Rob Goodlatte  

As a part of my ongoing Three Questions series, I’ve managed to score an interview with Mark Boulton. Mark is an expert on web typography and grid based layouts, he co-authored Web Standards Creativity, and he recently started his eponymous design studio—Mark Boulton Design Ltd.

This year at South by Southwest, Mark gave a fantastic presentation with Khoi Vinh entitled Grids are Good—by far the best talk given this year, squeezed down to twenty-two minutes to boot.

Also highly recommended—Mark’s fantastic Five Simple Steps series of posts, spanning typography to color theory, with a book soon to come.

Read on for Mark’s thoughts on justifying design, the value of graphic design education, and client work versus in-house work.

Steve Jobs announced at Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference that the iPhone needs no SDK — the built-in version of Safari allows developers to build iPhone apps as simple web applications. This isn’t terrible news — the iPhone version of Safari looks to have clever hooks that allow phone numbers to be dialed and address locations to be sent into the iPhone’s custom Google Maps application (microformats? — hopefully).

However, the WWDC demo shown by Apple’s iPhone VP showcased an address book application running inside Safari — not as a standalone app. We want iPhone applications that are accessible from the main menu — not from a Safari bookmark. My suggestion on how Apple should implement menu icons — allow developers to add an application icon to a web page through a <rel> tag (just like a favicon) and present this icon on the main menu if the user chooses to install the app. Simple for both developers and Apple, and there’s no risk of “instability”.

An aside— who approved “Web 2.0” as a set of standards?

Following the success of the Election ‘08 Facebook widget I created for Newsvine (22,000 100,000 and counting!), I’ve now focused my attention on a much more important political debate.

Who would make a better President — Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart? Optimus Prime or Megatron? Captain Picard or the O RLY Owl? Make your voice heard — cast your vote in Fake Election ‘08 on Facebook today.

It only takes a minute to make a fake difference for a fake tomorrow.

Add Fake Election ‘08 to your Facebook profile
(Note: You must be logged in to your Facebook account for the link to work)

I rarely have anything good to say about my cell phone — Verizon’s LG Chocolate. The menu interface is slow and impractical, the keys are too small for my oafish fingers, it lacks a speakerphone, and the stylish front-face red buttons give no sensory feedback besides a quiet beep. About the only good thing going for the phone is its outward appearance — and Verizon managed to uglify that by slapping an iPod-esque wheel (which doesn’t function like a clickwheel) ontop of the beautiful original design.

Yet, because of its flaws, it is the world’s best alarm clock.

When the alarm goes off I have to deactivate it through a slow interface using hit-and-miss front-panel buttons. And if I want to re-set the alarm I wade through five screens when two would suffice. It’s a puzzle to turn this thing off every morning — ensuring that I’m wide awake by the time the alarm stops. The Chocolate’s complete failure as a phone makes it the ideal alarm clock — its bad design actually benefits the alarm feature, albeit in a rather backhanded way.