Red turn signals

I was driving around town yesterday when I got stuck behind an elderly woman driving 20mph in a 40mph zone on a single lane road. While waiting to pass her, I noticed that the rear turn signal light on her minivan was red. Now, the standard for most cars is to have three different sets of lights on the back of the car with their respective colors. One for the brakes, which is usually red. The turn lights, which is usually orange (and sometimes red) and of course the reverse lights, which is white in color.

But why do car manufacturers think that using the color red for the brake lights and the turn signals is a good idea? I know that its easy to figure out that the blinking light probably means that the car is about to turn left or right, but doesn’t it just make sense to use the standard color that people usually associate turn signals with?

It’s these small design-standards that make tiny differences. When its raining cats and dogs and you can barely see the car in front of you, it just might make a difference to know if the car in front of you is slowing down or making a turn into your lane.

Tags: cars, design

12 April 08
Comment [3]

Helvetica Mug

Get one at the Veer store

Tags: design

Fancy McDonald's

McDonald’s is replacing bolted-down, plastic, yellow and white “furniture” with lime-green designer chairs and dark leather upholstery. It is the restaurant chain’s biggest revamp in more than 20 years, and, together with its franchisees, it plans to spend more than €600 million, or $806.6 million, remodeling 1,280 of its European restaurants by the end of this year.

A McDonalds is a McDonalds no matter where it is or what it looks like.

Tags: design

15 October 07
Comment [84]

White as Milk

White as Milk is a clean wordpress theme that puts focus on the content rather than the design. Its easy to use and customize and the design stays out of your way. I started using this theme for a photoblog, but then realized that there wasn't a good clean theme around for others to use, so here it is, download and enjoy!

Preview | Download

Version 1.8 is out and takes care of a few bugs and also has a few enhancements:

Better IE6 support - fixed bug where the sidebar would collapse if a photo/image was too wide.
Better mobile support - added support for Blackberry phones.
Easier to customize - most of the popular elements have been moved to the top of the stylesheet making it easier to find and edit.
Better widgets support.
Added support for tags.
Added Gravatar support
Content and sidebar area now use percentage instead of fixed widths.

FAQ

Q: How do I center the blog title in the header?
A: Open up your styles.css file and look for this piece of code: #headerimg {margin-left:28%;} and replace it with #headerimg {text-align:center}

Q: How do I make the template stretch horizontally all the way?
A: Open up your styles.css file and look for this piece of code: #page {width:700px;} and replace it with #page {width:95%;}

Q: How do I add an image in the header?
A: Open up header.php and look for these lines:
<div id="headerimg">
<h1><a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/"><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></a></h1>
<div class="description"><?php bloginfo('description'); ?></div>
</div>
and replace it with this:
<div id="headerimg">
<p><a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/"><img src="MYIMAGEHERE.JPG" alt="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?>" /> </a></p>
</div>

Got a Question? Contact me.

Variations

White as Milk is pretty easy to customize. Just open up the styles.css file from the wordpress admin area and the top few lines should tell you how to customize your copy of the template. I've created a few variations for you to try out. Just click on the variation you like, copy the code and replace it with the code on the top of your styles.css file.