I’ve just helped design a site for Girlboy Greetings!
Girlboy Greetings is a small greeting card establishment from Los Angeles, CA. The designs are quirky and are offered in a variety of colors. My favorite aspect of the cards is how they offer glimpses of everyday thoughts and places.
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I took a radically different approach with site conception and design in that I put the site together in Photoshop prior to any HTML development. This feels like a graduation from my previous design mentality, which had often sent me bouncing between divsdivsdivs and “oh-god-where’s my vector shape tool”.
The budget was small and time was tight so we went with a small 3 page, primarily static site. A Rails application with only 4 controllers runs the whole thing. The Paperclip plugin is in use by the Card model to handle semi-intelligent cropping of uploaded images. An implementation of a jQuery driven cropper is a to-do. On the front end, all is standard CSS with some basic jQuery effects. Fancybox rounds off the card display.

Humanized Output
Go organic with your Web application’s verbiage, especially in areas where users are likely to be in a hurry. “About two days ago” as a timestamp is wildly more helpful than “53 hours ago” or “2-1-2010 6:00 PM”. While it’s no replacement, widgets and primary listings are great places to use a more natural language.
And tomorrow, when I check my schedule and see my next meeting is in “about 3 hours”, I’ll remember. When I am in a hurry I can throw “[blah blah] 7pm tomorrow” at my calender app and it will just work. It feels comfortable, and it encourages smooth interaction.