Recent political scandals have much to teach us.

…Officers wrote that they knew from their training and work experience that the foot-tapping was a signal used by people looking for sex.
…
After a man in the adjacent stall left, Craig entered it and put his luggage against the front of the stall door, “which Sgt. Karsnia’s experience has indicated is used to attempt to conceal sexual conduct by blocking the view from the front of the stall,'’ said the complaint.

The complaint said Craig then tapped his right foot several times and moved it closer to Karsnia’s stall and then moved it to where it touched Karsnia’s foot. Karsnia recognized that “as a signal often used by persons communicating a desire to engage in sexual conduct,'’ the complaint said.

Assuming this is true (and recalling humorous-in-retrospect documents that we’ve all seen about law enforcement deconstructing hippies, punks, heavy metal, gangs, etc., it very way may not be), it’s cool to consider a signal that can only be interpreted by those that know what it means. To everyone else, it may not even penetrate your awareness. Until the communication is decoded, it’s almost perfect, especially for messages that may be risky.

I’m fascinated to consider that (maybe, just maybe) someone may have at some point tapped at me, and I wouldn’t have necessarily noticed and certainly not interpreted it as it’s presumably intended.

Thanks to the MPAA, now it's legal to snoop on private email. Douchebags.

This is one of my biggest problems with OSX usability. Cryptic symbols = keys? How is anyone supposed to remember all of them?

I'm sure many who read my post about cmf2007 last week thought "Yeah that sounds nice, but Denmark is too far away for me" or "I'd like to go to a Web conference, but I want something with a different focus".

Well, there are a number of other Web related conferences and events coming up in the next few months, in different parts of the world, with different speakers and programs. Maybe one of them is closer to you or more in line with what you're looking for.

The ones I'm aware of are these:

• dConstruct: Brighton, UK, September 7
• Internet Summit Austria: Vienna, Austria, September 12
• Webbdagarna: Malmö, Sweden, September 12
• Webmaster Jam Session: Dallas, USA, September 21-22
• Web Directions South: Sydney, Australia, September 25-29
• Webbdagarna: Göteborg, Sweden, September 26
• Mobile Web Americas: Orlando, USA, October 2-4
• An Event Apart: San Fransisco, USA, October 4-5
• <A-Tag>07: Barrierefreie Medien: Vienna, Austria, October 19
• Voices That Matter: Web Design: San Fransisco, USA, October 22-25
• The Ajax Experience: Boston, USA, October 24-26
• Webbdagarna: Stockholm, Sweden, October 24-25
• User Interface 12 Conference: Cambridge, USA, November 5-8
• Web 2.0 Expo: Berlin, Germany, November 5-8
• cmf2007: Aarhus, Denmark, November 6-8
• Future of Web Design: New York, USA, November 7-8
• Future of Mobile: London, UK, November 14
• Workshops For Web People: Leicester, UK, November 15
• @media Ajax: London, UK, November 19-20

There are probably several other conferences, workshops and other events taking place that I don't know about. If you know of something that should be on this list, post a comment with a link to the event and I'll add it (provided it is somehow related to Web design or development).

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Posted in Conferences.

I gotta say that I’m enjoying the Boing Boing redesign so much that I’m actually breaking down and making a real blog entry about it (as opposed to a witty twitter quip, or simple delicious link, or a lowly screenshot posted on flickr).

I thought the old design was showing its age and the ad layouts were very distracting (the jokes about it looking like NASCAR weren’t too far off). I even sent a mockup of a cleaner layout to Xeni and Cory a couple years ago, but I never thought it would change and assumed it would putter on for several more years in its previous state. I don’t know what prompted the change, but the new look is a great improvement. It’s way cleaner, easier to read, and the ads are no longer distracting. I disagree with Nelson on the change (though I agreed with his previous assessment). At this point in the lifespan of Boing Boing (one million dollars!), I no longer compare them to other blogs and instead to major media outlets, so I’m cutting them slack on three ad zones. Look at any page at even nicely designed media sites like the New York Times and you’ll see 3-5x more advertisements. So among top-shelf media sites, their advertising is barely noticeable.

I’m also happy to see a new gadget blog that’s unlike all the other million gadget blogs out there. It helps that it’s authored by my all time favorite gadget blogger, a man that deserves a medal for getting hired to write a regular column on Gizmodo, only to get fired after Gawker editors and readers took his first essay way too personally and seriously. It’s clear from day one of this new Boing Boing blog that this won’t be another shopping or wishlist gadget blog. Free from all the pointless gadget lust that powers other sites, this looks like it’ll be more along the lines of “interesting crap someone built that looks cool/works in a cool way.”

Bottom line, it was a great surprise to see Boing Boing’s new layout and direction today and I think it’s a huge positive change (and adding comments was nice too).

Today marks the release of Blueprint, version 0.5. This is a special release, as it is above all an experiment, trying out a few different techniques as we approach version 1.0.

The Grid

The grid in this release is upped from 14 to 24 columns. Now, before you all go haywire, consider the following:

12 is quite certainly the best number of columns for a grid, mathematically speaking. It is dividable by both three and four, giving you lots of options on how you’d like to set up your layout.

However, after trying out the 12 column scheme on a few sites, I believe it is too constricting. That is, the column count is too low. It was already too low when we were using 14, if you ask me, so 12 doesn’t seem completely right.

That’s why I’ve gone for 24. Being 2 * 12, you get all the flexibility, with the added possibility of creating truly complex grid systems. And, if 12 is your preference, all you have to do is to double your desired span counts.

But hey, Blueprint is about flexibility, not constraints. That’s why Matz from kematzy.com is the latest addition to the growing BP development team. He has created a wonderfully flexible BP grid generator, which lets you input your desired number of columns, margin between columns, and even your preferred total width, and outputs a nicely formatted and customized grid.css.

So please, if 24 is not your bag, check out Matz’s generator.

Also, the first class is no longer needed. :)

PX vs EM

Blueprint 0.4 introduced the use of em units for all vertical spacing, including line-heights and font sizes. However, in retrospect, this does not work as well as it should. While giving IE users the ability to resize text properly, the vertical flow and baseline was disrupted in nearly every browser except Firefox.

I do believe the baseline is quite important, giving each page a great look and feel, so we’re going back to pixels in this release. Resizing might not work as well, but the baseline now looks perfect in nearly every browser. I think this is a fair trade.

To accommodate those not happy with this, BP 0.4 will remain as a download on the Google Code site, so that you may easily make your own changes to stick with em’s.

We do hope to return to using em’s one day, but that won’t happen until we can make them work correctly with the baseline. If anyone wants to tackle this issue, please feel free to do so. :)

Fonts for the typographically literate

Version 0.5 also sports a new set of default fonts. We figure that if you’ve gone so far as buy your own great fonts, you should also get to use them when you browse the web. Here’s the fonts that now gets set in typography.css:

h1,h2,h3,
h4,h5,h6  { font-family: Constantia, "Palatino Linotype", Palatino, Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; }
body      { font-family: Frutiger, Univers, "Helvetica Neue", "Lucida Grande", Calibri, Helvetica, Verdana, sans-serif; } 
pre       { font-family: Corbel, Verdana, "Bitstream Vera Sans", sans-serif; } 
code      { font-family: Consolas, "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono", "Courier New", Monaco, Courier, monospace; }

This is also highly experimental, and the font choices are likely to change in future releases.

Coming in 0.6

A few things didn’t make it into this release. Most noticeably is the forms.css file. Created by Kim Joar Bekkelund, this file aims to give you some great looking default forms, with support for fieldsets, buttons and more. Expect it to ship with BP 0.6.

Another quite important feature that probably will be added to 0.6, is the use of an ie.css stylesheet, loaded with conditional comments, so that IE hacks stays in one place, and doesn’t clutter up our beautiful core files.

Get yer Blueprint, half price!

So that’s that. Another release, another milestone on the way to Blueprint 1.0.

As always, a tutorial, example files, the credits, and the download itself, are all on the Google Code site. So go ahead, and grab your own copy. :)

Why is Jerry Lewis big in France? Answer: it's a red herring. He was big everywhere and still continues to be abroad, in the US he's fallen out of favor

This story (link may expire) about an evolution in Japanese shampoo marketing points to a loosening of traditional advertising personas (and an associated shift in beliefs about who their customer really is).

Kaori Sasaki, who heads a communication consulting company, said Japanese businesses long viewed female consumers in three oversimplified categories — the housewife, office worker and schoolgirl.

But that formula is rapidly growing obsolete as more women pursue ambitious careers and more mothers join the work force, she said.

“Marketing is changing to reflect a changing lifestyle,” Sasaki said. She noted a recent TV commercial for detergent that depicts a man doing the wash — something once virtually unthinkable in male-dominated Japan.

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