Tag: Design

A bit of smart security design from Tiller

I’m trying out Tiller (a service that pulls financial transaction data into Google Sheets), and there’s a nifty bit of security design.

Instead of its own authentication, you login via Google. This means Tiller doesn’t need to do any account management, and my account’s as secure as my Google account.
Like all other services in this sector (Mint, Personal Capital, YNAB, etc), the actual data sync happens via Yodlee. Yodlee is… not great, but it’s at least not worse than what everyone else is doing. And, Tiller does the best they can by using Yodlee’s own credential flow, which means your bank login never hits Tiller’s servers.
When you set up a sheet, instead of requesting access to Google Sheets, Tiller creates the sheet using a bot account, then shares it with you. This means Tiller only has access to the specific spreadsheets it manages, not your entire drive.

There’s always a bit of inherent risk in services like this, and I’m pleased to see that someone at Tiller clearly thought very carefully about the risk model, and designed things to be about as safe as it could be.

November 19th, 2018 • architecture design security tiller

Typography: Rhythm & Proportion

Horizontal motion

Bringhurst:

Anything from 45 to 75 characters is widely regarded as a satisfactory length of line for a single-column page […] The 66-character line […] is widely regarded as ideal (25).

Sabon at 16px has an alphabet length of 203 pixels, or approximately 152 points. To figure out the horizontal measure, I started with Bringhurst’s copyfitting table (29), which suggests a line length of 26-28 picas (around 450 pixels) for an optimal 66-character line. I was aiming for multiples of 32px across, so I tried 448px. This looked narrow to my eye, and sure enough it yields (in my prose) an average line length of around 61 characters. I tried 512px next — a nice number for us binary-thinking folk — and that hit the nail on the head at about a 68 character line.

November 21st, 2008 • design typography

Minimalism

I’ve been working on redoing my website for at least the last year or so… and finally got it done.

I drew obvious inspiration from the minimalism trend (c.f. Bennett, Tomayko, Pilgrim); the simplicity of those sites are quite refreshing. As I was putting the finishing touches on the site, I ran across a roundup of minimalist designs that I think does a great job summing up my attraction to minimalist designs, the article’s first three points describe perfectly what I’m trying to do here:

November 18th, 2008 • announcements design

A note to web designers

When a job listing says it requires knowledge of web standards, don’t bother applying if you haven’t changed your markup since 1998.

From the web page of a designer applying for the senior designer position at World Online:

<META NAME=GENERATOR CONTENT="Adobe PageMill 3.0 Mac">

Dude, don’t even bother.

(If your markup is better than that and you want to work for the best online news team in the world, why not apply?)