Jess vs. The World

Facebook Lightbox Redesign

With the most recent design update to Facebook’s photo lightbox I find myself scratching my head a bit. While I know you can’t please everyone I often feel like Facebook makes design changes not design improvements. Merely making something different, not better. My goal was to take a very small amount of time - about an hour and a half in this case and design something I thought was better in order to get feedback on it. I started with some really basic sketches, then went straight into visual design. The rules were simple: it has to blend in to Facebook’s existing look and feel: flat colors, no gradients, minimal use of icons and so on. My overall goal was to simplify the presentation to optimize photo viewing and commenting part of this meant consolidating the photo options, especially those not used very much (like rotate, etc.) Please let me know what you think.

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I just launched a new Website for myself. Check it out if you have a second and let me know what you think by taking a quick 4-question survey, which can be accessed by clicking the link on the top of the page.

Yesterday I installed the new Twitter for MAC from the new MAC app store. My initial impression was that while there are some nice improvements the overall new design didn’t wow me and I overall I really missed some of the old Tweetie interface components. So last night I took a stab at combining the old and the new for what would be my preferred user interface. Here’s a run down of what I did.

Sidebar
I brought back the old sidebar: While I thought maybe after some time I would get used to the new sidebar it just doesn’t communicate as well as the new one. The new sidebar is hard to read I think mainly due to the dimmer style notification icons.

Footer
I included a footer bar: One thing that I think doesn’t work as well in the new interface is it feels too floaty too me. I thought the top and bottom of the old interface did a nice job of grounding the app and making it feel like a solid thing. I blended the old footer bar into the new interface making it black.

Composing a Message
I brought the “compose message” back to the surface: Tweeting and reading tweets are the two main things you do with the Twitter app. I didn’t like having to click to get to the compose message option. I left the new drop-down style options there but brought the compose functionality back to the surface.

Scrolling
Lastly I made the scrollbar longer: I’m all for minimalism but I need something more to grab onto.

Feel free to tell me what you think!

An old client of mine is in Inc. Magazine today talking about his organic dog treats business. I designed this packing almost three years ago and just also came across it in a local store a few weeks ago (they are based on the West Coast). There’s nothing quite like seeing something you designed in a store!

Hey, that little logo I designed (and blogged about here) got published in the New York Times. I’m honored to be mentioned in an article w/Milton Glaser even though I’m inconsequential.

See it bigger: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jesseddy/5060339658/sizes/l/in/photostream/

I just redesigned Postling’s product platform. Check it out!

http://jesseddy.com/index.php?area=postling