Archive for the 'Vestal' Category

On February 11th, Bill Gates apparently demoed Xobni in front of a huge crowd! Xobni’s Matt Brezina writes:

Bill Gates demoed Xobni as part of his opening keynote at the Office Developers Conference in San Jose, California today.

Bill called Xobni “the next generation of social networking.” He credited Xobni as leveraging the data in email to help users better manage their relationships.

Vestal designed Xobni’s user interface several months ago, and it’s great to see our design up on the big screen…

Webcast (Thanks, Xobni )

Popularity: 7% [?]

Kogbox lets users create snippets – small scripts limited to 100 lines and 10 seconds of execution time. Write as many as you like, and combine your snippets with others’ to build simple web tools.

This new project is kind of like a Wikipedia for code… but active code, not code examples. I’ve often come up with ideas for small tools or functions which don’t quite merit an entire website, and which could be easily incorporated into other projects. Kogbox (as its name implies) allows users to create small snippets which all work together to accomplish larger tasks. It’s also a kind of sandbox for experimentation.

You don’t have to take my word for it, take a look at the Kogbox website »

For now it’s invitation only. Contact me for an account.

Popularity: 9% [?]

I’ve been spending some time on my own projects in the last month, and the one I’m most proud of is called ARMSFLOW.

ARMSFLOW is a data visualization which displays arms transactions globally between 1950 and 2006. It was created with data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

ARMSFLOW includes 14,619 arms transactions (each is a sum of 1 year’s exports) and 228 government entities.

Visit ARMSFLOW

Popularity: 10% [?]

A few months ago we did a small project for ClimateCounts, an organization which tracks climate “performance” of a variety of well-known companies. Wood Turner, who directs ClimateCounts, gave us a lot of freedom to do a design which expresses some of the rich data they track.

The design, above, displays company size (by market capitalization) as relative “tread” size; that is, General Electric and Google are large companies. Color (green,yellow,red) corresponds to climate performance, as does the size of the typeface. Therefore Starbucks, which is a relatively small company, is shown in large text size and with a green colored tread. We did 2 shirts each in 2 color schemes.

The intention is not for users to derive hard numbers from this, but the meaning behind the shirt makes for a good talking point and is a quick way to look up climate performance without looking like a dense table of data. We also wanted to make a shirt which people would want to wear. We’re getting a pile of these on top of our fee so we can strut around wearing our own design.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Happy Usability Day everyone! That’s right: Nov 8th is World Usability Day.

At the Vestal Blog, we try to present you with interesting and useful information every day. Let us know how we’re doing! Please send us your feedback at blog@vestaldesign.com. And do the world a favor today: be useful!

Popularity: 11% [?]

A common problem for our clients is that they’d like to display images which have been optimized for web display (500px wide, jpg compression, nice and crisp) but want to offer the full-resolution images for download also. However not everyone wants to boot up Photoshop, Automator, or their photo editor of choice to create the thumbnails and web-sized images. Here’s a WordPress plugin incorporating James Heinrich’s phpThumb() thumbnailing script. It automates the process:

• Simply upload a large (huge) version of the image, put them in normal <img src="" /> tags. WPIR parses them out and generates 400px wide versions (configurable) in a <div class="images"></div> at the top of the post. You can style this to float:right; or whatever.
• It also generates a <div class="presskit"></div> at the bottom of the post with links to the high-res originals. These do a force-download instead of opening in the browser window.
• Exempt images from resizing: <img class="custom" src="foo" />

• Puts a nice, slight unsharp mask filter to crispify the images after that muddy bicubic resampling.

  There are more details and specifics in the INSTALL file. The plugin does not create any new databases and all the resized images are cached in the plugin folder. Using ImageMagick as described in the INSTALL file is highly recommended.

  I’d like to have a full WP interface to allow different widths to be configured, perhaps by what kind of page they’re in, what category, or even just a field in the WordPress sidebar to specify pixel width. But this is a good start… anyone want to pitch in?

  Download the plugin: wp-image-resizer-0-7.zip (v0.7)

  (Documentation: install.txt)

  All versions:
  
  
  wp-image-resizer-0-7.zip (v0.7)
  
  wp-image-resizer.zip (v0.6)
  
  
  

  
  

  Popularity: 14% [?]

We just launched a cool Flex interface for soccerratings.com. The widget allows you to chart several team’s ratings, or predict the outcome between two teams on their current ratings, all in realtime. A bittersweet widget, perhaps, as I just found out that it looks my alma mater doesn’t have good prospects this season.

Link to soccerratings.com

Popularity: 6% [?]

Popularity: 6% [?]

We’ve been somewhat out of contact the past few days. Skype, our primary means of communications here, went down a day or two ago. Only a few hours later, our website and email went down too as our webhost had serious problems. Together, they’re a good demonstration of Murphy’s Law. Fortunately, we have a lot of redundancy in place for these sorts of things, but it always takes time to get the old back-up plans working.

On another note, we have heard from Peru and everyone we know is okay down there.

Popularity: 4% [?]

One of our most recent clients, GreenVolts has just launched their new site, which we spent the last month or so designing. In their own words:

GreenVolts, Inc., based in San Francisco, was founded in 2005 to deliver solar power at fossil fuel costs. Through low cost and high efficiency, GreenVolts can access large markets previously inaccessible to solar power. GreenVolts changes the economics of solar energy.

Please check it out! We welcome any feedback.

Popularity: 9% [?]