Jacob Kaplan-Moss

Tag: design

A bit of smart security design from Tiller November 19th, 2018

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.…

Typography: Rhythm & Proportion November 21st, 2008

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.…

Minimalism November 18th, 2008

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:…

A note to web designers August 26th, 2005

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?…