Seoul was hot and rainy like the Philippines, but that’s where the similarities end. You will feel the the modernity and the affluence of a first world country. You will wonder how its residents keep their skin so white despite the scorching sun and having no qualms about walking up, down, everywhere. You will wish you understood Korean (thank goodness for calculators and electronic dictionaries). Continue reading ›
Infographics is the new black these days. I keep saying that images are still the most portable means of sharing information on the web, and visualizations fall into this behavior. Memes too, of course, with The Oatmeal straddling both sides.
And then there’s Nonsensical Infographics, which throws the purpose of infographics out of the window.
The science of infographics is an interesting beast. Infographics’ level of success is always based on how much and how well they communicate their data—the classic form follows function. In this series, I reversed these roles—form is king and dictates what the infographic communicates. Welcome to the world of fictional visual information.
Chad Hagen
Discovered via 20×200, a site that sells art pieces for $20. I want a local site like that.
Update (07/26/10): gov.ph now runs WordPress, but per technogra.ph, it returns a lot of missing pages and database error messages.
Here’s a thought: news sites should take a page out of the Philippines Free Press and use WordPress themes instead.
I’m not entirely serious here, because it’s yet another example of how pathetic Philippine websites are, from the highest office in government to mainstream media.
PFP takes the cake: who takes a site live with a default About page, an Uncategorized category, and blank featured images? Apparently its proud “modifier”, Skaizer.com. I wonder if they even thought of with scalability with running WordPress on a supposedly high-profile, high-traffic site.
However, its theme, Bueno by WooThemes, displays content that is far more readable and well-designed that most news sites I’ve seen, so why not? Using a theme with little to no modification won’t help your brand, but neither will a shoddy, bland, “I’m a new site therefore I must appear as neutral as possible” design.
There’s something I noticed with the Philippine online marketing industry that’s ticking me off more and more (see, I give it a few strikes before I go on a full-blown rant now): a lot of them know diddly-squat about the basics of sending emails, and commit the following crimes: Continue reading ›
Update (01/05/10): Slides are up.
Year 2, here we go!
The <form> function & class mini web design conference season is back in full swing and the first one is happening on Saturday, November 14, in Rm. 409, Benilde Building, De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde (DLS-CSB) from 1:00-4:00 pm. Brought to you by the Philippine Web Designers Organization and the Association of Information Management of DLS-CSB.
For the uninitiated: Unlike the annual conference, The FFC Mini Web Design Conferences are small, informal gatherings held every other month, where anybody can talk and learn about web design. For free.
There’s really not much profit (monetary or otherwise) to be had in making local “copies” of the most popular sites today; you’ll probably just be called unimaginative and lame (read: jologs). But these sites are fun little ideas that stir up the chunks in our cultural halo-halo and remind us that quirky is interesting and copying is okay, as long as we make it our own.
(But first, sites that didn’t make the cut:
Go figure.) Now, onto the honorable mentions:
An unapologetic, uncensored list of lessons learned from the <form> function() & class Philippine Web Design Conference last July 10 at the Asian Institute of Management, Makati—because if we have to figure out how we can improve next time, we might as well start with ourselves.
