Clients pay big bucks for sexy frontend designs but don’t want to be lost in ugly and unusable backends. Historically, many an administration interface had awful table-based layouts with complicated menus and unreadable data. It is time to reverse the trend: UX goes beyond frontend, and if we can code beautiful frontends, we should build beautiful backends too, all the more as backend designs are reusable. After Wordpress, Basecamp and the likes, here is an inspiring list of 10 sexy, though probably less-known, backend designs.
I wanted to share a site with you folks that I've been working on with the dev team at Colle+McVoy this last month.
As part of a project for Free Arts Minnesota, we put together a little web toy that allows you to make your own digital Qee and share it with the world.
What's a Qee? They are cute little vinyl toys. They come blank-white, and you get to be the designer and paint them any way you like. The digital version lets you experiment a little more with your design skills and you can fire the little dudes off to your friends.
It's pretty fun. Give it a shot and let me know what you think.
The urban river was created by Henk Hofstra in Drachten, The Netherlands and shows how mind blowing public art can be. The blue road installation features about 1000 metres of road painted blue and the phrase ‘Water is Life’ written in an eight metre high letters across it. This project took 4000 litres of paint and costed 75,000 Euros.
This may be old news to information architects and the like, but for an outsider, the idea of "mind mapping" as a prototyping tool is exciting in a geeky sort of way. Seems useful for any number of applications and it's good to see options out there beyond spreadsheets and site mapping software.
"One part geek Olympics, one part community service project and one part race-against-the-clock—Sierra Bravo’s F1 Overnight Website Challenge will partner deserving Minnesota non-profits with teams of talented web developers for 24 hours of fun collaboration culminating in a fully operational website for each participating non-profit."
Two reasons why this is an awesome idea: 1. A short-timespan codeathon means you can donate your time without worrying about a gratis project blowing way out of scope. Anything that doesn't contribute to the goal needs to be efficiently nipped in the bud. 2. It supports the concept that a defined programming effort and a small team can actually accomplish a huge amount of work in a small amount of time.
"I lived on the Moon" is a animation inspired by the Sound Track "I lived on the Moon" of the Kwoon's Albumn "Tales and Dreams". The video is rad and the music is really cool as well.