Monthly Archives: April 2008

Keyboard shortcut conflict: iChat vs browsers

By Nick Morrisson | Published: 13 April, 2008
I think the three applications that most people are likely to have open all the time are a web browser, email, and instant messaging. In every major browser I’m aware of, Command-L highlights the address bar so you can type in the URL of a site, which I do constantly. Command-L, Command-L, Command-L, all day long. [...]
Posted in Web | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Naming Downloadable Files

By Nick Morrisson | Published: 10 April, 2008
PDFs, word processing and spreadsheet documents, software packages, and lots of other things are downloaded to a user’s computer to be referenced at a later date. That’s great—if you can find it when you need it! Let’s put ourselves in the user’s shoes. We’ve downloaded something from a web site, either because we know we’ll [...]
Posted in Web | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Adam Darowski on URLs as UI

By Nick Morrisson | Published: 8 April, 2008
Adam Darowski has an excellent piece on URLs as user interface at his blog, Traces of Inspiration. I was just thinking about this yesterday when I was looking at Flickr with a “non-power-user” friend, trying to find an old picture in someone’s photostream. I watched them go from page to page, clicking 3 ahead, as it’s [...]
Posted in Web | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Ambigous Spin Cycle Selector Switch

By Nick Morrisson | Published: 7 April, 2008
This is the spin cycle selector knob on a Frigidaire Gallery washing machine. I’m not sure what this means: does “fast” spin the clothes faster and remove more water, or does it spin them at the same speed for less time, making it finish faster? These two possible interpretations are opposites in terms of the effect [...]
Posted in Tools & Appliances | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Ambiguous Letterforms Yield N-word

By Nick Morrisson | Published: 6 April, 2008
This is a poster for a show for Vanilla Fudge. The bubbly, melty type seems appropriate for a 1960s psychedelic rock band… until I try to actually read the words. “Fudge” is clear enough, but to my eyes, the “V” in “Vanilla” looks a lot like a “Y”, and the “L”s look like “G”s. Given the [...]
Posted in Typography | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment