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Hi Chris,

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Many of you noticed that my blog died last weekend. The data didn’t go away, but all the “look and feel” part – plus the customizations I’d built in including e-mail subscriptions. Looks like I sorta have to rebuild that stuff for scratch… so I apologize now for the new and completely generic look. When I find more emotional energy, I’ll come back and try to rebuild this guy.

Too bad it’s also successful. This interview excerpt comments on this phenom (read it all at: Where Visual Design Meets Usability – An Interview with Luke Wroblewski, Part I)

With the recent successes of not-so-attractive sites, such as Craigslist, MySpace, and Del.icio.us, there is a lot of conversation around the notion of ““ugly design.”” Why do these ugly designs work? What can we learn from their success?

On more than one occasion, we’’ve had a senior business manager tell me that we needed a less-refined visual design for our product because sites that are ““less designed” are more successful. To a certain degree, there’s some truth in that. Sites with confusing navigation systems and unclear page hierarchies may generate more page views because users are confused and clicking wherever they can. Sites that use visual design to make ads look like content may increase their click-through rates and thereby revenue because users think they are clicking on content when really they just clicked on an ad. In almost all other instances, however, design is a good idea.

Dismissing visual design as just a matter of making things pretty or ugly cuts off your ability to communicate with your customers at the knees. As I outlined earlier, design is a means to communicate, not mere styling.

Sites like Craiglist and Del.icio.us remain popular on the merits of their content. But, does their audience enjoy bumping through the site?

by the way, this is precisely the reason I love FaceBook. It combines good content with just-in-time user-oriented design. It’s clean, smart, has decent hierarchy… just nice.

Not that any of us would really stoop to reading Teen People. Hot celeb news. Airbrushed lipstick, etc. But, thanks to Jon King and others for my five minutes of self absorbtion today. I present to you the new site My Heritage Face Recognition, which takes whatever mini-digital-you that you upload, and says you look like famous people.

how could you go wrong?

(ps – check out the old photo I used…)
I look like:
Hayden Christiansen

Bruce Willis
Alan Alda
Robert Patrick

was a good year. It was the year of Grease and Superman and the first time you could buy a foreign-owned, US-made car in the United States – a small one called the Volkswagen Rabbit. Jimmy Carter is President, mustaches were still normal, and the energy we had been tunneling to Vietnam is now returning to an old favorite: an icier, unfocused military stance against new Soviet leadership.

College had helped him stay away from Southeast Asia, but now a young Wisconsin ROTC graduate still has obligations to fulfill in uniform. His home is a killer-whale, the Polaris class SSBN Vallejo, an undersea industrial microcosm of the tensions in the outside world. Not that he wouldn’t get a pie in the face for saying it like that. Real life is angles and dangles, sweat and tension, shallow and deep. There are the rare days pretending to be civilians in the bistro in Rota, or having a smoke in the sizzling sun, shirtless on the deck. But most are harder and darker – colored only with man-made light.

But light doesn’t only come from the sun; and there are moments he gets to lay back in his bunk, stare at the gray bulkhead, and travel back to the warm coast of South Carolina, the heat and palmettos and Food Lion. She’s there, and he knows news must be soon. Hopes it is. Soon.

And then it comes. It’s a Tuesday, but it never feels like that here – a hundred feet from nuclear launch, time is counted differently – but it comes, and May in 1978 turns out to be better than Superman, or Volkswagens, or winning the Cold War. It’s the day I was born, and the day LT George A Ridgeway learns that he’s now become a Dad.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad.

love,
chris
born 9:05pm, May 2nd, 1978, Summerville, SC.

Learn more about my dad in an article written about him in 2004.

One of the books that I shelved for a time and just recently got back to is Spiritual Mentoring: A Guide for Seeking and Giving Direction (see my “Currently Reading” section on the right for links). Sometimes I feel like I’ve read countless books on this topic, but I’m enjoying the time this one takes to integrate writings of classical spiritual writers throughout the history of the church.

Today I liked a quote by St. Teresa of Avila, whose first set of writings – today being read in dozens of languages – were only written in obedience to her spiritual authorities. Her feelings were of personal inadequacy… thought someone wiser than her should take the pen. I’m inclined to agree with authors Anderson and Reese that maybe this is what qualified her the most.

For the love of God, let me work at my spinning wheel and to the choir and perform the duties of religious life, like the other sisters. I am not meant to write: I have neither the health nor the intelligence for it.

The authority of persons so learned and serious as my confessors suffices for the approval of any good thing I may say, if the Lord gives me grace to say it, in which case it will not be mine but His; for I have no learning, nor have I led a good life, nor do I get my information from a learned man or from any other person whatsoever. Only those who have commanded me to write this know that I am doing so, and at the moment they are not here. I am almost stealing time for writing and that with great difficulty, for it hinders me from spinning and I am living in a poor house and have numerous things to do.

I’m in Florida with my friend Jon. He’s about to sell his house, and
we just flew one way to pack it up, and drive a truck back to
Illinois. I’m looking forward to it, but he has kids, and just woke
up at 5am. That’s 4am Illinois time. Maybe this wasn’t such a great
idea.

Picture or something soon.