Design – Page 2 – Confidant Communications Blog

New Confidant Website

I’ve had a slow couple of months business-wise, but the benefit of that is I can work on my own projects. I am happy to report that I have just completed a new website for myself. My WordPress blog (you are here) has not changed, but you will notice that my top-level site has been updated to be completely mobile-compatible using modern day technologies. My previous site used Flash for its primary experience and did have a mobile-compatible fallback but this was never ideal, especially as today’s browsers are making it more difficult to use Flash.

So—the new site is built using the UFront framework. This is a very interesting and useful tool because it uses the same Haxe source code which compiles for both client (Javascript) and server (PHP). The framework is able to cache resources such as the site template, and it builds pages client-side whenever possible. It will remotely load only the data it needs to build each new page. The result is that the site is super fast. If you watch your network activity as you browse my portfolio, you will see that each new page requires only a few kilobytes, and browsing previously viewed pages will have nearly no network activity at all. If JavaScript is disabled, the site looks identical and pages will be built server-side instead.

For graphics, the site detects high-resolution (e.g. “Retina”) devices and serves high resolution images to them if they are available on the server. The top-level site navigation features a single SVG graphic for the menu. The graphic is embedded in the site template, where it serves as a graphic library allowing me to have the same display code used for both the menu and the headers. Animation effects are achieved using only CSS3 transforms, which saves the user from having to download any JavaScript libraries.

Something I wish was different is that Webkit-based browsers like Chrome and Safari for desktop don’t render fonts nicely when perspective transforms are applied to page elements. I was able to remedy this fairly easily for portfolio items, but pages at the second level of my hierarchy are a bit fuzzy. My hope is that these browsers make improvements which remedy this for me.

As a benefit to the Haxe community and a thank you to other people who provided coding help, I have released my full UFront source code on Github.

Thanks for reading!

Making Things Last

I have an oil painting hanging in my home—a landscape of a lake reflecting the sunset that burns beyond a far-off mountain. I know enough about art to know that it is mediocre in terms of execution, style and composition. However I love the painting dearly because whenever I see it I am reminded of my grandmother who painted it.

I reflect on this and wonder what my children will have to remember me by. I dabble in music, poetry, writing, photography, illustration and artwork. I’ve produced a lot of things professionally over the years in both graphic design and programming. Yet a large percentage of my stuff is in digital form, and this worries me a bit. I see these problems:

Storage media becomes obsolete and incompatible much too rapidly, and it deteriorates over time.
File formats, especially interactive media, also become obsolete very rapidly.
Online storage services aren’t bulletproof and access can be lost due to human error.
If I die, who will be willing and able to track down all of this stuff I’ve stored in various places?

Right now, my solution to the above problems is eclectic. I try to keep most stuff on my one computer and to keep a reliable hard drive backup. Right after I’m done this article, I intend to review whatever instructions are left for accessing this and my other things which are stored online. Just like I told myself last year. And every year before.

What about code?

I will admit that when I write code, my primary goal is for it to be useful right now for the task at hand. I can’t help but wonder however whether my code will be useful many year from now.

If you follow me on Twitter for any length of time you will soon learn that I am an advocate of the Haxe language. It has been around for ten years now, and although it isn’t extremely popular, it is extremely versatile and can be compiled not only for multiple platforms but also multiple other languages.

In a nutshell, I see that code written in Haxe is going to have a very strong likelihood of being useful many years from now, no matter what other technologies come along.

But let’s gain a larger perspective on these issues:

Does any of this matter, and will anyone care?

I went to a presentation by Stefan Sagmeister a few months ago, and he talked a lot about happiness. He had some good insights about how to be happy, but it left me wondering: is that what life is about? Does it do any good to pursue happiness during this lifetime when it is just a speck on the timeline of eternity? His show was preceded by a presentation by the wonderfully talented Brian Kachur who made the point that creative people need to spend less time worrying or grumping, and more time making “cool shit”. That resonated with me a bit more than Stefan’s presentation, and it got me reflecting more on the meaning of it all.

Why is stuff cool? It seems to me that it’s about the audience and not yourself. I’ve joked before that I can be cool all by myself at home, but I don’t really believe it. Something is cool because it is judged to be so by others. We have a relationship with and obligation to the audience of whatever we make. I also believe that when we are focused on serving others, we are more likely to forget our own problems and therefore more likely to be happy. But happiness must not be the end goal.

Because it can entertain and inspire, communication design is an opportunity to do good. It is being good that will make people remember you and love you. That’s why I love my grandmother’s painting—it is because I loved her and it helps me remember her.

I want to take this idea yet another step further. I mentioned about our audience judging our works to be cool or good. Will we have the same audience many generations from now? I think about how much I know about my great-great-grandparents and I have to answer no. There is only one judge left after that amount of time, and I know my works will be remembered and written in his book forever. With no data loss.

A New Saskatchewan Logo

We have had conservative leadership both in our province and our country for a few years now, with mixed results. I will try not to trumpet my own political views but I feel the need to speak up about a recent action by the Saskatchewan Party.

For you non-Saskies out there, you should know that we have a very nice logo that in recent years has fell out of usage, apparently because its strong agricultural imagery is no longer representative of our overall industry outlook:

When it was first proposed that we develop a new logo, the idea was met with a fair bit of resistance. So for a while, the province resorted to using our coat of arms:

I thought this was a fine compromise. However, in recent years the Saskatchewan Party leadership has quietly begun using the logo below (I found versions in a number of colour variations):

While I could comment on the low-key methods they used to introduce the logo, my main issues are with the design itself. I believe in constructive criticism, so instead of just slamming it point by point, let me show you how I would fix it.

1. Let’s clean up that type shall we? Put the “of” back to a subservient role where it belongs, and go back to good old Helvetica.

2. What are those swooshy things? People flying right over our province, that’s what. What we need here is to change the swooshes to come from within the province. That way we can be known as a fountain of sorts. We export all sorts of good things, so let’s show it.

3. I think we need more swooshes and more symbolism. Let’s put in some growy-looking shapes that are reminiscent of the old sheaf logo, and a sun rising.

4. Green and gold? Identical to the ruling party’s colours? Come on. We are the “Land of Living Skies” (if our license plate is to be believed) so why not use a palette which is reminiscent of a nice sunset:

There you have it: a properly designed, party-neutral logo that properly represents our thriving province. I am against spec work, by the way, so if you want to use this logo you will have to elect me as the leader of some rival party and then vote me into office based on my other merits. If elected I propose that we institute the new identity on April 1, 2015.