know that the distinction is strong enough.
  • A little rough. Some of the graphics, particularly in the header, seem a little rough around the edges. Then again, it’s starting to grow on me, and I can see that that’s sort of the style. He also said it was a rough draft.

Overall, my few complaints are feeble and I’m only half sure of my opinion on either of them. The redesign is a welcome change.

]]> http://www.spencerwinters.com/blog/archives/2003/12/20/zeldman_redesigns New Kicks I purchased a new pair of shoes today, from Trickwood in downtown Kirkland (nice location).

Berra 3s, black leather with gold trim.

]]> http://www.spencerwinters.com/blog/archives/2003/12/09/new_kicks Manik Skateboards Manik Skateboards, a native Seattle board company, has just launched a new site. Coincidentaly, I just purchased a Manik deck after my last setup was stolen (Cindy, you’re my number one suspect).

The website is pretty, although the information architecture is a little bit scattered. It definatly gets the feel of the company accross to the user. Enough of that though, the real problem is that the site is entirely Flash based, yet utilizes none of the flashy things that make Flash flash (apart from the obnoxious beeps which ring through the air when hovering over each link and a few dissolves, which are easily JavaScriptable).

The accessability and page load time of this site could be increased ten fold (that’s not an actual statistic, please don’t refute it) if it was authored using the famed XHTML/CSS combo. Something about watching a bar go accross the screen for a good ten seconds while waiting for a page to load and then being confronted with a page of a couple text links (that beep) just doesn’t seem right.

Please, use Flash when it is needed.

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