Mike Industries

Just in time for the holidays, the Dutch Wolf has posted the first official beta of the brand new version of sIFR! sIFR 3 is chock full of great new features that are sure to bring out your inner typography genius, and because Flash is now owned by Adobe, we’ve even created an unimaginative new icon for it! :)

Some highlights of sIFR 3 include:

• Much easier implementation with no need for font tuning anymore.
• Constant font sizing with no more fuzzy logic used to determine actual type size.
• Smoother anti-aliasing and better readability via Flash 8/9’s Saffron rendering engine.
• Ability to use Flash’s text effects such as shadowing.
• sIFR now renders on-demand instead of after everything else has loaded, making for a much quicker viewing experience.
• … and a whole lot more.

So head on over to the Dutch Wolf’s place and check out the new beta for yourself. The quicker we can all help squash any remaining bugs, the quicker an official sIFR 3.0 implementation can be released.

It’s not too often you can stump Google these days. Search for any product, current or past, and you almost always get a slew of results telling you all sorts of things about it. Specifically, what it is, where to buy it, or what product has now replaced it in the product line. This usually even works on nostalgic products purchased decades ago.

Recently, however, I searched for a type of showerhead I’ve used since my college days and couldn’t find a single useful reference anywhere on Google. It’s the simplest and most powerful of showerheads I’ve ever used and it’s called “The Skimpy” (pictured to the right). It shoots a concentrated, forceful mist in a controlled stream unmatched by any other showerhead I’ve tried. The last time I purchased one was at a local hardware store maybe five years ago. It was about $8. The only reference on Google was an image of the showerhead in an obscure “product photos” section of the Interbath website. Subsequent searches on Interbath turn up no mention of The Skimpy.

So, I have a few options here. I can move the old Skimpy to my new place and use a different showerhead in the second bathroom. Or I can scour the interwebs for a place that somehow might still have Skimpies. OR… I can write a blog post soliciting opinions far and wide on what the best showerhead in the world is.

So that’s what I’m doing. Number three.

If you have any useful information on what you believe to be the most excellent showerhead you’ve ever used, post it in the comments along with a brief explanation as to why it’s so great. With any luck, after a few weeks, we’ll have the world’s most complete resource on superlative showerheads.

It seems like the percentage of cash machines which still suffer from button/screen parallax is still pretty damned high. This design problem has already been solved in at least three ways (touch screen, angled display, and low-profile screen bezel) and yet it seems like 90% of all ATM machines still look like this:

Kind of annoying.

It’s been almost two years since we originally released sIFR, and predictably, the world is still not a tangible step closer to a real custom typography solution for the web. Sure there are people bringing the subject up again in W3C mailing lists and companies waxing philosophical about the typographical ecosystem, but nobody is actually doing anything measurable about it. Talking is good, and I’d hate to suppress any constructive discussions that may be going on right now, but until I see something more than a “recommendation” or a “working spec”, I will continue to shake my head and wonder when we’ll see any execution.

We had a feeling this sort of stagnation would continue when we first released sIFR, and therefore, we haven’t stopped development on it since version 1.0. Version 2.0 was the big release and current defacto “sIFR standard” in place on most sIFR-ized web sites today. The list of sites employing this solution is long and impressive. From MSNBC, to Nike, to The U.S. Navy, we estimate the number of sIFR-sized sites to be in the thousands, spanning across hundreds of countries, and serving up billions of pages views annually.

For those running sIFR 2.0 or 2.0.1, we have a minor update for you: version 2.0.2. This update fixes a bug related to the Microsoft IE Eolas update and also degrades sIFR text gracefully to HTML/CSS in the presence of the Firefox AdBlock extension. On a tiny percentage of machines running the new IE (mostly Media Centers, I believe), sometimes sIFR text would show up as a broken image. This is now fixed. Additionally, the AdBlock fix removes the biggest of what I’d consider “material” downsides to using sIFR as a typography solution. Now even your AdBlocking visitors won’t miss a beat.

Version 2.0.2 is probably the last in the 2.0 series and is available at the standard sIFR landing page: mikeindustries.com/sifr.

Version 3!

The much bigger news, however, is the release of the sIFR 3 Alpha builds by lead developer Mark Wubben (”The Dutch Wolf“). Mark was the javascript genius behind version 2 and he’s now taking over lead development in this new version. I will still be involved as “spiritual advisor” (and tester, of course), but given duties at Newsvine, I’m pulling back a bit on the development side.

Some of my favorite features implemented so far are:

• Consistent font sizing, kerning, and leading, without the need for manual tuning
• Sizing through CSS
• Much better looking type, due to better anti-aliasing
• Flash 8 text effects such as shadows
• Easier configuration

So head on over to the first sIFR 3 Alpha article and let Mark know what you think. Or, if you’re really adventurous, you can download the nightlies.

A true solution for custom web typography will come eventually, but until that time, we will keep pushing forward with the tools we have.

So May 1st is Reboot Day and I’m sure there are going to be plenty of great redesigns around the web, but without even seeing them all yet, Croftie’s New Hotness gets my 1st place vote and my supreme jealousy as well. In fact, the redesign is so good that I’ve vowed never to make fun of Jeff’s penchant for pink again.

Normally a blog redesign is not something I’d write an entire post on, but the new jeffcroft.com is pretty special. I don’t mean special only in the visual sense, but rather in the paradigm-breaking sense.

Has anyone ever really seen a “live search” that impressed them? Live search, until now, has just been about saving you the trouble of hitting the enter key. But Croftie’s live search is a jaw dropper. Start typing in a term like “SXSW” and down slides a panel which shows you not only blog entries which contain that term, but comments, del.icio.us bookmarks, and Flickr photos as well… all separated nicely into columns. I fully expect to start seeing more of this around the web once more people get wind of it.

Another interesting aspect of the new jeffcroft.com is that it’s written entirely in Django. This really intrigues me, given that there seems to be a growing groundswell of discriminating bloggers looking for a way to break out of the MT/Wordpress/TextPattern mold in as dramatic a fashion possible. MVC frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django have been getting a lot of love lately and I’m wondering if CroftieCMS might just be the catalyst for this sort of thing to really take off. I’ve yet to even dip a single toe into the MVC waters, but developments like these are hard to ignore. Of course, no sooner do I profess my curiosity in Django that The Wolf tells me he has something cooking as well… and it has nothing to do with either Django or Rails. More details as they become available.

Technology and design aside though, the single most impressive aspect of Croftie’s new site to me is how comprehensive of an expression platform it is. It’s not just about blog entries with all sorts of miscellany decorating the sidebars. It’s about all parts of Jeff’s life. It’s about essays. It’s about link collections. It’s about photos of Jeff with strange women. Just about the only thing that’s not on there yet is his portfolio, and considering how impressive the site itself is, he really doesn’t even need one.

Any other noteworthy redesigns around the web today? Feel free to plug them in the comments…

A guide to creating a more tasteful MySpace layout. Sample images and CSS are included at the bottom. End product: myspace.com/mikeindustriesThe social phenomenon that is MySpace is one I don’t fully understand, and yet, one I must fully respect. In fact, with over 50 million unique users, it is something everybody must respect. Any website which rolls up that amount of usership is doing something very, very right, and no matter what your thoughts on it as a vehicle for your own expression are, you must give it its full due for what it is to seemingly everyone else.

Several weeks ago, I finally signed up for an account, and within seconds I was instantly put-off by what had been created for me: a hastily-designed “profile page” with uninspired colors, misaligned tables, and a mish-mash of extraneous cruft and design elements which made this feel more like a halfway house than a “home”. Now, granted, I am a designer by trade so my tolerance for this stuff is orders of magnitude lower than most of the population, but clearly, this was not a place I even felt comfortable having my name on.

So with the default home page this underwhelming, what is a MySpacer to do? Customize, of course. One of MySpace’s greatest features is its ability to let you skin your own home page. Unfortunately, 99% of the customizations I’ve seen are chalkboard-screechingly awful, but what could a MySpace home page look like if some actual design thought went into it? That is the question I sought to answer.

But first — as Keith Robinson asked me when I first showed him what I was doing — “Ummm, why?” The answer is twofold. First, I love a design challenge. Second, we’ve been building a lot of new social components into Newsvine over the past several weeks and I wanted a good reference point for what is already done well online and what could be improved.

So without further ado, on with the surgery…
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The excellent new sIFR-licious UW Admissions Site, designed and developed by Mercury Cloud.Now that Flash 7 penetration is well into the 90% range, it’s time to start thinking about version 3 of sIFR. One of the big selling points of sIFR 2 was that it was backwards-compatible with Flash 6, but given the most current Flash adoption numbers, that doesn’t seem necessary anymore.

SO… what The Dutch Wolf and I would like to do is provide a new version of sIFR which offers baseline compatibility with Flash 7 and progressive-enhancement for Flash 8.

We’ve already come up with a few things we’d like to add but are requesting feature requests from designers and developers in order to make sure this new version is as complete as possible. Here’s initial punchlist:

• Ability to display crisper text (especially at small sizes) for people with Flash 8. The Flash 8 Player uses a new anti-aliasing algorithm that now renders Flash text as beautifully as Photoshop does.
• More complete text formatting options using Flash’s CSS support. This includes the ability to color individual spans within a single sIFR file.
• Ability to use (and abuse) Flash 8’s live effects like soft drop shadows behind text.
• On-the-fly resizability of sIFR elements when windows are resized.
• Actionscript 2 syntax.

A major requirement of this release is that it should only take you a minute or two to upgrade any existing sIFR installations, so rest assured that when the new version comes out, it’ll be a snap to install.

Since we’re already talking about sIFR, I wanted to quickly call out some excellent uses of it I’ve seen over the past few months:

• Will Prater and friends over at Mercury Cloud have redesigned the admissions site for my alma-mater, The University of Washington, and it is spectacular. Some of the best use of sIFR I’ve ever seen and just a fabulous site to boot.
• Chevrolet.com now uses sIFR on almost every page on the site thanks to Jim Amos and Campbell-Ewald.
• Khoi Vinh has redesigned The Onion and Paragraph making subtle and disciplined use of sIFR.
• Thanks to Eric Webster and Digitas, the Pontiac.com site uses sIFR for their mastheads. Pontiac.com is a good example of a Flash-heavy site making smart use of the technology.
• I can’t remember who sent me this site (please let me know so I can give you credit) but Propel Fitness Water now makes nice use of sIFR and they even somehow managed to give their sIFR text nice wide kerning. I’d like to know if that required manual editing of font files. Looks very nice.

sIFR also was featured in Print Magazine this month thanks to the excellent Patric King.

So enough of the sIFR lovefest… let’s hear some feature requests!

“Never waste a stroke.”

That’s the best piece of advice you’ll ever get in logo design. However, it’s also advice that can inadvertently get you in trouble. Draw a blue circle on the screen and you’ve just stolen the Blaupunkt logo. Draw a yellow line and you’re copying Visa. Draw a black swoosh and you’re ripping off Nike. The less intricacies involved in creating your masterpiece, the more likely it is that someone has already created it.

This subject has resurfaced in my head this week because of a couple of questionable logo unveilings, and I think it deserves some discussion. First, let’s go over the three categories of what might be considered “logo theft”:
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This just in: ESPN is looking to fill a very high-profile web position — Creative Director, ESPN.com. You heard it here first. Yes, that’s right… a chance to set the design standards for the largest sports site on the web and continue to blaze the trails ESPN has been blazing since the original days of ESPNet SportsZone back in the mid ’90s.

I’m not going to post a long description of the job since the position more or less sells itself, but I will say that this is a great opportunity to work with some very talented people on some very exciting projects. The position is out of the main ESPN headquarters in Bristol, Connecticut and is only suitable for a candidate with a wealth of experience managing design teams as well as a killer portfolio. Experience managing the design of high-traffic web properties is a huge plus as well.

Anyway, I don’t work at ESPN anymore but I’ve volunteered to post the position on this site in hopes that either a Mike Industries reader or a friend of a Mike Industries reader might be the right person for the job. If you (or someone you know) think you might have the right stuff, drop me a line through the contact form and I’ll see what I can do. I can’t answer many specific questions about the job but I can help shepherd the process along a bit. Any e-mails should include at the very least a URL where some of your work can be viewed.

A List Apart, the venerable online periodical for web people, has quite possibly just pulled off the perfect redesign.

Everything is great. Nothing is bad. Click here to see the wickedness.

Favorite design touch: The hover underlines which disappear in the middle of the center-stacked text.

Favorite new feature: Adjustable color palettes for different issues.

Congratulations to Jeffrey Zeldman, Jason Santa Maria, Eric Meyer, Dan Benjamin, Kevin Cornell, Erin Kissane, and team on a great piece of work.

Meatspace Stan has more here.

*Prediction: A center-stacked headline mini-boom begins today.