cemregr

If you look at the (in)famous design criticism articles of the past year, you can see that discourtesy has become a pattern. Because these got so much attention, others started to think it's "okay" to do design critic in a similarly childish and discourteous manner. It's interesting to see the lengths people go for attention.

Tyler Thompson on Delta's boarding pass: "It was like someone put on a blindfold, drank a fifth of whiskey, spun around 100 times, got kicked in the face by a mule (the person who designed this definitely has a mule living with them inside their house) and then just started puking numbers and letters onto the boarding pass at random..."

Andrew Wilkinson on Zappos: "I checked out your new website and wanted to stab my eyes out with a sharp object."

Dustin Curtis on American Airlines: "Fire your entire design team, if you have one." (His original post was harsher but he has edited it since and I don't have access to the original.)

Walgreens and most supermarkets I shop at default to debit now when I swipe my card, and ask my PIN without prompting "debit or credit?".

To use credit, you have to press "cancel", which wouldn't be the first thing to come to your mind.

Upvote for the funny title :)

Sounds like an airbnb for workspaces :)

Google just doesn't get visual design right, when it's a bit more than just a plain UI.

Chrome's themes are just ugly: https://tools.google.com/chrome/intl/en/themes/index.html

Such are many of the background pictures Google is providing for the home page. It's sad.

I appreciate the effort on spreading the word about HTML5 and CSS3, but there are things in these articles that bother me a lot.

Overuse of CSS3 animations brings back the 'skip intro' flash experience of the 90s, and I'm terrified that since it's a new toy, there'll be a tendency to overuse it.

In this specific example, the speed of the animations (too slow) hinders usability and becomes distractive.

The pastel green gradient doesn't work at all as the background color.

Really cute!

"After the therapy, he vacationed in Jamaica, began dating a local woman and bought a house on the island. "I'm happy and well adjusted now," he says. "It's a good fairy-tale ending. As soon as we get some little Bob Marley kids it'll be even better.""

I found this fascinating so I'm posting it. It asks the user to copy-paste JS code in the URL bar, which is obfuscated code that automatically suggests the page to all your friends. And it redirects to a SMS scam. Wow!

Exactly.

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like

I'm not sure if this person is looking for work.

The site doesn't have an easily accessible 'about' section, a CV, or any way to contact the author. Just 3 pieces on the homepage that could be considered a portfolio.

Edit: I went ahead and googled 'email' within the site's domain. The content I was looking for was hiding under the link 'social interaction designer'. The 'about me' pages are blog items that one would find by chance using 'related posts'. The author ought to make these important posts much more visible...

Has this been machine translated, I wonder why is the English of the article so poor? News agencies in China don't have anybody who write proper English?

Arial isn't a copy of Helvetica. It more closely resembles the predecessor to Helvetica, Akzidenz Grotesk.

Agreed. And some folks who don't actually make anything get so much publicity.

The user interface in that app is terrifying. So many buttons. Looks like a windows app. I hope they polish it a bit and make it more apple-y.

These redesigns are good, I have to say. I'm glad you focused on making them more functional instead of prettier (that can't be said about most other unsolicited redesigns).

But after all the discussion about Dustin's AA or Andrew's Zappos redesigns, I don't know how the fact still didn't catch up, that creating the first mockup isn't that big of a deal, and the real work can't be done not taking into account any requirements or business goals :)

And unfortunately from a user's standpoint, a redesign is one of the worst things that could happen to a site. Because however cramped and difficult a site might be, there are people who use them daily, and changing the structure completely overnight would abandon the most loyal users. That's why it's easy for startups to come up with nice sites in 2010, they haven't had a website since 1995 so they don't have the baggage of previous users.

So as much as a redesign, I'd appreciate not a complete overhaul but sort of a compromise, that would improve usability without forcing old users to relearn everything. A good alternative is having the old and new site co-exist for a while, to get feedback on the new site as well, but not all companies unfortunately have resources for that.

This is amazing work. Congratulations.

Why don't you just use 8-bit alpha-PNG's?

Works in all browsers, degrades gracefully on IE6 (semitransparency becomes fully transparent), smaller file sizes as a bonus.

I am a Turk who learned Finnish as an adult. A striking similar between Turks and Finns is that both think their language is phonetic/read-as-written. While Finnish performs definitely better than Turkish in this aspect, both are far from being perfectly phonetic.

As the other comment mentioned Finnish isn't that phonetic at all. Even the simple "tervetuloa" is actually pronounced as "tÄrvetuloa".

But out of all languages I've learned/tried to learn, Finnish definitely is relatively more rule-abiding. And it has a huge bonus of being very obscure as to be used as a secret language :)