If you are anything like me, you probably experienced quite a few instances of sports bewilderment while watching the Beijing Olympics over the last few weeks. Dozens of sports were showcased, many of which are entirely foreign to the average viewer. As a result, I’d wager the following questions were pondered by millions:
“What’s the name of this sport, again?”
“How exactly do the rules/scoring work?”
“Is this a qualifying heat, or the final race?”
“Which team would the winner of this match go on to play?”
“Which star players on the court/field should I be keeping an eye on?”
“What other related events will this athlete be competing in?”
While a viewer could answer any of these questions by visiting websites like NBCOlympics.com or Wikipedia, this equates to lousy user experience. Most viewers aren’t going to want to get off the couch. Even those armed with a laptop have to take their eyes off the TV, pull up a browser, and wade through the website to find their obscure answer. Ugh.
But there’s good news! I would wager that by the 2012 Olympic games, viewers will be able to find answers to all of the questions above (and more) simply by using their TV’s remote control. How? By using TV widgets. Continue reading »
Remember when you were a kid and used to think about the future? If you were like me, visions of the future were full of hoverboards, flying cars, and shiny chrome everything. There was no doubt the future would be awesome, even if it seemed forever away.
Things seem quite different as an adult, especially one living in the early 21st century. The future no longer waits quietly over the horizon, but is instead standing at the doorstep. At times, peering ahead one or two decades seems somewhat unfathomable, as our lives change so much with each passing year. How to put it all into perspective?
How to setup your Nintendo Wii to watch online video on your TV! An overview and walkthrough, breaking down not only the steps required but also why this matters.
For far too long I have gone without sharing the great experience I recently had ordering eyeglasses online. Time to get the word out, at last!
The Past? It’s a blur…
Rewind a few months back, when a gathering forever of accumulated eye strain had finally pushed me to the limit. I bit the bullet and went to see my opthamologist. After a few visits, he advised I get glasses. Fair enough! I’d be able to see, right?
My next move was a stroll on down to a few nearby retail eyeglass shops, where I was consequently shocked. Glasses are expensive. Really expensive. Even the ones on the lower end of the scale at the cheapo store. Throw in some extra lens fees and not much help from my vision plan? The final count was way up there.
Looked like I didn’t need glasses that bad. And so it went, week after week of me refusing to give in so easily. But then it happened — a happenstance reader comment at the bottom of a random blog, and my glasses life was changed forever!
But wait, there’s hope!
I had found a post titled Adventures in $40 Eyeglasses, and leaving me hugely intrigued. I read the post, scoured the comments, followed the links, rinsed and repeated. This was exactly what I had been looking for.
Long story short? You can order glasses online. The very same glasses you’d get at any of the chain/retail places. And they’re cheaper… so much cheaper. Reading comment after comment and post after post, I was as good as sold. Glasses for $40, give or take? Where do I sign up. Continue reading »
It finally happened: Hasbro, the creator of the Scrabble board game, was successful in getting the uber-popular Scrabulous app removed from Facebook. In doing so, they may well have alienated a huge number of would-be fans.
The point could be well argued that Scrabulous was in fact creating value for Hasbro’s product. After all, what board game would a Scrabulous fan be eager to play when hanging out face-to-face with friends and family on vacations or during the holidays, for example? Scrabble, of course! But this may not be the case anymore, as bad tastes can linger. Continue reading »
Early in the design & development cycle of a website or application, it can be all too easy to be seduced by the endless ideas for features and functionality. You may find yourself saying “My tool will do this, and this, and this, and this!”
Having ideas rain from the sky is great, but can become problematic when you must begin developing a concrete plan for how to proceed. Suddenly, the seemingly infinite ranks of ideas begin to fight over the very finite number of chairs in the room. As such, clarity of the tool’s purpose will go out the window. Trouble!
In recently dealing with this problem, I poured over sketches and scribbles for a good while before wrestling away a working solution. It breaks down as follows.
Anyone who has set out to learn Photoshop, Illustrator, or any other design tool has probably tackled several tutorials along the way. Online tutorials are plentiful, surely an invaluable resource for those who seek to learn. However, tutorials alone are certainly not the end-all, be-all of design education. As good as any lesson might be, the true knowledge you take away depends largely on what you bring to the table. Continue reading »
In my recent work for Professional Baseball Training I had the task of designing a logo. This was a challenge that excited me from the outset, as it brought to mind the countless hours I used to spend as a child sketching the logos of my favorite sports teams. It was with these fond memories in mind that I looked back at the evolution of sports logos of recent decades, taking careful note of how things have changed over time.
It did not take much searching before I stumbled upon Chris Creamer’s SportsLogos.net, a “virtual museum” dedicated to sports logos & uniforms. This site has been invaluable for my research needs, as it provides quite the in-dept historical record for all teams in every sporting league you can imagine. In this post I would like to share some of my findings.
I am currently reading Universal Principles of Design (Lidwell et al), an excellent book recommended by Andy Rutledge in one of his podcast episodes. The book gives an overview and example of 100 different fundamental aspects of design. While most all of the topics covered are intuitively grasped, I find it immensely helpful to learn the concrete terminology & concepts used by the larger community. Time and again, I found myself saying “Ah, so that’s what they call that!”
This experience is especially true in looking back at the recent design & launch of my portfolio. Little by little, my growing design vocabulary has been able to quantify certain approaches, behaviors, and principles I employed in my quest for the perfect design. This is both for better and for worse, for there were definitely some design pitfalls I fell victim to over the past few months. At the top of this pile was my misguided approach to the design itself. The story is as follows. Continue reading »
It is done, finally! My long-awaited web & graphic design portfolio has officially launched. This has been quite overdue, I must say. But here we are, upon the high seas. Or, safely in orbit. You pick the metaphor. Continue reading »
What's this about?
You are reading the blog of David Potsiadlo, a Maryland-based web designer who works hard to dig up creative solutions to life's design needs.
