Design.PBS: The blog of the designers of PBS Interactive.

Huh? There are no women in web design? But—scratches head—am not I a woman? Well, that would be a yes, however, if you attend one of the many web conferences or read about the "rock star" web designers—Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman, Jason Santa Maria, Dan Cederholm—often women aren't mentioned or included. If they are, it is one of the same handful always mentioned—Veerle Pieters, Molly E. Holzschlag (Molly) or Larissa Meek anyone? I don't begrudge Veerle, Molly or Larissa their due but I would love to see a few more names become common-place because there are some wonderful women out there shaping the web. I work with some of them.

I guess I could ask the typical questions of why there seems to be some invisible boundary women can't cross in web design. Is it because women are afraid of the "technical aspects" of it? Is it because women tend to be the caregivers in a family, so they don't have time to speak at conferences? Are we not being asked to speak at conferences? Are we too scared or meek to toot our own horns? Is it because the "man" is trying to keep us down (the was a joke by the way)?

I could pose many more questions and could even speculate about why this seems to be an issue but…I won't. I no more have the answers to these questions than anyone else, I only have opinions and opinions aren't facts—as much as some people would want you to believe they are. What I do know is that every generation—no matter the gender—needs someone of their own gender to look up to. Young women need to see that they too can become successful in their field if they chose web design as that field.

All that said, there is good news, despite the numbers, web conference events are attempting to be more inclusive and we're seeing at least one or two women as guest speakers at a majority of them. So I figured in celebration of Paper Clip Day (I know it was in May but I missed it), I would like to steer you towards some female web designers who are doing good work.

Divas of Web design

Jina Bolton | Sushi & Robots

Twitter is 140-character chunks of immediacy written by people that matter to you. Your friends, famous web designers, favorite directors and actors, or even childhood heroes. The oldest content on Twitter's homepage for me, right now, is one hour old. The oldest. The most recent tweet was written two minutes ago by some designer I've never met who lives in Canada. It reads:

Rethinking the whole "giant burrito before client meeting" idea.

Did news about this Canadian's gastrointestinal situation make my life better? YES. Just the fact that it occurred right as I was eating my own lunch, for one thing, made it relevant. I also sympathize acutely with having the vulgar details of bodily functions make client meetings uncomfortable. We spend so much of our time acting like perfectly running professional machines: it's pleasurable to have a moment of sympathy with the inescapable biological humanity of another designer.

This is why I get so impatient when I see lists like Matthew Inman's Ten Things You Need to Stop Tweeting About, which advises against tweeting about what you're eating, your workout, out-of-context thoughts, or your kid-dog-cat-goat-or whatever else. These rules prohibit many things that are patently good, and don't even touch what's really at work in making some tweets more interesting than others.

One of the three known "perfect vellum" copies of The Gutenberg Bible, is owned and displayed at the Library of Congress. It is important to understand its impact, not just in the history of graphic design and typography, but as one of the most significant documents in the development of western culture.

It was a remarkable typographic and technical achievement, Gutenberg had to overcome a variety of difficulties to produce the two volume edition. However, producing multiples of a book went beyond a practical solution, it changed the way we think and relate to one another. According to Marshall McLuhan, (I'm simplifying his ideas considerably), we moved from story telling = group, shared knowledge, to print = individual, specialized knowledge. This ability to distribute information took the power of interpretation out of the hands of the few (literary intelligentsia) and gave it to us all.

Where: Library of Congress, 2nd floor of the Jefferson Building.
When: Monday - Saturday, 10am - 5pm.
Metro stop: "Capitol South" on the Blue and Orange lines. Two blocks north on 1st St SE

For more on McLuhan's (prophet of the electronic age) interpretation read Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man or The Book of Probes.

Please reduce, reuse, and recycle these ideas.

A wireframe is very simple design that lays out the essential elements that go on each of your web pages.

Why wireframe?
I have always used wireframes as part of my development process. Whether it's a rough sketch up or an extensive digitized version, I feel that wireframes help properly structure the design and are invaluable to projects. If wireframing isn't part of your initial design process yet, you should definitely try it out!

By laying out wireframes you can visualize without worrying about the colors, graphics, typography, alignment and other aesthetically pleasing details until later on. Instead you are able to focus on content, architecture, functionality, usability and a phenomenal user experience, the important stuff! Think of wireframes as blueprints. You wouldn't lay down the bricks without some sort of plan now would you?

A flashmob is a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief time, then quickly disperse.

One of the Flashmobs I witnessed took place at the National Mall, couple hundred gathered and carried out a massive pillow fight. Good thing AOLers caught on this tradition and used it to create designs in a quick fashion. Also, its a great deviation from your regular routine and lets you think outside the screen.

Last Friday, Oct 9, PBS Design team had their first flash mob with four participants and four different topics: Photography, Type, Pattern and Colors.

Erin Lassahn

An integral part of any good design is color selection. If you're anything like me, you troll sites looking for pleasing palettes, maybe you even have ColourLovers bookmarked and make regular visits to the site. However, sometimes a photo can inspire your palette and you want an easier way to save and create the color table from the photo. It can be done quickly with Photoshop in three easy steps.

1. The first step in this process is to convert your photo from RGB color mode to Index Color Mode. Experiment with your own settings but you can use the settings in the image below to start with.

Over the weekend I watched Wait Until Dark, the 1967 film starring Audrey Hepburn, Richard Crenna, Alan Arkin, and the awesomely named Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. Here's the summary from Netflix:

"Audrey Hepburn was nominated for an Academy Award for her portrayal of Susy Hendrix, a blind woman terrorized by a criminal (Alan Arkin) who's after a stash of heroin that was planted in her apartment -- inside a doll -- without her knowledge. He manages to isolate Susy, and she must find a way to defeat him in a thrilling, chilling battle of wits."

Based on a play from 1966, Wait Unitl Dark is a textbook example (and that is not meant to be derogatory ) of the idea "If you introduce a gun in the first act, be sure to have it fire in the third." Through out the movie, small elements and conversation pieces grow and become important during the climax. Characters expose motivations at the end, all in relation to previous set pieces and dialogue.

And while there aren't any guns, there sure are a lot of knives.

"But Jones", you say, "what does this have to do with design? What made you even think this could be a post?"

Simple: If you introduce a gun in the first act, you should fire it in the third. Stop making arbitrary design decisions just because something seems cool.

This entry is the opinion of the writer and it is the writer's alone.

Audio on the internet has generally been an after thought. From over-used midi loops to badly compressed, royalty-free sound effects, audio is an abused, non-visual design element.

Originally, when I started this entry, I wanted to showcase, well... the good, bad, and you get the point. However, while searching around on the internet it became wicked-clear to me that only a handful of industry-specific sites actually care about the soundscape they are creating. My hat goes off to you all in the gaming, movie, education and journalism industries.

Now for the rest of you. Lets talk. I know audio is not meant for everyone, however audio is not by the same token excluding anyone. By this I mean you can have your corporate, non-profit, hibbity hubbity website and with just a few well thought out audio bits create a non-visual level of communication with your user that will only enhance the experience. Do note "well thought out audio". Those same audio triggers if linked to some canned audio effect will decrease the user experience.

Product designers use foam to mock up products all the time. But it's not the first thing you think of using for UI design. Yet, it was a perfect material for teachers to use to prototype a video player. Add to that a tested method for brainstorming ideas and you can quickly dash (or SCAMPER*) to your next great idea.

Here is the process I used with ten teachers—with widely varying degrees of tech savvy—to create a video player and customize it in the space of a half hour. Why foam? Because it was immediate and non-threatening. The teachers looked at it as a craft project. We started with where they are, not where we want them to be. Taking the tech out of it put them at ease and produced some remarkable results.

1. Each participant was given a bag with a variety of pieces of foam, from an art supply store, in various geometric shapes and colors.

2. To introduce the exercise I asked them not to invent but to reinvent. This is an important idea to emphasize to minimize the fear of creating we all share. Reinvention is the primary means we arrive at a new idea or product. Most ideas are evolutionary, not revolutionary. I began the with the story of the Honorary Chairman of SONY Akio Morita and his idea to combine two devices to create a new entertainment product. SONY engineers had shelved a project that they believe had failed: the smallest possible stereo tape recorder. Chairman Morita saw the potential of this tape player when combined with another new idea—light weight headphones—and the SONY Walkman was born. "This is the product that will satisfy those young people who want to listen to music all day. They'll take it everywhere with them, and they won't care about record functions." The Walkman led to the iPod—and It was easy to find one of those in the room.

This post began sometime last week: I was in a meeting and the subject of links opening in new windows came up. Somebody was noting how it had caused a user problems on a certain site. Internally, I flew into a rage. IT'S TWO-THOUSAND-@#$%ing-NINE, more than two millennia since Jesus first came to earth to tell people not to use target="_blank" on their links, and we're still dealing with this crap?

Like any mature adult, I dealt with this by throwing together a bookmarklet to express my rage and righteous damnation of all links that open in a new window. You, too, may use the fruits of that indignation by dragging the Link Witch Hunt to your bookmarks toolbar. Use it to conduct a witch hunt on any page you're viewing to scour it for offensive links. If the site passes, it gets a benevolent green congratulatory message. If it does not, however, the severity of its offense will be judged and all links angrily flagged for the world to see.

With this tool in one hand and a torch burning in the other, I went in search of particularly offensive sites. Our own PBS.org was quickly burned, Facebook's sins were even more flagrant, and--naturally--the sites of a few of my web gurus were revealed to be utterly pristine.

I must admit I shed a few tears when I had to tie Twitter to the stake, too.

Over the weekend, all of this burning and damnation caused me to reflect on a few things. Did I really have the right attitude about links that opened in a new window? Were they as bad as I felt they were? Were they equally bad in all instances?