ui-ux

In this second post discussing the current design of the website you're on as you read this, I go more into detail about how I drew out the art assets for alvies.org and built it all to go together. Of course, by the time you're reading this, the technical details are out of date, but I probably won't write much more about that.

I hadn't done a whole lot with my eponymous website in a decade; not as if the thing gets a boatload of traffic, but as someone who makes his living and has his major hobbies all connected to the web, it was a bit awkward to have something quite so stale.

As we are the masters of our technology, we should trust our instincts when our technology does something we don't expect or don't understand. If we lack sufficient mastery of the technology to recognize this situation, we should either get it or seek out those who have it. I trust the people who build our smart devices, but I shouldn't forget that I'm the one actually using them.

A while back, I had a project in which I had a series of buttons that needed to be styled in a rainbow of candy colors, for a list of items that all lead to different spots in the same content hierarchy. The design mockups I was given for the project were detailed but did not appear to be internally consistent from color to color; the base colors were chosen from a brand guide, but the guide did not provide any detail for how to lighten or darken the colors for user interaction states. I started by developing CSS to match the mockups, but the problem kept gnawing at me.

The "Arkeg" is, as you might be able to suss out if you think long enough, a combination of a stand-up arcade game cabinet plus a "kegerator," another portmanteau describing a mini-fridge with a small keg of beer inside. This is, in fact, a real thing, and it's one that will set you back roughly four thousand dollars. But not the one you'll read about here!