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Country Pickers: A Suggestion

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

You will surely have seen one of these before:

Wouldn’t you rather have one that did this?

If the code is working properly (and there’s no reason it shouldn’t), the first option in the selection box will be the country you are currently in.

I suspect the vast majority of the time that anyone fills out such a form the person will be in the country they want to select. In those situations the person won’t have to make any changes, saving them a few seconds, and in any other situation they would just select their country as usual.

It’s a minor thing, but it’s one of those small things that could make filling out a form that little bit easier.

The Code

In case you’re interested the PHP code is below:


function find_country()
{
	$ip=$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
	$country = '';

	if (!empty($ip)) {
		$country = file_get_contents('http://ip2.cc/?api=cname&ip='.$ip);
	}

	if ($country != "") { return $country; }
	else { return "Please select your country"; }
}

A call to find_country() should be placed as the first option in a select input with the selected value set. It will either return the country name or the text “Please select your country” – that way if no result is returned the default option will still be helpful.

Note: The user will not always be in their home country, so make sure you give them the option of changing the country.

Posted in Design, Usability |

The Many Designs of Small Hadron Collider

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

The www.smallhadroncollider.com domain name was registered on the 26th of July 2008. Yesterday, the 3rd of February 2010, marked the debut of a fully functioning website. So, what exactly have I been doing for the last 558 days?

Designing for Other People

I’m a perfectionist, which means that given unlimited time I’d never get anything finished: nothing’s ever perfect, so I would spend the rest of eternity tweaking things. Luckily, when you’re doing work for a client there is always a fixed time-span in which you must work. Having this known end-point means that you have to accept that the work you do, no matter how high quality, will never be quite perfect. But you can put up with that because, unlike you, the client is most likely not a perfectionist, and the designer’s job is to please the client, not themselves. Deadlines make perfectionists productive.

Designing for Myself

But the problem with deadlines is that they don’t really work if you set them for yourself: you know it’s just an arbitrary date and that if you went over it by a few days no one’s going to get upset. So you keep on tweaking. And the thing with tweaking is that you eventually get tired of tweaking the same thing: you’ve been tweaking it for days and it’s still not quite perfect. So you do a whole new design, one that can surely be made to be perfect. And then you tweak that for days. But it still doesn’t quite reach perfection. So you do another new design…

And that, to answer the question I started with, is what I’ve been doing with the last 558 days: I’ve been tweaking.

Some of the Designs

So, without further a do, here are some of the designs I’ve come up with in the last 558 days (you can click on the images for larger versions).

Design No.1

Small Hadron Collider was initially set up as a Mac software company. I was going to sell References, a program I’d created that made making bibliographies for essays and dissertations much quicker. I was also going to give away a little program I called iStrain which reminded you to stop staring at the computer every twenty minutes.

This initial design was up for a few months, but it lacked content. When it comes down to it the design was a little bland and it wasn’t based on a grid system, which meant the layout was pretty arbitrary.

Design No.2

The second design was a bit more colourful than the first and I think it’s got quite a bit of character. However, it quickly evolved into Design No.3.

Design No.3

This design is just a slightly redone version of the second design: there’s a bit more going on in the background and the header has been made smaller, but the basic concept is the same. I’m really fond of this design, but it was for a software company and not a web-design company.

Design No.4

The first of the web-designer designs. It’s clearly an evolution of the previous design, but with a now somewhat cliché glass effect. The blue and black theme makes a return quite regularly in these designs.

Design No.5

The logo remains the same, as has the colour scheme, but now it’s gone from quite fun to quite serious.

Design No.6

This design’s a bit of a weird one… Moving on swiftly.

Design No.7

This is another one that made it up for a few months. It was a bit too serious though. It was also 12 pixels too wide, which meant you got scroll bars on smaller screens. I tried to adjust it to make it 12 pixels thinner, but it ruined the whole design.

Design No.8

This is one of my favourite concepts. The background was going to have an intricate system of rooms full of little mouse-scientists. Probably the most literal interpretation of the company name. But I couldn’t get the menu system to work quite as I wanted and, after weeks of tweaking, I started again.

Design No.9

The next few were all done within a week of each other. This one experimented with vertical text and a margin to the left. But it’s not got much character.

Design No.10

This design, on the other hand, has far too much character.

Design No.11

Return of the blue and black. This one was so close to being the design I went with. But it had a needless splash page and it’s not very friendly.

Design No.12

This one was all a bit conceptual. The logo is an artistic rendering of what the Higgs Boson should look like on the screens at the Large Hadron Collider. I quite like it, but it does make the site look like an actual physics research company.

Design No.13

A more colourful version of the previous design. Very bold. Too bold.

How Did I Do It?

So, how did I finally escape the endless tweaking? I’m not really sure. But I did, and that’s the important thing.

Posted in Design |

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