Stray Hawkeye

Admittedly, this site doesn’t even follow all of them (I keep meaning to do a redesign, but I barely get enough time to make regular posts, as you may have noticed), but a few thoughts on things that make good websites:

• If there is a navigation tree, it should have 3-7 items at each level, no more, no less.  Nine may be allowable at the highest level, but is never actually necessary.
• No one tool / website / page / area should do more than one thing.
• One thing is defined as something you can explain in one sentence without a conjunction.
• Never try to impress your users with how complicated something is – they will not be impressed, they will leave.
• Give the eye room to breath.
• Be consistent everywhere.
• Once your user has seen the home page, no other page or behavior should surprise them.
• You are not all things to all people, your site can’t be either.
• Never, ever, ever build anything in flash.
• Blinking things distract people and we are all already too distracted the way it is – never make anything blink.

Make a refrigerator that consists of several horizontal draws, kind of like a clothes dresser. This would keep the cold air in better when you open it because the cold air would attempt to go down, but is stuck in the drawer, so it can’t pour out the bottom like in a normal fridge. It would also only expose a small amount to the fridge to heat, so when you open it, at worst you’re only letting out about a fifth of the cold air. Air could circulate between drawers through the rear of each, allowing for one cooling unit, and each could be sealed off pretty simply when they open.

This design would also make it easier to clean (take out one drawer at a time without needing to let the whole thing warm up). It would also help eliminate the waste of having empty space at the back of shelves, and letting cold air out as you try to dig to the back of a shelf looking for something.

You could also then adapt the idea so that the fridge could be more horizontal that vertical (maybe 6 feet wide with 3 columns of drawers, and a couple of feet tall) so you wouldn’t need to bend down to get to the bottom, or stand on your tip toes to see the back of the top shelf.  This would take up some valuable counter level space in the kitchen (or could be just below counter level, as the food would be in drawers that you would still want to look down into), but the fridge is easily the most accessed part of any kitchen (except maybe the sink), so I think it justifies the space it would take.

It would also keep kids and pets from attempting to climb into the fridge every time you open it.

I… I… I don’t know what to excerpt.  Usually when I go to a site or a blog post or whatever and I find something I like, I grab a little quote or a picture or whatever to excerpt here, to show you how cool it is and prove that it’s worth clicking over to.  But,… what do I do when it’s all awesome?  When there’s just plain too much awesome to find a best one to excerpt?  I… I don’t know…

Now would probably be a reasonable time to explain what I’m talking about.

I read Swiss Miss, and a while ago I came across this post, and bookmarked it because I really liked it.  And then today, I clicked through to the site for the artist/designer that made it (Jennifer Daniel).  And… it’s all awesome, in so many ways.  So, let me try this again, maybe a bullet pointed list of why it’s all so awesome:

• There are visual puns, and playing with expected shapes, and just general cleverness without the sort of annoying “Look at me, I’m clever” kind of feel that sometimes gets.
• Almost everything on the page makes you look twice and then think.
• So I’m saying it both looks cool and makes you think, without being full of itself.  Which is painfully rare.
• It’s all really simple (or perhaps a better word is clean).
• Each one has it’s own little style that is cohesive to itself, and each one is a little different from each other one so they don’t get hackneyed, but they still all have this same sort of clean, witty, cool style to them, so they all sort of go together.
• There’s a joke all the way at the bottom, and a tiny bug that crawls around on the left hand side of the page, and even the URL and page title are funny.

The only downsides I can find:

• I’m baffled by the left navigation, so I’m not real sure how to find more awesome.
• It would seem some of it gets archived / taken down over time (I think I remember seeing a few other ones there a while ago) which means some of the awesome is hiding / gone away.

So, what I’m really saying here is, go look around, it’s worth the five or ten minutes.

Bonus:

So, I emailed Jennifer while I was writing this post, and she was nice enough to send me an alternate version (with a few extras) of one of my favorites (thanks Jennifer!!), so that’s going to be the excerpt.  And thus, in a maybe kind of sort of Stray Hawkeye exclusive, I present a case study in awesomeness:

Boob Slang

A short list of forms of awesomeness embodied in this:

• It takes a second to figure out what it’s about.
• It covers what would generally be viewed as a vulgar theme in a clean, straight forward manner and in a style that you would expect in a science poster on the wall of a high school classroom, which adds to the humor.
• The color complements the theme.
• I tend to think of myself as being quite up on vulgar slang, and there are a few in there I hadn’t heard before, including:
• Bottom row, third from the right.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look at the Minnesota Twins baseball team the same way again, especially since next season they’re leaving the Metrodome and going topless.

This bed looks quite, ahem, functional. (Via Design Milk)

I also really like this comforter.   Especially since the mat that comes with the game isn’t really sized for grown ups.  (Via Craftzine)

Cool print by Christina Vantzou (found via Swiss Miss):

Makes me think you could make a really cool dress / Halloween costume from this.  Just a normal dress where the bottom was a shark mouth and maybe the arm/shoulder was a fin would be really cool, even with no tail.  Maybe some ripped / shredded tights to go with it.

I attempted to photoshop up this idea, but it came out laughably terrible, so I’ll let you imagine from the description.

Okay, while we’re at it, one more BMW post.  Not sure how I got this many BMW links built up, especially since I prefer Acuras.  Though with how behind I am on posting things compared to bookmarking them, I would imagine I can probably get a fair number of themes going.

At any rate, did you know that all BMWs made since 1961 have one design feature in common?  The Hofmeister Kink.  It’s basically that the rear side window comes slightly back forward at the bottom instead of trailing back towards the rear of the car.  There’s an interesting article about it here.  One of those things you don’t really notice until someone mentions it, and then it’s everywhere in a million different little variations.

Via Kottke.