Punchbowl Blog

It’s not too late– Earth Day is this coming weekend (April 22nd).  So why not get some friends together and throw an Earth Day party this weekend? MyPunchbowl helps you with some fun and sophisticated Earth Day templates. Here’s one of my favorites:

My recommendation: if you are going to have an Earth Day party, don’t use plastic forks and knives for this party (kind of defeats the purpose, you know?).

In case you are wondering how Punchbowl helps the earth, we all are fanatics about recycling and do our best to keep everything digital (not much printing around here). We also use those low-energy lightbulbs. Yes, I know it’s not much, but Al Gore told me it’s the little things that add up!

I asked my wife to tell me which of our new templates is her *least* favorite. She chose the one that is my *most* favorite.

Don’t ask me why. I guess I just like hotdogs.

Start your next party at Punchbowl.com!

A great new site launched recently called Behance. Behance offers an in-depth take on what it takes to be a creative person. Their interview style is in-depth, focused, and edgy.

I’ve spent a bunch of time clicking around to read interviews with various creative people. I’m partial to the more technically minded folks, but they have some great interviews with musicans and artists too.

Take a read of MyPunchbowl’s Behance interview– then book some time to spend looking around the rest of the site. My hats off to Scott and the rest of the crew at Behance for an interesting and visually appealing site.

When we launched MyPunchbowl.com, we took a stance on public vs. private RSVP. I wrote a detailed post about how we think private RSVP is better for the host, and that RSVP shouldn’t be a public exhibition.

Well, it’s time to come clean: this was a calculated risk to get the conversation started about the whole notion of public RSVP. A lot has been written on the subject. I personally don’t like public RSVPs (I’m not a fan of coming up with a witty comment for all to see). We wanted to stir the pot– and hear people’s viewpoints about online RSVP.

Boy did we ever get some passionate responses. Here’s one of my favorite emails we got shortly after we launched in January: “Are you (@#)& kidding me? You guys are idiots. How can you not show the guest list? Surely this can’t be very hard. This is a big, big miss.”

When I got this email I realized that we had succeeded: people really care about RSVP options. We were successful in stirring the pot– from the Wall Street Journal to CNET to O’Reilly, they all covered our design choice. Clearly it is an issue that matters to many.

The reality is that we believe that great software should provide the most flexibility in a simple to use interface. Sometimes you have to take a calculated risk to get the conversation started. So with that said, MyPunchbowl.com now allows you to choose RSVP options. We think we have the most flexible RSVP options: you can change them at any time and the updates will happen in real-time.

So now that we have options, which way do you prefer? Would love to hear your thoughts.

I noticed that Brown University has a cool new homepage with a unique design:

www.brown.edu

I’ve been reading a great book on design patterns. I think Jenifer Tidwell would call this design a type of card stack.

It’s a bit unconventional, and won’t appeal to everyone … for example Matt is used to windows rolling down, not up, so he finds it a bit unsettling. But since I went to Brown, I challenged him to a fist fight for badmouthing my alma mater! He declined. Anyway, it is a great way to fit a lot of information in a single page.

What do you think?

Designing a website is a little like designing airplane seats: One size needs to fit all (… or, well, in the case of most airlines, one size fits all small people).

But in terms of websites, I’m referring to browser size and screen resolution. MyPunchbowl challenges us to design not just for different types of web browsers, but for different screen resolutions (800 X 600, 1024 X 768, etc).

But wait, there’s more - a dimension like 1024 X 768 refers to the area of the entire screen. I don’t know about you but the toolbars and menus in my browser take up quite a bit of space. Oh, and by the way, I don’t usually maximize my browser. So the actual window in which you view websites can be quite a bit smaller than the screen resolution.

I think you’ll find that this article provides some nice insights into this issue.

In the end, like the airplane seat, you can’t please everyone. There will always be some graphic designer with a 12,000 X10,000 pixel monitor looking at MyPunchbowl like this:

… just as there will be someone holding onto their 640 X 480 monitor seeing something like this:

We’ll try to walk the middle road with our design and please as many people as possible.

You’re surfing the web. You click on a link or button. Nothing happens … or does it … wait, is the browser logo moving? is anything happening here?

There’s nothing worse than staring at an idle web browser wondering what’s going on. We sympathize. That’s why we try to give feedback in MyPunchbowl whenever possible. Usually it is in the form of a “spinner” - the fun little windmills that turn after you, for example, press “send email” to share your invitation.

Want to get dizzy? Check out this page of spinners:

http://www.napyfab.com/ajax-indicators/