The wonder world of web design

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Feb 242009
 

How do you create a wireframe? The process begins with a dialogue. Together, you and your developers determine what needs to be done to translate your business successfully into a website. Nobody knows your business better than you, so you will be doing most of the talking – your developers will be listening ?

The wireframe should consist of words – no images – transcribed by your attentive developers based on what you say. In wireframing, you use aural senses (talk/listen) to determine what the site should do. You defer the visual senses (look/feel) to storyboarding, where you attend to how the site will appear. You cannot “see” how a site will work until you first “listen” to what the site should do!

Participants are reminded to bring their ears to the meeting. A multi-user interface will be set up between ears and mouths. Afternoon tea will be served. BYO ‘teeth’.

 Posted by bruce at 1:32 pm  Tagged with:

Raging author rips into sub-editors

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Dec 122008
 

Well, as Joan Didion once remarked, either you care about commas or you don’t. If you are one of that select band do not miss this glorious email from Giles Coren . One indefinite article was removed from his restaurant review. Yes, an ‘a’. It kept him awake; it brought him to the edge of resignation. God bless the Old Country, occasionally.

 Posted by bruce at 11:44 pm  Tagged with:

A democracy of words

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Aug 112008
 

The thing about Rakim

 Posted by bruce at 4:55 pm  Tagged with: ,

Plain please

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Jul 032008
 

On ABC TV news tonight the man who ran down people with a bulldozer was described as having ‘commandeered’ the vehicle. Well, it’s not lexically wrong: Shorter Oxford gives as sense 2. ‘take arbitrary possession of’. But the far stronger and more common usage is that in which officialdom – the army, the police, an emergency crew- commandeer a vehicle; when the need, that is, for urgent action in the public interest temporarily overrides legal possession. Thus the ABC’s way of putting it leaves a faint impression that the man had formal authority.

Does this tiny point matter? Yes, if you care in general about precision. But much more because such things quickly invade usage. You will have often seen and heard that some poor sod was ‘executed’ or killed ‘execution-style’. Again, plain villainy is unduly dignified. The man in Israel stole the bulldozer, then used it to kill people.

 Posted by bruce at 10:02 pm  Tagged with:

Metrics

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Jun 202008
 

When everyone was exposed (harrumph) to at least a little verse, they were also taught that one of the sins of the prose writer is to lapse into metre. Here are two consecutive sentences from an entertaining review of a new book by Ferdinand Mount (via Arts and Letters Daily)

His frozen heart unfreezes and his readers cry thank God.

Nothing succeeds like failure if your blood is blue enough.

Whoops. Maybe we survivors from the period are the only readers who notice and care? Doubtful: I suspect people catch a slightly iffy scent but can’t track it down.

 Posted by bruce at 11:04 pm

Demotic games

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Mar 222008
 

The street/cool/text msg world is producing some savoury demotic: going hawkshit on Iran for example. But you have to be certifiably young to use it straight.

I admire contemporary American prose for its inclusiveness. Slang, obscenity,whimsy, riff mix down with the educated stuff. Nicholson Baker would find a way to use ‘hawkshit’.

 Posted by bruce at 11:03 pm  Tagged with:
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