icons - The psychology of everyday shapes

We know a lot about colours and how they affect people, but what do we know about shapes? When choosing icons or logos, how do the shapes in them affect their perception?

Does anyone know of any research that has been done into the psychology of everyday shapes or have any experience with how people perceive them?

Edit: I mean perceive here more in terms of emotionally than in terms of meaning. Something like, how a square make us feel as opposed to a circle or a triangle.

Answer

In a nutshell, the evidence suggests that users see rounded shapes as more 'friendly' than sharp shapes, and that sharp shapes, appearing slightly dangerous, garner more attention.

Some go further and suggest that, as a rule, you should give almost all your divs and content rounded edges except for call-to-action buttons, which attract more attention when squared.

website design - Web Safe Alternative to Myriad Pro Font?

Are there any fonts that I can use in my font stack that are more or less similar to Myriad Pro and web safe?

css - How do so many app menus get that finished textured look?

I don't know how to describe it but how do you create that nice textured look with css?

Seen in the background:

Also seen a bit on the left hand dark navigation of:

Thanks for your help

Follow up:

1) Is one method (css/or whole image) better suited for mobile?

2) Could you link to a quality source for these small bitmaps?

3) Is the a pure css method of achieving this noise effect?

Last Follow Up:

1a) You mentioned the CSS transformations have a much heavier toll on RAM. Is this a 1 off price to pay when the layout is initially rendered? (assuming no zooming or animation of the div) Or will it continue to to be a drain on system resources as long as it is present?

1b) This is a hard one to answer, in a low ram environment how cautious should I be about adding another div to my project. (assuming no crazy css transformation or excessive box shadowing) Should I think that every div makes an impact? or every 10? or 100?

Answer

Textures are typically some kind of noise or bitmap. There's a variety of ways to achieve the effect in Photoshop, Illustrator and using CSS.

If you want to keep things to CSS as much as possible, then you'll probably still have to use a bitmap images and use the background-image (or background) property as part of your element style. The texture image may not need to be too big, because you can repeat it horizontally and vertically, and use it in conjunction with other CSS properties.

If you'd like a texture or noise as part of a gradient, then you're almost always better off just baking it into a bitmap image. Again, it could be tiled horizontally or vertically, so you may only need a ~10px wide image.

Btw, both the examples you've posted look like they're built in Photoshop or something similar, not CSS (I could be wrong though — do you have links to the source?).

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Is one method (css/or whole image) better suited for mobile?

That's actually a fairly difficult question to answer, because there's many factors at play. Images will typically be larger in file size, but render faster. CSS can be incredibly slow and take up more ram if you have many shadow and inner effects. But, CSS scales as you zoom in, which means things get rerendered at size. That's great news, until you zoom in really far and MobileSafari crashes because it's using too much RAM (happens all the time with SVGs on iOS).

CSS pros: * Rerenders at size as you zoom in on MobileSafari. * Can be smaller (in terms of file size), which means it'll download faster over 3G etc.

CSS cons: * Can take up a lot more RAM and is more prone to crash browsers. * Can be a hassle to design (creation is often less visual than creating images). * Requires support in browsers for certain features. * Less control over rendering (gradient dithering etc).

Image pros: * Total control over how things look. * Images always look the same, because they're prerendered. * Far less likely to crash browsers due to memory usage.

Image cons: * Extra work and CSS required if you want to support higher DPI displays (usually two sets of images). * Typically slower to download, because files are bigger.

Could you link to a quality source for these small bitmaps?

If you just want some noise, you can create a Photoshop document and apply the noise filter. There's a few different ways you could make it work, but it'll depend on the exact situation you're after. You may wish to create a white Photoshop document, fill it with a lot of noise (Filter > Noise > Add Noise), then make the layer mostly transparent (5% opacity?), and save for web. That way it can be applied on top of another colour and it'll add texture.

Is there a pure CSS method of achieving this noise effect?

Nope. Noise isn't part of the CSS spec. You can embed images into your CSS file though. Here's an example of that:

http://www.mightymeta.co.uk/css-noise/

This page may also be of interest:

http://lea.verou.me/css3patterns/

There's a few ways to use images that can stretch to different widths and heights, repeating middle sections. CSS3's border-image is worth being familiar with — it can let you create fast, flexible divs and buttons that are styled with images.

http://css-tricks.com/understanding-border-image/

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You mentioned the CSS transformations have a much heavier toll on RAM. Is this a 1 off price to pay when the layout is initially rendered?

Elements drawn in CSS often need lots of buffers, compositing and masking (shadows, inset shadows, gradients, rounded corners etc). These are typically only done once, but it seems like things can be redrawn if they go off screen and come back on (if the user scrolls or if the divs move). It's probably not a simple question to answer, and the results may change from browser to browser.

(I assume you're just talking about elements created in CSS, rather than the actual CSS transform property, which is something different. Slightly related: I've noticed that CSS transform and CSS animation typically doesn't rerender, meaning it's fast, doesn't use more RAM and can pixelate if scaled up too much.)

This is a hard one to answer, in a low ram environment how cautious should I be about adding another div to my project.

You should probably be fine. :) My comments about low memory relate to zooming all the way in on web pages with a few big CSS elements or SVG (vector) images on Retina device. We have a simple website with some very simple SVGs and zooming in crashes almost every time on an iPad.

(assuming no crazy css transformation or excessive box shadowing) Should I think that every div makes an impact? or every 10? or 100?

box-shadow can have a huge impact on performance. Be very careful with it, especially on large elements. You're probably going to have to do your own testing when it comes to performance. Adding another 10 divs shouldn't have much impact, but it depends what's in them, how big they are and how they're styled.

Slightly related: Here's a great talk on CSS performance tuning.

A talk on some problems solved related to CSS Performance at GitHub. The talk was given at CSS Dev Conference in Honolulu, HI 2012.

software - How do you track submissions to publishers/markets?

What tools (software or otherwise) or procedures do you use to track the progress of submissions to publishers or other markets? How do you reduce the chance of accidentally (and embarrassingly) submitting the same thing twice to the same market?

Answer

For tracking short stories and direct submissions to publishers, use Duotrope, a free online tool that contains every market you've ever heard of and a multitude that you haven't, complete with submission history, links to websites, etc. Also, be sure to donate to them, because they deserve it.

For tracking agent queries, use Query Tracker, which has a similar feature set but is geared towards literary agents (which Duotrope doesn't cover). They also have a premium subscription for 25$ that gives you a bunch of additional nice features.

background - What is this pattern called and how is it created?

I've seen this on many websites as a background but I can't seem to find a name for it or I can't seem to create it myself. If someone has done this, it would help a lot if you can give me some details.

Answer

Essentially that's called noise.

Basically there is a base color and then there's noise added to that color layer.

In photoshop you can do this with add noise filter.

Filter > Noise > Add noise.. ( Just like 1% or so.. just a hint of noise. )

Best practices for direction control in 2d game on mobile

I've been working on a pacman clone in HTML5 for quite a while. (http://pacman.platzh1rsch.ch)

One important thing for me was always to keep it responsive, so it would be playable on all different handheld sizes. The big problem wit that is: it is way to hard to play on a mobile device.

On a desktop or laptop you can control Pacman using your keyboard's arrow keys or W-A-S-D, which - in my opinion - is really easy.

For touchscreen devices I added some buttons into the game and also the support for swipe gestures. Anyway, turns out it's still way too difficult to play for most of the users.

Do you know any better options on how to solve this issue?

EDIT: Just adjusted the game to detect swipe gestures on the whole screen and I think it is already a pretty nice improvement. Thanks for all the hints, and suggestions!

style - Colloquial speech in pre-modern setting

Following this question, I'm struggling with writing the speech of pre-modern (in my case - 5th century) noble-born children among themselves.

Characters who are well-educated would not be making grammatical mistakes and would not be mispronouncing words (in fact, you can expect them to speak the local version of "Received Pronunciation"). They wouldn't use "Ain't", for example.

At the same time, children speaking among themselves, (as opposed to speaking to an adult,) would hardly use structured literary sentences - they would use colloquial speech.

Trouble is, colloquialisms can easily be timed and localised - they belong to a specific time (a specific century, or even a specific decade), and to a specific place. Thus, they create a jarring effect when used in a work set in an earlier time and a different place (as discussed in the question mentioned above). And of course, I have no access to colloquialisms of the period I'm writing about.

How, then, do I solve this conundrum - how do I write colloquial speech, without jarring too-modern colloquialisms? And while we're about it, what about the uneducated farmer in the same setting? Particular mispronunciations and grammatical errors are also period-specific and location-specific. How do I mark a person as a "poor farmer" without also marking him as being a "poor farmer from 1900s Northern England", for example?

Answer

how do I write colloquial speech, without jarring too-modern colloquialisms?

Fictionalize it. Just avoid the clichés that people would recognize; catch-phrases or gestures or accents, give them a twist and present your own.

Even then, the general rule in fiction (written or film) is to NOT be too consistent with accented speech, but spice phrases with it; or pick something that doesn't have too much impact on the reader understanding the speech.

Or skip the accents altogether: If you need a poor farmer, get into the head of one. What do they think about? What do they worry about? What do they talk about with each other? Do they think they're poor? Make their allusions and metaphors fit their trade; e.g. to describe something nearly impossible,

"Can't break that ground with ten ox pulling!"

An actual phrase from farming is "Don't eat your seed corn," meaning have the willpower to not sacrifice your future for the present satisfaction of eating. How else could you express that sentiment? Maybe, "better to eat a hen than to eat the last rooster."

what about the uneducated farmer in the same setting? Particular mispronunciations and grammatical errors..

Do not assume the lower classes are stupid.

There is a difference between being uneducated and being stupid. Most people are in lower classes due to birth circumstances. Both wealth and poverty are heritable; if your parents are poor they cannot afford your education, nutrition or health care, and you are forced into a life of early labor instead of more intellectual pursuits.

Poverty begets poverty; wealth begets wealth. In both cases, those cycles can be broken by exceptional intellect or talent, in the first case exceptionally high intellect or talent (although poor nutrition, health care and education may greatly reduce the odds of this occurring); and in the second case by exceptionally poor intellect or talent that squanders wealth to the point of losing its advantages for their descendants.

Do not include grammatical errors and mispronunciations to create colloquial speech. Almost anything you do in that regard will be considered racism or bigotry against a class, and alienate readers, and therefore agents and publishers that have plenty of other material to consider that doesn't stray into racism or bigotry.

You can use simple grammar, or a twisted but consistent grammar as some languages do, relative to English. "Cruel, he is. Believe you me," is not bad grammar, it is a different rule of grammar for the line "He is cruel. [you should] Believe me." The speaker may well consider the latter phrasing bad grammar; the "you" is missing from the second sentence. So there is an example of colloquial grammar; no assumed subjects. Or try the rule "no pronouns", or "nouns before adjectives", or other cultural modifications; e.g. men only refer to females by their name, never a pronoun.

Be consistent in the rules of grammar and pronunciation each character follows; don't try to indicate stupidity by language errors. Stupidity is conveyed through language by simplicity of sentences and concepts and misconceptions or superstitions; e.g. believing counter-factual claims. A lack of intellect has consequences in how much they can understand; both on the individual word level, and in terms of complex sentences or complex ideas. People of low intellect will reject the complex for a lack of understanding. Because they don't understand things well, they will cling to dogma and comfortable things they "know" are true (whether true or not) because they were told they were true by their parents and elders and community.

Intelligence is not marked by vocabulary (which is just memorization, and a good memory does not imply high intelligence); it is marked by insight and quick and accurate understanding of both what is being said and what its implications are. We consider Sherlock Holmes a high intellect not because of his vocabulary but because he sees clues where we see none, and puts them together into a coherent and true picture in ways we cannot. More often than not, in plain language: The clue is, "The dog that didn't bark." (Why didn't the dog bark? Because the dog knew the killer well, and did not regard him as a threat, and that narrows the list of suspects to one.) No fancy language, just a clever observation most of us would overlook.

The bottom line is do the work of a fiction writer, use your imagination to fictionalize the colloquial speech patterns you need, and in doing that you can avoid anything you recognize from real life. Clearly that is what was done with Yoda in Star Wars, and various curses and exclamations in Star Trek and hundreds of other fictional cultures and societies.

You don't have to be complex, or invent Klingon or some other language. Just a few rules (of grammar or culture) can transform a language. And mine the things and tasks these characters are occupied with all day for the metaphors and similes they would use; e.g. make them different for a soldier, a baker, a farmer or a seamstress.