Pixel City

Happy 20th birthday!

$ whois pixelcity.com
Domain Name: PIXELCITY.COM
Registrar: ENOM, INC.
Sponsoring Registrar IANA ID: 48
Whois Server: whois.enom.com
Referral URL: http://www.enom.com
Name Server: H1.CORE-DNS.NET
Name Server: H2.CORE-DNS.NET
Creation Date: 27-jul-1997

Log in, log out, login, logout.

"Log in" and "log out" are verbs. "Use this form to log in. Click this icon to log out."

"Login" and "logout" are adjectives. "Visit the login screen. The logout process is complete."

They can also be nouns. "Login was successful. So was logout."

I'm just posting this because I'm tired of seeing things like "Click here to login" everywhere.

"Sign up" is the same way — you can sign up for a meeting on the signup page.

Random thing: logos

This is just a random thing that popped into my head while eating at a place where SportsCenter was on. If you are making a logo with two words, and the first word starts and ends with the same letter, you can use this trick:

Magazine covers shot with iPhones

A few of these stories came out at about the same time so I figured it was worth saving them in one place. Three major magazines have recently used photos that were shot with iPhones on their covers: Traveler from Conde Nast, Billboard, and Bon Appétit.

UPDATE, September 7, 2017: Also shooting covers with an iPhone is a little magazine called Time.

Car Design

Well-known designer Peter Brock recounts designing the Daytona Coupe in the 1960s. (13 minutes)

Apple Ports: they come, they go.

This is a great piece and it's totally the kind of thing I would do. Now I feel bad that I didn't have the idea first. Great job, The Verge.

Shifter Design

Whether it caused a death or not, this design is pretty bad. If the position is important, make the position apparent.

Whose point of view?

iTunes: It should either be "My music" and "For me", or "Your music" and "For you". :-|

Lightweight Web Pages

Here's a great article (transcript of a talk, actually) on making small web pages. (Small as in fast-loading and small file sizes.)

What do I mean by a website obesity crisis?

Here’s an article on GigaOm from 2012 titled "The Growing Epidemic of Page Bloat". It warns that the average web page is over a megabyte in size.

The article itself is 1.8 megabytes long.

Here's an almost identical article from the same website two years later, called “The Overweight Web". This article warns that average page size is approaching 2 megabytes.

That article is 3 megabytes long.

On a related note, there's this post at quirksmode:

Pushing the web forward currently means cramming in more copies of native functionality at breakneck speed — interesting stuff, mind you, but there’s just too much of it... I don’t think this is a particularly good place to push the web forward to. Native apps will always be much better at native than a browser. Instead, we should focus on the web’s strengths: simplicity, URLs and reach.

Logo and Icon Design

A general rule of logos is that they should work well at all sizes. It's worth pointing out, though, that you are allowed to manually tweak them if needed to make them work in certain situations. Craig Hockenberry discusses what he did to make his company's icon work at very small sizes.

The animation to the left shows the progression of changes Anthony made to align the roof and windows of our factory on a 256×256 grid. While we ended up with a shape that’s different than our official logo, it renders a lot more clearly in the space provided.