Category: Voting

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Blue Beanie Day Haiku Contest – Win Prizes from Peachpit and A Book Apart

ATTENTION, web design geeks, contest fans, standards freaks, HTML5ophiles, CSSistas, grammarians, bookworms, UXers, designers, developers, and budding Haikuists. Can you do this?

Do not tell me I
Am source of your browser woes.
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Write a web standards haiku (like that one), and post it on Twitter with the hashtag #bbd4 between now and November 30th—which happens to be the fourth international Blue Beanie Day in support of Web Standards.

Winning haikus will receive free books from Peachpit/New Riders (“Voices That Matter”) and A Book Apart.

Ethan Marcotte, co-author of Designing With Web Standards 3rd Edition and I will determine the winners.

Enter as many haikus as you like. Sorry, only one winning entry per person. Now get out there and haiku your heart out!

See you on Blue Beanie Day.

P.S. An ePub version of Designing With Web Standards 3rd Edition is coming soon to a virtual bookstore near you. Watch this space.

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Election links Polls Voting Web Design Websites

Tracking Elections From the Ground Up

PollTrack is a new website that combines poll tracking data and written analysis to decipher “what voters are actually thinking and feeling” in the lead-up to the election. The site is not complete: sections are unfinished, artwork is rough, and usability problems involving labeling (“Today’s Map Today”) have yet to be sorted. But though the paint is not dry, the site’s potential fascinates.

The Presidential Race section includes a three-layered map showing current poll averages, projected averages in the coming weeks, and projected election day averages. It’s nail-biting stuff.

Commentary by Maurice Berger complements the visual data, explaining what the polls reveal or analyzing the way events in the news affect how the country says it intends to vote. Berger is a cultural historian, curator, art critic, and the author of numerous books, including White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness.

The site needs, and will no doubt acquire, polish. Copy is required to help the first-time user understand what the site is about and make better use of its features. The design feels more like a wireframe than a layout, and the stock photos on the home page are unneeded and poorly chosen. Intended to humanize, they merely cause the site to feel generic—and it is anything but.

But these are fixable problems, and almost beside the point. What matters is that PollTrack delivers insights and information on the most important election in years.

[tags]polling, election, vote, websites, webdesign[/tags]