Here's an annoyingly unhelpful teaser of a new Pownce-related thing I've been working on with a few friends lately. It's the first piece of really original design I've done in a while, which has been refreshing. After working on iterating and refining the same two projects (Digg + Pownce) for the last few years, it's nice to sink my teeth into a fresh, untouched problem! I can't wait to see this project breathe in the next couple of weeks (hopefully!).

Also check out Mark Trammell's latest collaborative effort entitled Adapting to Web Standards: CSS and Ajax for Big Sites . It looks like Trammell (who works with me at Digg) and I will likely be doing a workshop at dConstruct this coming September in Brighton, England. He'll be discussing many of the topics from the book.

I've been going through dozens of applications for design positions over the past few months as we hire at Digg. I've also been through plenty of resumés and portfolios at silverorange and I'm sure I'll be sifting through more with Pownce at some point in the not-too-distant future. An application and portfolio are generally fairly easy to do well (though they're seldom incredible) but there are a few common and easy-to-fix issues that I've seen again and again. A few things that cause me to pause on anyone's application:

Include your portfolio

Nothing matters more than your portfolio. Sure, your education and prior experience are useful knowledge, but I want to see your actual work immediately. I'm continually surprised how many applications are a straight up resumé with no link to a portfolio. A web-based portfolio is always preferable, but if you can't include current work online at least include well-described screenshots.

Lightboxes in portfolios can die a speedy death

This issue precipitated this blog post over any other. Ever since the Lightbox effect was created, there's been a surge of designers implementing it in their portfolios. Click on a thumbnail of a project in a portfolio and there's about a fifty percent chance you'll end up seeing a downsampled image of the relevant site. The Lightbox thing is easy to implement and has been used effectively in lots of places. Your web design portfolio is not one of those places (unless you're featuring your photos). Seriously. At best, I want to see your work in full functioning order. Bar that, a static html/css page would great. That won't work either? Well at least provide a full-size screenshot.

Link to actual live sites

If you can, link to an actual live website that you've designed. Sure, you might've handed off the work to your client six months ago and now they've gone and changed some stuff, but that's all part of the design process. Showing something that lives and breathes in the real-world even when you've let go of the reigns is a great sign of confidence. Even better, describe what's changed since you handed off the project and how that's been positive or negative. If you're unable to show live work because of NDA concerns, find some way to describe the project in general terms or share particular parts of the UI that don't give the game away.

Describe your role in a project

If you worked as part of a team, especially a big team, describe which parts of the project most reflect your input. Just linking to your work is good, but it's all the better if you're able to describe the politics of decisions, the process to achieving the final goal, and how you were able to produce something to proud of.

And now I shall return to my current stack of applications, with a deep sigh that I got that off my chest...

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If you haven't tried Slideshare before, you should totally check it out. The service is amazingly useful for sharing your presentations and slides. And, Rashmi (one of the founders) was a great presenter at FOWA and she's awfully nice to boot!

Thankfully, Paul includes full transcripts of his shows on his site. Aside from the obvious advantages for accessibility and searchability, it has the added benefit that I could read the entire thing this morning in a cafe without headphones. Very nice. I wish more podcasters had the patience to do so. Even with typing errors and some hilarious misinterpretations (Ben Goodger came out as Van Gudgers!!) it's extremely useful. I'd be curious to know if he uses an automated system.

The one problem with the transcripts is that you can count the times I say "you know". Erg, what a terrible oral crutch. I'll have to work on that.

It's really fun to be developing for the iPhone. First off, it's a welcome change to be developing for a single rendering engine... and a decent one at that. Plus, you've got the run of all of Webkit's features, including advanced pseudo-selectors, text-overflow ellipsis, and simple rounded corners in CSS. While I do enjoy making bulletproof designs in my normal web design, there's also some freedom in not having to consider text-resizing, extreme page resizing (you need to support 2 dimensions), and other hurdles when you're developing for the iPhone. Of course, we're still following standards pretty strictly, but not having to cope with the lowest common denominator (or even any rendering discrepancy) certainly makes things interesting — and fun!

Even more fun is developing specifically for the user input quirks of the iPhone. When your primary input device is a honkin' fat finger, it changes the way you think about links and buttons. Everything's got to be bigger... way bigger. The yellow digg box and Digg It button are about twice as large on the iPhone as on the normal website. I also made the clickable area of the Digg It button even larger than the button itself so if you click on the edge of it, you'll still get a press. You also have to make sure buttons aren't too close together so that you don't mash one when you intend to hit the other.

Joe (the Digg dev who coded the project) and I started from Joe Hewitt's excellent proof of concept and then adapted the javascript and the rest of the code. We're using jQuery (thanks to the jQuery team for their assistance) to render the sliding effects to mimic a 'real' iPhone application's functionality.

Joe and I threw this together over the weekend with Kevin's help storyboarding it. Good times were had. I'm really looking forward to messing around more with developing specifically for the iPhone. Fun fun fun. Can you tell I think it's fun?

UPDATE: One thing I forgot to mention is that page loading takes a long time on an iPhone. Actually sending and receiving a request over At&T's slow network (when you're not on wifi) is especially slow. So, we're actually doing one larger load to bring in both the story list and the contents of the stories. Then you've only got one request (and we made sure it wasn't huge) and you can browse the 10 stories on the page without loading again.

Update 2: Also see Joe's write-up on some of the technical aspects of the Digg iPhone version/

However, Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser has been the albatross around designers' necks. Versions 5 and 6 had no support for 24-bit PNGs and they dominated the market for so long that it seemed like we'd never move beyond using the simplistic transparency of GIFs. Then Firefox changed the game by not only supporting PNGs (something the previous iterations of Mozilla browsers did too) but by becoming popular enough to make the use of PNGs tangible. Even more importantly, Firefox's growth pressured the elephant in the room to follow suit. Now, Internet Explorer 7 supports transparent PNGs and it's quickly replacing its predecessor as the dominant browser.

At this point the vast majority of people are using browsers that support the transparent PNG. Huzzah! The critical mass has been reached and I believe it's finally over the top for the PNG.

Pownce, the latest project I've been working on, is the first major site I've designed that makes extensive use of transparent PNGs. You'll notice the background images on all of the sub-pages are subtly transparent over the graphical page backgrounds. PNGs are being used in several other important places as well, both for effect and for ease-of-use. It's been extremely fun and liberating to finally have the confidence to use PNGs like this. I already plan on moving further in this direction and some projects for Digg that haven't yet seen the light of day will be using PNGs as well.

I think the prudent designer isn't going to deprive IE6 visitors of a good user experience with regard to PNGs. Just leaving those poor lost souls people to ugly patchy images isn't acceptable. However, rough edges to images if you save an equivalent GIF for each transparent PNG is hardly a major drawback for these people. I believe it's an acceptable trade-off.

I'm certainly not one to be on the bleeding edge with new technologies (at least most of the time) and I think that's why I feel so good about starting to use transparent PNGs more frequently — they're not bleeding edge anymore. PNGs are ready (and maybe they've been ready for quite some time) for truly mainstream adoption by the entire web design community.

Leah, Kevin, Shawn and I finally have Pownce ready for a limited initial release! I won't go into a ton of detail about what we've created other than to say I'm super excited about it and there's lots of info over on the Pownce site.

We're very excited to get real people sending real stuff to each other and to see how they use the service. At least for the moment, we're going to let people in slowly so that we can tweak things and fix any bugs. It could be considered a public beta (except we shied away from labeling it beta since that's so cliched and meaningless). So, sign up with your email address on the homepage and we'll get you in as soon as we can so you can start using it and give us your feedback.

Big thanks to our fantastic alpha testers who reported tons of bugs and made loads of great suggestions. And, thanks to all the others involved for their hard work (especially Leah... she's the one full-time person on this!).

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