Nivas.hr blog

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Few days ago Facebook unveiled their new looks. I am aware of the fact that every time Facebook changes something, people yell "AAARGG HELL NO", just to be silent 5 days later and accept those changes as good. And indeed, when version prior to this one came out, i considered it to be excellent because it solved a lot of architectural design problems, and made Facebook more, how should i say, interesting.

This version is just bad, and it is bad from two different standpoints.

First - too much faces.
I know this is FACEbook, but there are just too much faces now on the homepage. Every post has a face associated to it. In reality there is no need to put face of a person next to every action. Someone shares a link - i see a face. Someone adds friend - i see a face. This makes homepage look too chunky and too heavy.

Second - identification of MY facebook
Of all those faces i see on homepage, my face at the top is the same size as everyone else. This makes it hard for me to quickly comprehend that this is indeed MY account. My picture should be bigger, or in any way more visible.

Third - switch to Twitter-like "what's on your mind"
The switch from Status to What's on Your Mind makes Facebook too much Twitter-like. People are now compelled to spam their ideas all the freaking time. "Status", may he rest in peace, was more personal and more related to an individual. This switch will, inevitably, spawn tons of useless messages, diluting Facebook into Twitter madness.

Fourth - the ROUND CORNERS
This point touches me more than any other. Facebook was one of the last bastions of safety and refuge for web designers - any time a client asked "can my website have rounded corners", web designers could answer "well, it could, but we suggest not to, because Facebook is massively successful and it does not rely on rounded corners". I hope you folks reading this realize that from today all websites will have rounded corners. How can you battle against client's argument "well, Facebook had square corners, and now they redesigned into round"?

New web awaits us, and it is fat, rounded and chunky.

Unfortunately, it is my duty to report another Logitech G9 failure.

Before I begin, here is some sweet talk, just to put things in perspective. Now, generally I love this mouse; the ergonomics fit's my hand far better than G5 (harassed that one for years), looks like a 7of 9's breast implant - combining both sexy and super geek. The precision is noticeably better than G5, and the left mouse click just makes you want to ... well, click it. A winner on paper statistics for sure.

For those following our rantings, u should be familiar with Daemon's initial post describing the issues with trashy grip problem also known now as the „G5 skin disease affair“. I am sure many of you returned to more closely inspect the Hi-Res images, and documentation presented in the post.

As we expected, we where contacted by Logitech representatives, the mouse was replaced, and all was well (with a little help from some sticky grips).

4 months latter, the disaster strikes again!

This time the left mouse button stopped working and started irritating. Daemon says it is no surprise since he can hear me stomping on it in from the other room, but i know he is just sticking his head out for the love of Logitech. The truth is – there should be no excuse for a 6 month old Logitech G9 to cancel obedience.

I design, I click, I play Quake, I play TF2, and on average, Nivas Design crew spends 12 hours a day hard-core clicking, and yes.. I do believe the harder you press the button, the faster the bullets will fly (almost, a scientific fact, ask any gamer), but you don't buy G5 if you don't know your mice.

Fact is, my colleague is still pounding away on my old Logitech G5. The same G5 which passed a proper Guantanamo treatment in my hands for about 1.5 years, and now 6 months in his hands - and it is still working flawlessly!

What in the name of Christ and all that is holy and unholy, is wrong with this product?! Logitech G9 is seriously best mouse on the market while new. But durability of that mouse is just awful! How can they be called "Gamer grade" mice, when they cannot withstand hard core usage? Logitech PLEASE don't make me go out and buy Razor, 'coz we all know they look like a truck ran over a squid.

Daemon edit: to answer your question, yes, Nivas designers do work with Hand of Sauron

The no-bullshit, no visual clutter, maximum functionality, minimum system resource drainage Winamp skin is finally here. We do not believe in bloated pieces of software that eat up your eyes, system and screen real estate just to do simple tasks, like play music. Therefore, we made this black Winamp Classic skin. It's easy on your suffering eyes, with visible yet subtle buttons, and has that sweet neon glow. Also, being a Classic skin - it eats considerably less amount of memory, opposed to that bloated Modern junk.

To download and install just press the big button, and if you have Winamp installed, it should sort itself out one way or the other. Enjoy the Deep Black.

Some say they are two former graphic designers, and that they sound a bit like Daft punk… all we know is, they are our favourite players – bow down to Justice.

Much has been said about the notorious iPhone. Well, today it hit Balkan grounds and I must say; it’s damn fine. Clearly the first broad audience device that made me feel like the future is here… well if not the future, at least the Federation. Just holding the device made me feel like I can teleport from the crappy mall I was in, on to my superfly spaceship high in orbit. The build quality, the design and the overall futuristic feel of the device, make it a worthy acquisition. You may think it’s retarded, hell I might even agree, but it’s the mother of all hi-tech bling. And that’s a cold fact.

We are happy to announce this year’s FESTO 2007 — leading advertising festival in Croatia, awarded Bronze Bell (some say Croatia is low on silver, so second place is bronze) award in category “interactive advertising — web sites” for jasnasurina.com.
Digitel approached us with a groundbreaking idea to present a book’s release on the web as a… BOOK! A series of authors video clips where packed into slick book design, making a strong concept which was recognized by the festivals jury.
A fine example, of how an overused technique can still be put to good use with some creative thinking. First place was taken by our dear friends and identity father’s sudarpitarević, for their more than miraculous “Lavlja
i Tigrova mast” (Lion and tigers ointment).

Happy times at Nivas

Daemon made some really good points about inconsistencies in the new CS3 package (which is in fact the biggest release of different applications under the same name in a history of suites). But there is a lot to suite than just an pretty standardized interface. Who wants another Office look a like suite? 10 programs to share same icon set, menu system and bits of functionality? I don't use anything else than Flash/Flex/texteditor these days, so I really don't understand any of the stuff Daemon rants about. CS3 suite is the first big thing that was released after the Adobe / Macromedia merge and stuff I've seen/read so far regarding the functionality and cross application integration is just amazing. Many products have gained improvements in interoperability with each other, But, as always... time and sleepless nights will tell.

Kuler is a new crayz project from Adobe (online community - slash - color picker tool), which requires Flash Player 9.0.28.0. You can share your own colors themes with other designers, and  you can download themes to use with Adobe Creative Suite 2 applications.

Today I came across this article back from 2005. Amazon.com popularized the tab navigation metaphor online. Through the years they explored multiple interface design solutions to make their growing product inventory accessible to Web users. As a result, some interesting lessons emerge when one looks at how the site’s top-level navigation has changed over the years.

Guys at Fadtastic listed our logo for Planet Actors web site in their examples section (Logo design where 1+1=3) 'nuff said. At least, it's nice to see it near Shaun Inman, Ping Mag, CSS Beauty and CSS Mania logos.

You can check out interesting read at Les tendances web du #FF017D. Happy to see our last project in examples. I guess biggest influence on us with pink colour here was massive T-Com rebranding campaign.

Btw, here is translation to English by Google - Why men would not be entitled to the Pink?! Check out the rest of this cool blog about #FF017D. Wicked.

Have you ever sliced up your PSD layouts and turned them in to XHTML web pages only to find that the two are not equal (column widths are not right, margins and paddings are off...). I know it can be a great pain but there is a simple but effective solution to this problem that does not require constant print-screening. In the initial state of any design the foundations are made up of a grid based system. This means that a layout is first seen through mathematical building blocks. By doing this you can precisly predict user habbits like why should the navigation be on the left, the content on the right and so on..

Before you start coding, get your first draft grid system save it in any web safe format. Next you apply that image as a background image to your document body using CSS (remember this image is here only to assit you in setting up intial xhtml layouts). And thats it, you can now continue your development and not worry about breaking the original design.