» Life and work should be fun

Life and work should be fun

This picture was taken at a late party after I had done hours of physical labor so I was slightly more uncoordinated than usual.

Chris Papadopoulos Dancing

In real life, I’m most definitely not not one to habitually make a spectacle of myself. On the rare occasion I do dance in public, I feel very self-conscious and have difficulty really letting loose.

But I have this rare and amazing image of me dancing away here to illustrate a small point.

The point is simple. Don’t be like me. Learn how to dance.

Wait, thats not it.

The point is to try and have some fun with everything you do. And that can apply to the internet.

Fun

Worrying about simplicity, usability, text legibility, and other great web design practices is always important. But trying to inject a little bit of fun and joy into the world is something I’ve been ignoring.

I’m going to try and make it a point to have more fun with what I do this year. So here are just a few fun elements of other websites I’ve noticed. Most of these are very small touches, but they’re touches that are really appreciated and add a bit of fun and emotion into the mix.

Fun Greetings

Flickr has something that I think is really neat, and illustrates the global nature of the site and photography.

Every time you log into Flickr, it gives you a random greeting in a different language.

In what probably amounts to just a small handful of lines of code, Flickr makes me smile and learn something new.

Fun Message Boards

Crazy as it is, Something Awful has an incredible culture around it and an incredibly active community that has produced some of the internet’s funniest photoshops and creative projects.

Their message board software has been altered to allow folks to add in a custom thread tag with a tiny little image icon.

Here is part of the custom list of thread tags on the FYAD, dark and ironic comedy subforum.

Amazing, Amazing.

Fun Shopping Carts

Threadless, a t-shirt company with a real emphasis on creative community, also has a website filled with tons of cute touches.

One neat thing is the shopping cart that has a little sad face inside it when it is empty. Simply brilliant.

Fun Copy

Wil’s software ain’t half bad either.

Making people laugh with words is one thing that I think Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster does particularly well.

This speaks for itself.

Images with Effort

Even though Roughly Drafted Magazine can appear to some to be overly biased towards Apple at times, it is one of the more fascinating tech reads out there due to Dilger’s knowledge of the history of the tech industry. And the kicker is that articles are often spiced up with humorous images like this.

A little bit of effort can go a long way.

a new look for a new year

A modest refresh of this site’s look was done. There are still a few things here and there I need to fix but whatever.

- A new logo. The word “rain” is contained sequentially within the word “information”, so I think thats a pretty neat and minimalist way of presenting the logo. I’m hopeful it will also look snazzy in print. I also switched the text to a Futura Light typeface to give it a more elegant look.

- Bigger pictures. I changed it up a bit to allow wider pictures on the homepage and to make the most recent feature article more prominent.

I’ll write about it more later but I’m really tired of trying to implement annoying stuff in IE.

- Instead of going for rounded corners with images or annoying javascript, I did it all with CSS 3’s border-radius option. It should only work with Firefox or Safari right at this moment.

- Added some more information about me on the about page and some more projects I’ve completed on the gallery page. Constructive feedback is always welcome.

Conclusion

So thats a small look at some fun little touches. If you’ve noticed some fun little touches elsewhere on other websites feel free to post some examples as its always nice to see things I’ve not come across before.

Have fun and be well. Life is busy. I’m currently working on some smaller bits of private work and also progressing on an exciting site of my own that I’ve wanted to tackle. For now, here’s a sneak peak at the logo and it may give you a bit of insight into what this upcoming site is about.

logo concept