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I read the news yesterday that Eoin Colfer will be writing another installment of the 5-volume Hitch-Hikers’ Guide To The Galaxy trilogy. This set off alarm bells in my head, even though the project is going ahead with the full blessing of Douglas Adams’ widow, Jane. I am assured by friends who know Jane personally, that this is not a cynical money-making ploy, but is being done “for the fans”. Even though that may be the case, as a long-time avid reader of Douglas’ books, I remain to be convinced that the project is a good idea.

Adams’ writing style was unique and ground-breaking. Even the proposed new author admits he’s terrified at the prospect of following in the great man’s footsteps! This doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence for the outcome.

With many things in life, re-visiting old haunts many years down the line can be a mixed blessing. How many times have you returned to a location much-loved from your childhood, only to find that things have changed beyond all recognition? You can end up wishing you had left well alone.

If this is true of physical places, then we enter a whole new dimension when it comes to the subjective things like art, music and literature. I recently redisovered some 80’s music which I’d almost forgotten. Thankfully, it had lost nothing of it’s shine on hearing it again.  But these were songs by the original artists.

I’m often repelled by modern cover versions of classic songs, and can be heard yelling at the TV or radio that said tune has been murdered. But not always. I prefer Madonna’s version of American Pie, and almost any cover of a Bob Dylan song, over the original!

I also enjoyed the 2005 film of the Hitch-Hikers’ Guide, maybe even a bit more than (with hindsight) the slightly cheesy original TV series. Although made after Douglas’ untimely death, the film was something he had been pursuing for years, trying to find a studio in Hollywood which would remain faithful to the original characters, and live up to his own high standards.

So this brings me back to the Hitch-Hikers’ new installment, “And Another Thing…” Why resurrect the characters now? Not all the fans have been wondering what happened to Ford, Arthur, Zaphod and the others after all this time. I believed that Douglas hadn’t particularly left any unfinished business with the series.

Part of me wants the thing to be a success. But part of me is also dead worried that the new book won’t live up to my expectations. So, best case scenario: I read the new book and love it. Worst case: I read the new book and am left disappointed. It’s a gamble I’ll have to weight up when the tome hits the shelves next autumn. The trouble is, you can’t “un-read” a book once you’ve seen it.

Designing Our Way Through Data

Jeff Veen

Jeff’s opening keynote for @media was very thought provoking, as usual.

He spoke about data visualisation and how diagrams can often show us things more quickly and more intuitively than a table of data is able to.

User Participation + Mass of data = designing for data
Data + metadata = information

Make the data useable, you can make sense of it. Add some styles -> makes it more accessible. Example was a rainfall chart. Boring table gives no indication, you have to parse the figures and work it out. But make an icon in each cell instead - colour darker and a bigger raindrop for indicating more rainfall - suddenly the visualisation makes things easily understood. Beware, “prettification” can go too far, and destroy the underlying data.

Jeff also showed us some notable examples:

John Snow
A Cholera outbreak in 1854 in London killed 500 people in one neighbourhood. He figured out with empirical evidence what was happening by plotting the death locations on a map. The local water pump was infecting people  - pump handle removed -> people stopped dying. He effectively mashed up pump location vs Cholera deaths and proved Cholera was a water-born disease. Lead to the development of  Victorian sewers. Found new way of gaining meaning from data.

Charles Joseph Minard
Map and chart for Napoleon’s troops marching to Moscow [see above]. This showed graphically how the number of Napoleon’s troops dimished with time, and location, as they marched to Moscow. And it also showed vividly that thousands of them died whilst trying to cross a particular river - obviously a dangerous spot - by plotting time/deaths/geographical location, it tells you much more about the data than pure figures would convey. Minard said of his map:

The aim of my carte figurative is … to convey promptly to the eye the relation not given quickly by numbers requiring mental calcuation. Charles Joseph Minard

Harry Beck
Tube map designer - Veen showed us before and after views. The old version was very confusing. Leaving out all the dross made things a lot simpler and more intuitive.

Google Analytics
Simplified things. Don’t plot too many things at once. Inspired by Indiana Jones plane journey - dot per datum on the chart. Don’t junk up things too much - remove “chart junk” and things get more comprehesible.

When to talk to people
Lots at the beginning, tails off in a log graph - compared with cost of changing your mind - the opposite. As launch approaches, expense climbs dramatically.

• Look at history
• Look at data visualisations
• Look at users

To help give instpiration for your designs. Books - Edward Tufte:  “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information”

Jeff’s presentation: slides (pdf) | audio (mp3)

There was a dangerously-tempting bookstall at d.Construct the other week, and I found myself buying two books which have been on my To Be Read list for a while:

Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and AJAX - Christian Heilmann, Apress
I think it will be an excellent companion for the DOM Scripting book I’ve already read by Jeremy Keith. Will do a proper review when I’ve read this in more depth.

Blog Design Solutions - Andy Budd et al, Friends of ED
Great advice for customising your blog. Not just in terms of look and feel, but also advice on hosting your own blog, setting up testing environments, databases etc. I hope to give this blog a “lick of paint” in the near future!

I’ve also recently finished Dan Cederholm’s excellent book:
Bulletproof Web Design - Dan Cederholm, New Riders
This one is a must-read for anybody seriously contemplating standards-based web design. Dan takes common table-based solutions (which can still be seen in the wild), explains why they are not bulletproof, and then reworks the solution in a standards-based way. I was very impressed with the session he did for @media in June, and this takes things even further. A great reference for bulletproof techniques.

The lastest issue of .Net magazine (#154) has an article by Andy Rutledge, in which complains that not enough is done to inspire good design in people who do not come from a design background. And I agree with him.

Ever since the advent of HTML, anyone with a bit of a techie background has been able to put together a home page of their own and let it loose on the web.

In my time, I’ve stumbled across some truely shocking examples of bad design. I’m sure you know the sort of thing - fonts all sizes and clashing colours, forty different typfaces in use; nothing lines up; everything screams at you, and basically you can’t be bothered to see the wood (good content) for the trees (hideous design). Recently, I found the XOXO blog, and I’m afraid it’s assault on my eyeballs prevented me from actually reading the blog to see if there was any useful information there. I just felt ill. [Sorry guys if you read this via trackback, but I'm afraid it's not just a matter of personal taste, there are also usability/accessibility issues which have been resolutely ignored ]

My background is geeky rather than arty (my degree was Electronic Engineering; the only thing we ever “designed” was the odd circuit board layout!). So aside from my latent arty tendencies with my photography, how did I pick up the basics of good design?

When I first started web design (with lovely Notepad) back in 1996, I made all the mistakes a novice can. There are some nasty memories lurking out there in the WayBack Machine! But I later found two books by Robin Williams very useful (no, not that Robin Williams, this one is a woman!). They are:

The Non-Designers’ Design Book - Robin Williams, Peachpit Press
Giving the basic principles of good design, layout, use of space, etc. Robin remembers the four major elements of design by a handy little acronym, I’m sure you’ll be able to work out what it is:

• Contrast
• Repetition
• Alignment
• Proximity

Her book is anything but! It exapans on each of these elements as you go through each chapter. The second is:

The Non-Designers’ Type Book - Robin Williams, Peachpit Press
Which shows you the right and wrong ways to go about using typography in your designs.

Both books are primarily aimed at design for print, and although print and web are quite different in some ways, the principles still hold true for the design of a web page.

If you’re just starting out (or would like to learn about some of the formal grammar of design), you might well find these helpful.

If you’re thinking of dipping your toes into the standards compliance/css development pond (come on in, the water’s fine!), and you aren’t able to afford some of the swanky courses available out there, a good alternative is to read some books by well-respected practitioners in the field, at least to get you started.

Here’s a small selection which I’ve read recently, and have found to be extremely useful. I’ll try to add to the list on an ongoing basis, so you might like to come back and check it again later.

I no particular order (other than the order I’ve read them in!):

• 
  The CSS Anthology - Rachel Andrew, pub Sitepoint
  Excellent all-round introduction to using stylesheets for layout and positioning, with practical real-world examples. Good for people relatively new to CSS - I knew how to change fonts etc but was pretty green regarding CSS for layout until I’d read this and digested it thorougly.
• 
  Build Your Own Standards Compliant Website Using Dreamweaver 8 - Rachel Andrew, Sitepoint
  Invaluable for pointers on getting the most out of Dreamweaver 8 and making sure your code validates nicely, is properly semantic and doesn’t suffer from coad bloat. Good chapter on layout of forms without tables.
• 
  Dreamweaver 8 Unleashed - Zak Ruvalcaba, SAMS
  A big, thick wedge of a book (I’ve actually read most of it but not quite all yet). Excellent advice on using Dreamweaver for dynamic projects. Gives code and method examples for ASP, ASP.NET and PHP server models, which is great as some books limit themselves to one flavour. I currently do most of my dynamic projects with ASP.NET, but in future I’ll be getting to grips with some PHP too, so it’s great not to have to buy another book right from the start.
• 
  The Zen of CSS Design - Dave Shea & Molly E. Holzschlag, New Riders
  The book of the website. Dave and Molly take a few of the excellent examples from the CSS Zen Garden site, and deconstruct them, with explanations about each technique explained along with copious screenshots (full colour). Yes, you can look at the site directly and try and work out what the stylesheets are doing, but that’s pretty hard if you are a novice, and these succinct explanations are a great help in developing your understanding of how to apply the theory to real-world examples.
• 
  DOM Scripting (Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model) - Jeremy Keith, Friends of ED
  A great introduction to the scary world of JavaScript for anyone who is thinking about delving into unobtrusive JavaScript which can add progressive enhancements to your site, whilst degrading gracefully if a browser does not support JavaScript (or has it turned off).
• 
  CSS Mastery, Advanced Web Standards Solutions - Andy Budd, Friends of ED
  Definitely not for beginners, but takes the examples and techniques to the next level for people who have some experience with coding standards-compliant (X)HTML/CSS. Two chapters at the end, written by Cameron Moll and Simon Collison, bring together lots of the techniques described earlier in the design of two case studies.

That’s it for now, although I have a big fat PHP book sitting on the pile to read. I’ll add more when I’ve had time to digest that.