Elements of Excellent Photo Gallery Design

I just ran into this website, which is the only site on the entire fucking web that has done photo galleries correctly. I cannot overstate its uniqueness or importance. It is the only well-designed photo site on the entire web! The only one. Gaze upon it in awe as I did and behold its majesty!

When I saw the main page I got the impression it was made by a really good graphics designer. Because it looks really good and clean. The attention to detail is exquisite and exactly what you'd expect from an amazing graphics designer.

1. the background is subtle and washed out
2. the composition of the photo that makes up the background is amazingly well-suited to a background page with its star present but off-side
3. the colour choices of the background photo harmonize with those of the home page - it's all blues with the only exceptions being the star and the name of the site
4. the playful descriptions with arrows draw the eye towards the menu options without being desperate, condescending or stuck-up - imagine what it would look like if there were only arrows with no descriptions, or alternatively if the descriptions were in a formal typed font
5. the menu options are underlined but not in a forced way, because the coloured bar is underneath them like a thick fat yet subtle and tasteful underline
6. the underline doesn't draw attention to itself by being vivid or sharp yet succeeds in drawing the eye to what it underlines in a perfectly natural way
7. the name of the site is in bright vivid letters to make it distinctive, and it's repeated because it's that important
8. the photo examples from new galleries cycle - at first I thought too fast but now I think just right
9. no euphemisms are used for the paid portion of the site which conveys refreshing honesty and directness
10. and the lack of minimization / maximization games (euphemisms like "member" or "join" but repeated all over the place) is tasteful and elegant

And then I saw the photo gallery and I was in awe. Because its behaviour is absolutely correct. You don't see that with mere graphics designers.

1. wasted space between photos is minimized with just enough to create boundaries
2. the grey colour that makes up the boundaries is exactly the same shade of grey water as in the home page - minimizes cognitive disruption
3. there are no elements other than the photos and the scroll bar
4. there are no active elements
5. none of the scrolling is hierarchical, you don't have to back out to go to the next photo or to see what's ahead
6. you can see all the photos in the gallery at once in miniature in the scroll bar
7. the scroll bar is vertical which allows the mousewheel to come into play
8. and harmonizes with the vertical pan motion you frequently use to see photos of people
9. the scroll bar is always visible, something that's difficult to achieve if the scroll bar is at the bottom of the screen but easy when it's at the right
10. even without the mousewheel, moving the mouse vertically the height of a screen is easier than moving it horizontally its entire width
11. scrolling the photo and scroll bar are overloaded functions, which is bad, however at least you CAN do both without repositioning the mouse, which is good
12. there are only just enough photos in a gallery so that the scroll bar will still fit entirely in a screen
13. and since this is the height of a screen, all of the photos in the gallery are accessible through a simple hand motion
14. while the scroll bar fills up the entire vertical extent of the screen - which it wouldn't if it were horizontal and limited to a simple hand motion, not with today's wide screens anyways
15. the designer is arrogant enough to disable all of the default or normal ways of doing things and demand you do it their way, using the scroll bar, so that you appreciate what a great site this is

The web was invented two decades ago and this is the first site I've encountered that has done photo galleries right. I think this says something about programmers' skills, talents, judgement and competence. Something exceedingly bad across the board.

Note that all of the galleries' behaviours and arrangement on this site ought to be encoded and determined by the web browser, not by the site owner. The instant you have a photo gallery with portraits, it should always, always look exactly like this. And when you have a photo gallery with landscapes then the only deviation is the scrollbar goes along the bottom of the screen. Because the rule is that the scroll bar should never, EVER form a visual boundary in the middle of a photo. There are no better options. The only open variable is the shade of the background between photos.

The only things missing in that gallery are two active things. The current photo should be outlined in yellow or highlight & washed out in white, or both. And there should be keystrokes to go to the previous and next photos in the list as well as first and last. And the behaviour of 'next' at the last photo should either be the next gallery or cycle back to the first photo.

What Is Suberian? Why Suber?

Suberian is an operating systems design project I've been working off and on for more than a decade now. Why bother with an OS project? Haven't the legions of morons proved the Unix / Windows duopoly cannot be broken? Haven't the (non-existent) legions of OS designers proved that Systems Software Research Is Irrelevant?

Well the problem with that view is that Unix and Windows blow chunks and the market is overripe, stinkingly so, for a revolution. The only reason it hasn't happened, aside from the distinct lack of vision is that everyone working on OSes is being a good little engineer or otherwise targeting engineers. IOW, nobody gives a fuck about ordinary users. One of the ways this plays out is that they work on and market some esoteric crap that users never actually care about. Instead of something users do see and do care about like, say, the UI.

And let's not forget about that lack of vision. Vision which can only be achieved by someone capable of both synthesis and analysis. Unfortunately, those neurocognitive traits are in rather extreme high demand so anyone displaying them both is going to get sucked up into and coopted by the capitalist system to do goodness knows what useless corporate shite for the rest of their lives. It's not like an operating system is a lightweight product either. It's extremely complex so for one person to design an entire operating system, that person's going to have to be at loose ends for years on end.

So okay, I've been working on this for over a decade. Why blog about it now? Why now of all times? Because it's nearing crunch time. The key parts of the design are all being finalized. I've seen the light at the end of the tunnel. There's only one major UI and one marketing issue left to figure out, the rest will be straight out implementation details. I'm not counting the sub-project I've mostly pushed back to Year 5 after initial release. Yes I do know the meaning of the word prioritizing, even if I've somehow managed to design almost everything in reverse order of implementation.

So that's Suberian. Right, I should actually describe it. Well, it adheres to every single high-level principle I could think of except Functional's Referential Transparency. There's not much point in listing everything including the kitchen sink. If there is to be a guiding principle above any other, it's Reflexion. I want it to be possible for Joe Schmoe (as opposed to Neo the H4ck0r) to be able to find his way to some random process, pause its execution, and fiddle with the stuff it has access to. And I want Joe Schmoe to understand what he's doing despite knowing fuck-all about programming. That's what reflexion is meant to be kiddies.

And that actually answers 'Why Suber?'. Because of Peter Suber's The Paradox of Self-Amendment and even more importantly his Nomic Game. Well, that and Suber is a pretty good last name.

What I Want

I want out of this current depression.

I want my 250k out of life, enough for a home and an annuity to secure the necessities.

I want meaningful work that uses all of my talents, and peers and coworkers who appreciate them.

I want to accelerate the demise of the publishing industry so that it is done within a decade. I want the hierarchical (mainstream) media to disappear on my watch. I want to wipe out the hierarchical DNS.

I want to introduce people to sortition as a viable political system so they know what real democracy looks like.

I want to wipe out the totalitarian web, putting power back in the hands of readers and users instead of solely in writers and programmers, and introduce sharing.

I want to fundamentally alter how programmers are paid for software to both secure a living for them and to align it with the ascendant Attention Economy.

I want to secure a place for designers so they are esteemed and appreciated now and forever.

I want to revolutionize computing and to advance the state of the art (practically frozen in 1980) by 4 decades.

I've known exactly how to do these things for years now. Except the first.