Christian Ross

Test Your Focus

For a long time multi-tasking was a buzz word in the corporate setting and a desired trait in many job interviews. It’s too late for me to hunt down the research but I have come across a few different articles in the last year or two debunking the myths that we are actually good at multi-tasking or that we are more productive when we attempt to be. As much as I like having a variety of projects to work on, I do find that my productivity tends to suffers when I jump quickly from task-to-task during the day.

I just spent the last 5 minutes testing my personal theories on some simple NYTimes interactive tests. As I imagined, I scored quite well on the Focus portion and fell short of average on the Juggling Tasks (multi-tasking) test. Care to see how you perform?

NYTimes interactive test on multi-tasking

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Daily Drop Cap

I feel like I’ve posted about Jessica Hische’s work before but I can find it anywhere. Either way, her Daily Drop Cap was already a pretty awesome experiment on her part to push her illustration skills and spread the word but she upped the stakes yesterday with some awesome letter-pressed business cards to accompany.

Today’s drop cap is probably one of my favorites:

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And the new business cards: (more…)

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I Code in Tables

There’s no shortage of material in the web-ranks that points to best-use practices of coding a website in a proper, semantic way. Semantic, basically meaning the idea that your content should be separate from the way it is presented to the computers that display your work. Creating a website with logical semantic code, often means that your website fares better in a number of areas:

  • Pages have the ability to be far more flexible for each device that accesses them
  • Page load times are often shorter with well-written code
  • Search engines — like Google — mention well-written code in their documentation of ways to rank higher in their results
  • Code-nazi’s sleep better when you abide by the rules written in their books and they don’t call you out in the blogosphere
Disclaimer: I am all for best-practices in everything I produce. Whether in design or development, I try to always take the path of least resistance but not at the expense of cutting corners. I prefer to develop my sites with semantic HTML.

(more…)

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