ParaNorman.com

Una liga bastante entretenida. El sitio de www.paranorman.com recrea muy bien toda la trama y escenarios de la película de stop motion, que por cierto es de Laika, la misma empresa que nos dió Coraline y una de las mejores en esta técnica…

La navegación tiene un scroll con efectos de parallax que son de lo mejor que he visto aplicados a una UI. Entre otras cosas, hay un recorrido interactivo por la historia, así como por detalles de la producción. Tambien tiene una aplicación para que hagas tu propio personaje animado y lo publiques en el sitio y en redes sociales…

You don’t become a hero by being normal. Enter Norman’s world and unlock secret content in this HTML5 site that works across desktop and device.

http://www.paranorman.com

ParaNorman.com

Parallax Top40

Aquí una buena recopilación de los 40 sitios que mejor sacan provecho del efecto Parallax (o de mapeado por paralaje), que es una técnica de scroll que mediante la superposición de varias capas y el movimiento independiente de estas, crea una sensación de profundidad. Para entender mejor este aparente sinsentido, vamos a Wikipedia.

Este efecto se utiliza tipicamente en los videojuegos, sin ir mas lejos, el primer ejemplo lo encontramos en el Moon Patrol de 1982 y desde entonces se ha usado para suplir la carencia de profundidad que nos dan las representaciones bidimensionales, ya sea un videojuego, o como en este caso una web…

 

In this round up, we have some fantastic examples and uses of the parallax effect for you. The parallax scrolling effect, now a firm design trend, is a technique that uses multiple background images that move at different, yet synchronized, speeds as the user scrolls down (also, less popularly, horizontally) a web page. The overall effect gives the viewer a seamless and intriguing browsing experience that just looks damn good!

At the bootom of the page we have also included a selection of tutorials to help get yopu started…

http://bit.ly/M7fMWq

Parallax Top40

Designing for touch

El tamaño de las pantallas no es lo único que cambia cuando se diseña para móvil. También está el problema de los dedos.

Como este artículo lo explica, es toda una ergonomía diferente. Y es diferente tambien para cada uno de los sistemas que hay dentro del mismo “móvil” (iPhones, Android, Tablets). Lean esto…


Great mobile designs do more than shoehorn themselves into tiny screens: they make way for fingers and thumbs, accommodating the wayward taps of our clumsy digits. The physicality of handheld interfaces take designers beyond the conventions of visual and information design‚ and into the territory of industrial design. With touchscreens there are real ergonomics at stake. It’s not just how your pixels look, but how they feel in the hand.

Touchscreen design demands thoughtful awareness of where fingers casually come to rest on the device. Grab a phone in one hand, for example, and unless you deploy a crazy-claw phone grip, you always tap away with your thumb. For phones, designing for touch means designing for the thumb.

Thumbs are marvelous. It’s our thumbs, along with our affection for celebrity gossip, that separate us from the beasts, but they do have limited range and flexibility. While a thumb can manage to sweep the entire screen of all but the most oversized phones, only about a third of the screen is in truly effortless territory – at the bottom of the screen on the side opposite the thumb.

Place primary tap targets in this thumb-thumping hot zone. When holding a phone in the right hand, for example, the thumb falls naturally in an arc at the bottom left corner of the screen…

http://www.netmagazine.com/features/designing-touch

Designing for touch

Omni-touch

Interfaces de luz. Presiento que cuando este tipo de tecnología (llamada Omni-Touch) sea asimilada y aplicable en todos nuestros gadgets y dispositivos, vamos a pasar por toda una nueva revolución tecnológica, caracterizada -a diferencia de la actual- no por cambiar cómo nos comunicamos entre personas, sino cómo nos podemos comunicar entre personas y máquinas…

7626-omnitouch-microsoft-sigue-sabiendo-innovar

Soon you, too, will be able to talk to the hand. A new interface created jointly by Microsoft and the Carnegie Mellon Human Computer Interaction Institute allows for interfaces to be displayed on any surface, including notebooks, body parts, and tables. The UI is completely multitouch and the “shoulder-worn” system will locate the surface you’re working on in 3D space, ensuring the UI is always accessible. It uses a picoprojector and a 3D scanner similar to the Kinect. The product is called OmniTouch and it supports “clicking” with a finger on any surface as well as controls that sense finger position while hovering a hand over a surface. Unlike the Microsoft Surface, the project needs no special, bulky hardware – unless you a consider a little parrot-like Kinect sensor on your shoulder bulky. While obviously obtrusive, the project is a proof-of-concept right now and could be made smaller in the future…

http://tcrn.ch/npq3K5

Omni-touch

Design errors

Va una interesante notita de webdesignerdepot.com sobre algunos de los más famosos -y caros- errores de diseño que se conocen, cometidos por empresas que parecerían ser tan grandes y existosas como para pensarlas incapaces de cometerlos (Google y Yahoo, específicamente). Y sin embargo los cometen…

Why developers cannot afford to ignore design

We developers sometimes take design for granted. And let’s be honest: who doesn’t hate taking things for granted.

Some say we will never truly appreciate the importance of design until we have been trained in the essence of design and beauty. Well, I say BS to that. I want to break us our of this box and clear away the cobwebs from our code-oriented minds.

Development, by its very nature, reflects the knowledge base of the person in charge. And the skills required to develop such a knowledge base can leave us in the dark about design. Developers often sweep design under the rug in order to be able to learn the intricacies of PHP and MySQL.

But as someone who has been writing code for 13 years, I can tell you it doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, many of the world’s greatest developers have an excellent grasp of UI and UX and of what their users want. The best way to get a handle on it is to figure out what you want in a UI…

http://t.co/qcOjQzV

Design errors