BrainFuel

There is a town in Arizona named simply – Why. Why, why, why. Gotta wonder about the folks that named that town. They were probably wondering why they were there themselves. Maybe it was hot (it’s in the southern part of the state), maybe they were thirsty. Who knows. There isn’t much in Why, why I don’t know. When I was there all that I could tell was that the population must be no more than a few hundred people – if that.

It’s a dusty old town and I remember a gas station and a mailbox. The mailbox was what interested me because it was posted about 15 ft. in the air and had a sign on it that said ‘Air Mail.’ I thought it was funny and so I of course took a photo. I’m thinking that since this gas station was on a stretch of road close to a national park, they used this mailbox to attract tourists. I know I stopped. I took pictures and laughed. But I didn’t buy anything. I suppose the moral of the story is this: when you’re in why, don’t ask why.

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I was perusing some sites today and found a great little article about blogs. Now I know your thinking “not another post about blogs” but hear me out. Something I’ve been thinking about recently is the purpose of this site, BrainFuel. I suppose I should ask why? What is its purpose? Several years ago, in 2001 when I started this site the intent was to keep a list of sites with good design. I simply used Dreamweaver to post interesting links and it was just for my own purposes because I could never remember the URLs of cool sites when I needed inspiration. And then I began to get emails from people suggesting sites (incidentially, we don’t get too many these days because we don’t post the address). I really didn’t even have a name for this site at that time, it was just “Cool Sites” and people liked it.

Today, BrainFuel is a collection of hundreds of links, articles, and tips from the team at Tornado (4 of us). Recently, I’ve been thinking about what focus BrainFuel should have in the future and I read an interesting post over at MDN Studio tonight. It’s interesting because he took a look at hundreds of blogs and analyzed why they are successful and what character traits they possess. Highly recommended.

Lastly, to end an abnormally long post, here’s a neat looking site: JasonZada.com (can’t comment on the site content).

Some of the key points of Rumsfields rules that resonated with me were:

Winner of the silver medallion Paragon award (from the National Council of Marketing and Public Relations), the Lake Washington Technical College, WA is very superb. I liked the simple navigation system and clean design.

Smooth, simple ecommerce site for beautiful laptop / powerbook bags. I like how you can see all the styles without having to click, as well as pick any size/style combination from the handy dropdowns. My (hypothetical) Powerbook would enjoy the charcoal-colored Eames dots style the most.

Ever since I can remember it’s been about computers, the internet, and all things technology. That’s how Bill Gates made his fortune and many others. But today, that’s all changed. The founder of IKEA has passed Mr. Gates and now Ingvar Kamprad, a name I don’t even know, is the richest man in the world. So now, the richest man in the world is a guy that sells furniture. Haha!

I liked the navbar on the sub sections of the Monterey Institute of Technology web site.

Apparently Macromedia introduced a new product called Flex (The presentation-tier solution for delivering enterprise Rich Internet Applications, blah, blah, blah, blah, oh, sorry!). Anyways, I thought that this FlexStore demo was pretty awesome.

Actually, if you’re really interested, read about what makes Flex sell for $12,000!

I think white space is so very important in web design.

There are two ways to look at white space (at least, I think so). First, you could say that white space is used to separate elements of a page – basically we use space between content elements to separate them. The second way you can look at white space is to ask yourself the question “does this page element help my design?” If it obstructs your overall message then by all means remove it. That’s more of a relevance issue but you get the point.

I’m trying to communicate that we should always evaluate whether something is important on a page and if it is, use white space to make it obvious. There is a good article about this at Design Matters.