Nathan Levesque

Just about every month now it seems that a company is coming out with some new web technology. Not only that, but these companies have figured out that a public beta is a golden nugget of PR. This means that we developers and designers have access to this stuff in its initial stages and for free!

I’ve met essentially two kinds of people when it comes to embracing new technology.  There are those that don’t learn it and they have their various reasons. Some don’t like change, some don’t think they can learn, some question whether the technology will actually be adopted by the community, and others simply aren’t aware of what is out there.

Then you have the others that crave new technology. They consume it in bulk and are checking their RSS feeds every 5 minutes for something new. Of course there is varying degrees of these two attitudes, but those are the two distinct camps of thought.

Which group is right? Well, for me I learned web development back when CSS was beginning to emerge as a preferred visualization technology. For the next several years I really didn’t pursue any advanced web technologies. Around 2005 I began to realize how far behind I was. So I poked around PHP a little and thought learning a little of that would double the value of my marketable skills. Suffice it to say, it didn’t.

These days I’m not so timid about new tech. I at least am aware of it. I dabble as much as I can in everything I can get my hands on. I still have my moments when I realize I’ve only scratched the surface of what is out there. I find myself these days finding emerging tech, analyzing it for potential and thinking to myself “add that to the list.”

The bottom line is that the more we embrace these emerging technologies the faster they come to market and the more companies are willing to takes changes in developing that next quantum leap of web technology. We often think of consumers pushing the market. Well, they do, but we are not without our own ability to add some momentum to the ride.

So get out there, take 30 minutes each week to find and bookmark some interesting finds even if you’re not immediately interested in them. A week later you may find something else and discover a new way to combine the two in ways no one considered before.

Some of the big ones to keep an eye on are obviously Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo.

Tally-ho!

A quick roundup of some of the interesting ASP.NET blog posts/tutorials that popped into my mailbox this week.

Integrate Windows Live ID Authentication with ASP.NET Membership, Profiles and Roles

A nice tutorial by Peter Bromberg on how to integrate Windows Live ID into your ASP.NET site.

ASP.NET enhancements in VS2008 and .NET FX3.5

A post on Somasegar’s WebLog about some of the new features in Visual Studio and .NET FX3.5 including the integration of the ASP.NET AJAX extensions, LINQ (including the new LinqDataSource control!), and Membership, Roles, and Profiles using JSON and SOAP.

LINQ to SQL (Part 9 - Using a Custom LINQ Expression with the control)

The 9th part of a tutorial series by Scott Guthrie on using LINQ with SQL. Links to Parts 1 through 8 can be found at the top of the above linked post.

The title of this post is graffiti from the game Bioshock. As an avid gamer, I enjoy the subtle details that their creators place in the game and this is one that I think all designers take to heart. In essence this post boils down to examining the ethics of the aesthetic decisions we make.

Wikipedia defines moral imperative:

“a principle originating inside a person’s mind that compels that person to act.”

This means we do things automatically, as a mental instinct. Instinct has its benefits, one is that we do these things subconsciously. However, instinct can sometimes become out of control, or worse, be ignored because it is instinct. Should not aesthetics be the first instinct a designer has?

Aesthetics are key, without them our designs would be loathed or avoided. So why do we as designers make our aesthetic decisions? I have seen many designs pass where the designer had free reign yet aesthetics have been completely ignoring for the sake of visual experimentation or lack of experience. Certainly visual experimentation cannot be faulted nor lack of experience, however we as designers have an ethical obligation to anyone who would encounter our products to make them aesthetically pleasing.

What happens when someone sees something that is hard on the eyes, difficult to read, or otherwise not pleasant? They leave. Plain and simple. The person simply should not have to put any additional effort into dissecting a design to make sense of it. Not only are we doing them a disservice by implementing designs that fall short of acceptable, but we do a disservice to ourselves and indeed our industry in the process.

Aesthetics are also not merely picking colors that work well together. Ok, so you’ve mastered the color wheel, but have you thought about composition? Composition is a complex topic (perhaps for a later post) and there are aesthetics in composition as well. Having your design crammed so tightly into its space makes the elements blur together and has a similar effect to mixing all the colors together.

In summary, take some time at every state of your design and remind yourself that aesthetics are a moral imperative. Am I really making every aspect of design work together aesthetically? Does the composition make certain colors dominate too much? Is asymmetry making my design too unbalanced?

It’s not all about pumping out pixels en masse, every pixel should be a masterpiece in the collection.

I’ve recently switched to using WordPress as a blog platform and content management system for the site. A new look for the website is in the works, in the meantime the default theme will have to do.

I will be updating this blog with entries on a variety of topics such as: .NET, C#, XNA, PHP, SQL, Web Design, Freelancing, Graphic Design and Traditional Art. Grab some RSS and enjoy.