Alex Hardy

I’d like you to have a look at Orisinal; a collection of some of the most beautifully made Flash games I have seen.

Most of the games have very simple play mechanics, relying on a few key controls and the mouse. The simplest games are usually the most enjoyable though and I’m certain that you’ll find at least one game that threatens your day’s work with the desire to see your name on its high score table.

Charmingly illustrated characters and clever use of blur effects give the graphics texture and depth of field that is uncommon in Flash games.

Some of my favourites: The Bottom of the Sea, Chicken Wings and Friends.

Admired web design studio Happy Cog have updated their website.

Home to author and web standards advocate Jeffrey Zeldman, as well as designers Jason Santa Maria, Greg Storey and Dan Cederholm, Happy Cog publish A List Apart, host events and somehow find the time to design websites for the likes of Amnesty International.

So a redesign of their own website is bound to cause a stir among the web design community, and it doesn’t disappoint.

Zeldman has a post describing the rationale for the design on his personal website. The crux of it is that it connects the diverse activities of the company by expressing them in a sentence and building the navigation upon that statement.

As usual, their design is simple and effective with a warm, friendly palette. I also note with interest that their blog is built on WordPress.

Have a look. While you’re at it, buy Zeldman’s book Designing with Web Standards. I’ve read the first edition, and it proved a solid starting point for learning XHTML/CSS based design.

I’m going to throw down the gauntlet (no pun intended) to my blogging friends and list my favourite, most fondly remembered games of all time. Things like this are subject to constant revision, so I’m not going to be too fussy about it. I’ve listed them in alphabetical order (because some things are too hard to compare). I list the platform that I played each game on.

1. Beach Head (C64)
2. Boulderdash (C64)
3. Burning Rangers (Saturn)
4. Bust A Move (Playstation)
5. Command & Conquer (Mac)
6. Dungeon Master (Amiga)
7. Exile (Amiga)
8. Flashback (Amiga)
9. Gargoyle’s Quest (Gameboy)
10. Gauntlet (C64)
11. God of War (PS2)
12. Halo (Mac)
13. Homeworld (Windows PC)
14. Jumping Flash (Playstation)
15. Lemmings (Amiga)
16. Myth (C64)
17. NiGHTS Into Dreams / Christmas NiGHTS (Saturn)
18. Outrun (C64)
19. Panzer Dragoon Saga (Saturn)
20. Quake 3 (Mac)
21. Rainbow Islands (Amiga)
22. Resident Evil (Playstation)
23. Resident Evil 4 (PS2)
24. Rez (Dreamcast)
25. Rick Dangerous (Amiga)
26. R-Type (Amiga)
27. Sega Rally (Saturn)
28. Sensible Soccer (Amiga)
29. Shadow of the Colossus (PS2)
30. Shining Force 3 (Saturn)
31. Sonic the Hedgehog (Megadrive)
32. Soul Calibur (Dreamcast)
33. Starwing (SNES)
34. Streetfighter 2 (various versions) (SNES)
35. Super Mario 64 (N64)
36. Super Mario Kart (SNES)
37. Super Mario World (SNES)
38. Super Monkey Ball (Gamecube)
39. Super Probotector (SNES)
40. Super Tennis (SNES)
41. Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles (Arcade)
42. Tetris (Gameboy)
43. Tomb Raider (Playstation)
44. Ultimate Doom (Playstation)
45. Virtua Tennis (Dreamcast)
46. X-Men Vs Streetfighter (Saturn)
47. Yoshi’s Island (SNES)
48. Zelda: A Link to the Past (SNES)
49. Zelda: Link’s Awakening (Gameboy)
50. Zelda: Ocarina of Time (N64)

You could infer that I don’t care much for computer gaming (consoles all the way for me…), that I think the SNES was the best console ever, and that the Zelda series are my favourite games. Yep, sounds about right.

Now if I could just get a damn Wii I could play Twilight Princess…

I thought I’d kick off a new section. As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m going to keep a record of things I find interesting or inspiring. It might be anything - a website, movie, videogame or something further afield like an interesting art or design book, an exhibition, a piece of architecture or something from the natural world (there are some pretty wild designs there!).

It’s a Friday and I’m feeling unwell, so I’ll make my first post a brief one. It’s a website from my home town.

It’s the Manchester City Galleries website by Manchester agency Reading Room.

The graphic design is clean and simple, not really much to write home about (or indeed post about), so why am I drawing attention to this site?

Go to your browser options, and increase the text size. Notice how, instead of the usual effect (the text getting larger and the page layout breaking), the whole layout enlarges - images and all. In some cases you observe some wrapping as elements get too large, but it works well for the most part.

For the web designers among us, they’ve done this by setting body {font-size:62.5%;} in CSS, which makes 1 em = 10 pixels. They then specify the dimensions of everything with ems. So the image of the front entrance is sized as {width:16em; height:15.2em;} - in effect 160px x 152px. So because ems are a measurement that scales when you enlarge the text everything grows proportionately.

This is great for people who have poor eyesight who habitually enlarge text, or perhaps just those on fancy high resolution screens.

Very clever indeed.

See the news story on Reuters.

I’m no fan of the nanny state, but I remember the scrape I had a couple of years ago (which truthfully was as much my fault for listening to my music as the driver’s for trying to jump the lights).

Speed camera fines are proof enough that many people won’t take the correct action by default, so if the prospect of a fine makes people a little more cautious then maybe it’s not such a bad idea.

I’m in the midst of poking around in code, so I thought I’d open the old browser testing can of worms. Here are the browsers I prioritise in order:

1. Firefox (Mac)
2. Safari (Mac)
3. Firefox (PC)
4. Internet Explorer 6 (PC)
5. Internet Explorer 7 (PC)

[EDIT] To clarify, the list is the order that I test in, not of importance. That order would go: IE6, IE7, Ff (PC), Safari (Mac), Ff (Mac).

The Mac browsers are higher up the list because I work on the Mac. It makes sense to use the tools at hand. I have two reasons for placing a higher priority on testing in IE6 than IE7, its majority market share and simply that IE7 is a marked improvement. If your web page renders acceptably up to the point of testing it in IE7 you’ll probably find no issues at all. Mercifully there are ways to run both IEs without needing two PCs.

Where it comes to minority browsers like Opera I take a more relaxed view. If the latest version of the browser renders the page in an acceptable manner, then it’s fine. Users of such applications are technically savvy enough to have actively chosen their browsers. It’s safe to assume that they maintain up to date software. It isn’t worth the time and effort it takes to hack your way around the quirks of obsolete software. For this reason I’ve (reluctantly) abandoned testing in IE5 for the Mac.

I use the word acceptable rather than identical. When testing a web page you should view it in isolation - the question isn’t “does it look the same?” because pixel-perfect reproduction from one browser to the next is an impossible goal. The subtly different text sizes, line spacing or even anti-aliasing alone will see to that. The question is “does it look right?”

In case you wondered which browser I prefer, let me spell it out

So, you web designers out there: what’s your take on this issue?

Steve Smith of Ordered List (known principally to me as the author of the excellent Tiger Admin and Feedburner plugins for WordPress) has teamed up with Jonathan Snook of Snook.ca (whose blog I regularly read), Dan Rubin of SuperfluousBanter and Bryan Veloso of Revyver (whom I confess to not knowing so well but I’ll be checking them out).

Their venture is called Sidebar Creative and I wish them well.

In many ways, they demonstrate what I always hoped Jon, Si and myself would become under the Design Inc name that we jointly hold. A small group of independent designers and developers, joining forces to fill the gap between one-man-band freelancers and the full-service design agency. Doing better work together than they could tackle individually.

Perhaps even eventually abandoning client work to focus our resources on our own business goals.

So far our accomplishments have been limited to the occasional freelance job and a website that is so neglected I don’t wish to link to it. Part of my reason for starting this site was that I’m in my late twenties and no longer content to wait for that future to happen. To take the first step by finding out if I had anything to say. It seems that I have plenty… Going forward, I’ll build my own platform that I can use to spring new projects from.

Maybe one day Design Inc will be some sort of reality and this blog will join it. In the meantime please excuse me, I have a contact form to program

Set against the backdrop of the chaos and civil war that enveloped 1990s Sierra Leone, “Blood Diamond” is the story of Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio), an ex-mercenary from Zimbabwe, and Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou), a Mende fisherman.

Both men are African, but their histories and their circumstances are as different as any can be until their fates become joined in a common quest to recover a rare pink diamond, the kind of stone that can transform a life…or end it.

This film was a pleasant surprise, having heard mixed reviews from friends. The acting is generally strong although Jennifer Connelly isn’t given a great deal to do as the earnest journalist. Hounsou gives a fierce performance – I was first impressed by him in Amistad – but risks being lazily typecast as the token oppressed African. I expected to cringe at DiCaprio’s South African accent, but he pulls it off convincingly enough.

It is a violent film, quite shockingly so for a 15. The indiscriminate horror of war is captured, with women and children finding themselves in the firing line as often as soldiers.

The main criticisms that I would level at the film are that the Archer’s redemption story is so heavily foreshadowed that you find yourself simply waiting for his Good Deed At The End. It is also overlong - Steph and I felt that at least 20 minutes could have been edited without compromise. I suspect that The Last King of Scotland is better on the whole.

[rating:3.5]

Visit the Blood Diamond website for more information.

A new article on A List Apart by Bobby van der Sluis, called “Flash Embedding Cage Match”, offers a rundown of the options available for including Flash content in a webpage.

It refers to Geoff Stearns’ SWFObject script (my tool of choice), and compares it to Unobtrusive Flash Objects (UFO), which is by the author himself.

Now obviously the implicit message is “my technique is the best, use it”, but he does seem to have a point. UFO’s main advantage is that you can insert your JavaScript before the element that you want to replace with Flash content. SWFObject requires you write the code after it on the page, so you can’t squirrel away your Flash enhancements in a linked JS file. I always thought that was a bit nasty.

I’ll explore UFO more thoroughly before I choose a method for Refresh.

My friends Stephen and Richard have started blogs.

Both are designers, so you can expect them to put the world to rights on that front. Richard is an enthusiastic mountain biker and videogame player, so if you want to read Nintendo DS and Xbox 360 opinions from a purchasing gamer rather than a journalist, look out for his star rated reviews.

Meanwhile, I’ll be adding a category for websites and services that I think are particularly good (not necessarily what’s already on FWA, Styleboost etc), as well as wider inspirational material.

Coming soon.