Max Kiesler - Web Design, SOMA San Francisco

Rendr 2 was originally developed as a rapid html prototyping tool, however, the possibilities are endless. As an experiment I downloaded the source and tried designing a page for a marketing site I was working on. I have to say that as a coder / designer the interaction of the app was amazing. I've tried designing as I code several times all with fairly good results. In many ways Render 2 added the missing link to this process by getting rid of the hole drag your page to the browser process. Seeing elements change live makes all of the difference.

New models for content visualization are popping up all the time now. Box Grid was originally developed as an experimental blog site. The two things I find most fascinating about Box Grid are the fact that it was originally released in 2002, and that does not use flash. The interface is all CSS and javascript based. While this type of content visualization will not work for every project it is place where we can start to imagine new ways to surf a website. The source code is also downloadable! Big hats off to the designer.

As a web application designer I'm always looking for new ways to visualize information and content. Musicovery has showed us a different way of visualizing and browsing music. While the menu is a standard set of music categories, the browse interface itself is like a map with your genre of music displayed in a map-like drag enabled environment. You can drag the music map around your genre until you find an interesting artist. Then when you click on their name the artist is repositioned to the center of the map and the music start playing, along with some nice visual effects.