There’s an experiment attributed to Harry Harlow. Five monkeys are placed in a cage, with a ladder and a banana hanging from the ceiling. Whenever a monkey climbs the ladder to grab the banana, all monkeys are sprayed with ice cold water. After a few times, monkeys know better and nobody tries climbing the ladder.
Then, one monkey is replaced. The new arrival wants to get the banana, but as soon as he climbs the ladder, the other four start beating him – they want to stay warm and dry. After a few attempts, the new monkey conforms to the group and stays down. Then, another monkey is replaced and the story repeats itself – when the monkey that was never sprayed with cold water joins the other three. And so on until there is no monkey left who was sprayed with cold water, but still the new arrival gets beaten when he tries to climb the ladder.
Now, the decision was made by team members long gone. There’s nobody on the current team who made the decision, and nobody knows why the decision was made. It just gets passed to the new team members, with no questions asked. It may have been a good decision when it was made, and it may still be a good decision now.
But if you ask “why are we doing this” and the only answer is “the decision was made before we got here”, form your own opinion and don’t be afraid to question the status quo.
I’ve just published the final releases for the following projects:
Flamingo 5.0 release contains:
- New scroller panel component
- New color selector popup
- Full right-to-left (RTL) support
- Toggle menu buttons
- Dock icon for ribbon frame on Mac
- Dynamic resize of ribbon components
Substance 6.1 release contains:
- Platform specific keyboard shortcuts
- New Mariner skin
- New Office Black 2007 skin
- Better visual integration in Substance Flamingo plugin for ribbon under all core Substance skins
Trident 1.3 is mainly maintenance release with a few minor API additions to the repaint timelines. Flamingo uses Trident for some of the animations, and you will need to add the latest Trident jar to the classpath. If you’re running your Flamingo-based application under Substance, add the latest Substance Flamingo plugin jar to the classpath for consistent visual appearance and animation effects.
Here are a few screenshots of these libraries in action. New Mariner skin in Substance:
New Office Black 2007 skin in Substance that is targeting the Flamingo ribbon component:
Scrolling support for Flamingo popup menus:
Color selector popup for Flamingo command buttons:
Full right-to-left support in Flamingo ribbon:
Today’s post highlights the design of ArnaudBeelen.be. Set in a monochrome theme with strong dominating black elements, it uses color sparingly to highlight the latest project and provide rollover indication on the rest of the portfolio thumbnails. The portfolio takes the main stage, with a spartan header that features the bare minimum of information about the designer, and no footer at all.
An unusual four-column layout gives an impression of a random positioning. However, note the cross-column horizontal alignment of elements in the first and third column. The “latest project” thumbnail in the fourth column is top-aligned with its counterpart in the second column, and has larger height to balance the visual weight that would otherwise be off-center since the last column has only one element.
Image by julieboddy
Every month this series is tracking the latest design trends and collecting the best examples of modern web designs. Here is the list for July 2010 with almost 1200 links from 38 aggregator posts:
