I’ve been using the vector graphics editor Inkscape a fair bit over the last few days, and in the last few months have given it something of a workout. It’s been quite impressive. I was never a really heavy Illustrator user, but Inkscape seems to compare to it much more favorably than, say, GIMP compares to Photoshop. It’s a later-generation product, so perhaps that’s not being fair, but regardless it just feels a lot better to use. Maybe there are killer features that Illustrator has that Inkscape doesn’t, but since I don’t know what they are, I don’t miss them…

I’ve mainly been using it for map-making (related to this), and for that it’s been really good, and I’m rather glad it exists, because doing the same kind of work in a bitmap editor would probably be incredibly frustrating. I haven’t read through the documentation, but whenever I’ve needed to find out how to do something I’ve been able to without much trouble, so it seems that they’re doing a good job on that as well.

Via BoingBoing, I came across quite a good article on information architecture and user experience design for social websites. If you’re at all interested in the area, I recommend it. There’s also a related wiki that seems to have a great deal of content on it.

I did some work on the PyWebSF site, so that it looks rather better than it did with the default WordPress theme. I altered a pretty good WordPress theme called Arras Theme, which I was fairly impressed with. As a reminder, the first meeting is tonight.

My brother asked me a while ago to design a logo for PyWebSF, and tonight I took a shot at it. Part of me thinks it has a certain something, and part of me thinks it’s exactly the sort of thing you get when you ask an engineer to do a designer’s job.
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I noticed earlier this year that Wells Fargo ATMs had a new user interface. I was quite skeptical of it at first, partly because it was quite different and I’d gotten used to the old interface, and partly because I tend to believe that many redesign efforts end up providing worse usability than the prior design (I’m an optimist, clearly).
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It’s not, as a co-worker claimed today, because I’m a Luddite. And, despite often feeling as if I’m against it, I’m not actually against the technological capability to send and received HTML-formatted messages via email.
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A gallery of images designed to tile seamlessly as backgrounds.
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