A Nod from the WaSP

Some Shameless Self-Promotion

The Web Standards Project’s Education Task Force has listed Humboldt State University’s web site as an excellent example of a standards-based edu site. I have since fixed the minor validation errors they mention, which were caused by my inexpert use of Textile in a couple of pages. This is an honor for which I can take full credit— I often let my student assistants code out the projects and write the CSS to develop their skills, but this project was pulled off before I even had the luxury of a student assistant. So every line of it is mine, all mine! I talked about the redesign of HSU’s site on collegewebeditor.com if you’re interested in more details. It’s nice to have my work up there next to some sites that have the benefit of large web teams or the budget to hire well-known designers, even if it is buried in the bowels of the WaSP site.

wilshire | one puts out another great Textpattern plugin

Implemented here.

Rant: Are CSS style galleries and awards sites good-old-boys clubs?

This post was spurred by the news that John Oxton has been added as a weekly judge for the Web Standards Awards. Congrats John! You deserve it, and this not personal. I clicked over to the WSA to check out who the other judges were. They’ve got an impressive international list of folks. One out of 11 is female. Thanks for representing us, Maki. I then went over to StyleGala to have a look at what designs are hot these days. I noticed, along the way, that ten out of ten news contributers are male, as well as five out of six site reviewers. Cheers, Lea, thanks for doing all the work for us girls! CSS Beauty is run by a man, as is the CSS Vault. I guess it should really be no surprise to me that the web is seemingly so male oriented, as Malarkey puts it. At least the CSS/Web Standards community. I mean, whether a site award-worthy or gallery-worthy in this community is being determined almost exclusively by men. This is not sour grapes, as I have never submitted any of my work to these sites and don’t presume to think that it belongs there. What I do not believe, however, is that there are not more that two women who deserve to be in the group of 29 people who are judging standards-based design. Malarkey, I’m linking to you again because:

1. I’m determined to get you to answer at least one in ten of my communications to you, you lazy busy… ; )
2. As a contributer to both the WSA and StyleGala who I’m reasonably sure appreciates the design talents of women, maybe you can enlighten me as to how this came about. Does this bother anyone else?

Male vs. Female Design: Shades of Grey?

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about women and web design, as I’ve had the good fortune to be working with some incredible women on a project I can’t really talk about yet (I’ve been so wanting to say that— seems like you haven’t hit the big time until you can’t tell people about what you’re doing…). As I mentioned here, most designs on the web today scream “male” to me— they seem to have been designed for men by men. There has been some discussion over the last year or so about where the women of web design are hiding. This is not the point of this post. There are women web designers everywhere, but for some reason the male aesthetic is taking over. For the record, I have nothing against men, I don’t think there is a vast male conspiracy against female designers, and I don’t feel like I’m being held back by “the man”. I just think there is another point of view out there that doesn’t make it into the design discussion as often as it should. Being the recovering scientist that I am, I decided to take a semi-scientific look at the designs of some sites that I visit often, to try to determine just what it is about them that make them seem male or female to me. I grabbed a bunch of sites from my feed reader, and I will be looking at specific design aspects of these sites in a series of posts here, to see if I can discover patterns. For the first “analysis”, I decided to focus on what my eye sees while I am reading the site’s content. I thought it would be interesting to look at the aspects of the design I usually don’t consciously focus on, but am always seeing. To do this, I grabbed a screenshot of a portion of each site that contained header type, usually corresponding to a post title, and included the whole horizontal aspect of the design. I cropped the header type roughly in half, because I didn’t want to be distracted by reading the same stuff over and over. This essentially gave me an indication of how horizontal sections are separated from each other, and a sense of the colors used for typography and backgrounds in the content area. The screenshots are available here, as well as the list of sites that they correspond to. The first 17 are sites belonging to men, and the next 12 are sites belonging to women.

Analysis

The Smell of Summer

Today the quintessential scent of summer greeted me along with the bright sun and soft breeze. Some people label themselves as “visual”, meaning they need to see something to truly understand it. Following along these lines, I would have to describe myself as an “olfactory” person. Certain scents have the power to immediately transport me to a certain time in my past, or clue me in to the changing of the seasons. I am fascinated by the sense of smell, and if Smell-O-Vision was really an option, I would see all my movies that way (and make fun of how they spelled it…). This does not mean I surround myself with aromatherapy candles and room fresheners— I can’t stand that stuff. I like the natural smells of life. The scent that spells the changing of spring in to summer for me is not the smell of freshly cut grass, as some of you may have been guessing. It is the smell of recently killed skunk on the road. There is a time for a few hours after a skunk unloads it’s scent glands where it does not smell exactly like that nasty smell we all associate with skunks. It smells very musky and a little strangely sweet, and granted it doesn’t smell great, but it doesn’t smell awful. At the end of spring, skunks seem to be more active, maybe scrounging food for their newly born litters, and thus get run over by more cars in the wee hours of the night. I got to thinking about this, and then realized that skunks definitely don’t exist in Australia, and I was pretty sure they weren’t in Western Europe or Britain, either. A quick check into the 800 page “Walker’s Mammals of the World” on my bedside table (don’t ask…) confirmed that suspicion. I am having trouble imaging going through life without ever having smelled a skunk. What would take its place in the olfactory palette? And what would take over its contradictory role in nature— an animal that is so silly and lumbering that everyone would love it except for the fact that it stinks? Maybe you Aussies and Brits can clue me in here. I wish they had Internet Smell-O-Vision working so that I could share that smell of summer with you. Of course that would mean that I would be broadcasting the smell of skunk all over the place. Although, I bet I wouldn’t be the first to pull that off if it were possible… What smells signals summer to you?

University Web Pros: What’s Your Dream Project?

Students have graduated and summer is upon us, so I thought it was a good time to take the imagination out for a spin. Here’s the scenario: For the course of one project, the University web site fairy godmother has granted you full control. You can manage the project any way you see fit, and staffing, money, politics, institutional inertia, technical resources, and any other common barriers are not an issue. The only stipulation is that the project must be for the University web site. What is the project that you would do? What is your dream project, that you think would greatly improve your University web site, but you can’t get off the ground due to some of the above barriers? What is the one project that you would love to do? I’ll add mine to the comments later in the day, but I don’t want to bias the direction of the conversation. You can leave your answer here, or write it on your own site and leave a reference to it in the comments. Have fun!