Posts by John Williams

Why character limits don’t work

While we do our best to make designs flexible, sometimes there are cases where the space available for text is limited. Maybe it's a widget, or maybe it's text inside a Flash piece, or maybe things just need to line up properly. But for whatever reason, we have to ask people to fall back to old print design skills and write content to fill the space.This involves writing the content, checking to see if it will fit, editing it again, checking to see if that fits…

At some point we get this…

And they’re all obsessed with coffee, too!

I haven't read Lee Siegel's anti-Internet book Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob yet, but the New York Times has reviewed it and the opening, at least, sounds like the kind of argument I've heard against computers and technology ever since I was calling electronic bulletin board systems in high school: computers separate us, turn us inward, make us anti-social. Siegel seems to think his experience at a Starbucks bears this out:

In "Against the Machine," the…