December 2006
Creating Passionate Users: Add graphics to your blog, book, or presentation
by 1 otherPeople pay attention to graphics. They respond to graphics. They learn from graphics. If you want your readers/learners/audience to "get" something as quickly and clearly as possible, use visuals. And you don't have to be a graphic artist, designer, or information architect to put pictures in your presentation, post, or book. This post is my first attempt to categorize the kinds of graphics I do here, and offer tips for creating visuals that tell the story better and faster than words.
November 2006
Amberjack: Site Tour Creator - Simple. Free. Open Source.
by 28 othersAmberjack is a lightweight Open Source library, enabling webmasters to create cool site tours.
By guiding your site visitors, Amberjack tours can greatly improve the usability of your website.
September 2006
A List Apart: Articles: Text-Resize Detection
by 5 othersWhen you design for the web, you don’t know what software people will use to experience your site, and you don’t know what capabilities your users (and their software) have. Flexible layouts and resizable type can eliminate a lot of worst-case usability and design scenarios, but it’s still extremely difficult to create page layouts that don’t break even if the user increases the type size by more than a few settings.
August 2006
Baekdal.com - The Goal is Pretty Simple
by 5 othersThomas Baekdal is a Project Manager, a Change Advocate and an Information Architect. He wants to help create a better future. This site is created to support this vision and will focus on topics like management, branding, usability, standards and life in general.
Design Inside Yahoo!: George Oates | unraveled
This is the second interview of Design Inside Yahoo! This time, I interviewed George Oates, the UI designer at Flickr. I talked to George about Flickr’s beginnings at Ludicorp, its place in Yahoo!’s social media strategy and the Flickr design process.
Anand Agarawala's Homepage!
by 1 other (via)Skilled in rapid prototyping interactive graphics and 2D/3D user interfaces. Extensive training in fundamentals of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Usability. Proficient videographer, productions include 3D Animation, Music Videos, Short Film Fiction, Documentary, Interactive Flash, TV segment and opening sequences, Advertisements, Visual Effects and Bluescreening.
data visualization & visual design - information aesthetics
by 31 othersinspired by Manovich's definition of information aesthetics, this weblog explores the symbiotic relationship between creative design and the field of information visualization, in an emergent multidisciplinary field what could be coined as 'creative information visualization'.
Interaction-Design.org - A site about HCI, Usability, UI Design, User Experience, Information Architecture and more..
by 3 others (via)So far, this website features the beginnings of a free, open-content, peer-reviewed Encyclopedia covering terms from the disciplines of Interaction Design, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Design, Human Factors, Usability, Information Architecture, and related fields. By using the Creative Commons Copyright Licence, the Encyclopedia is in effect the property of the Interaction Design community, not of this specific website.
July 2006
F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
by 7 othersEyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe.
June 2006
graphpaper.com - Microsoft Word’s Useless Buttons
It’s not bragging (in fact, it’s probably a little embarassing) for me to say that I am an expert user of Microsoft Word. I can do just about anything I want with it, and I understand most of Word’s idiosyncracies and tricks. Still, the UI has always seemed to get in my way. For example, there are a ton of buttons I never use — so for kicks I decided to see just how many.
Anil Dash: Office 2007 is the Bravest Upgrade Ever
by 1 other (via)By radically changing the user interface in Office 2007, Microsoft made the riskiest bet in the history of commercial software. And I think they're going to win the bet.
Veerle's blog
by 17 othersI’m a graphic/web designer living in Belgium. My personal journal is an online source for topics ranging from XHTML/CSS to graphic design tips.
I began my career in 1992 as a freelance graphic designer under the name of Duoh!. The first 3 years were mainly filled with print orientated work such as logos and stationary.
Web feed icon trademark, licensing and usage guidelines : pretty widgets
by 1 otherI am encouraged to read Mitchell Baker’s posts (part 1, part 2) about the usage of Stephen Horlander’s web feed icon which is seen in Firefox, IE7 and on an increasing number of web pages. She suggests that Mozilla should work with the web community to set usage guidelines for the icon. This is a great idea. Guidelines are necessary to avoid confusing web users about the meaning of the image.
Subtraction: Little Orange Icons
(via)The world of XML syndication is still a soup of acronyms and counter-intuitive terminology — RSS, Atom, XML, feeds, aggregation, ’casts, etc. — but at the very least, we’re inching towards visual standardization in how we represent it iconographically. Microsoft, in an uncharacteristic but laudable show of cooperativeness, agreed late last year to adopt Firefox’s orange RSS/XML icon — a rounded little square with featuring what might be best described as ISO-style broadcast waves — for its Internet Explorer 7 browser.
May 2006
BBC - bbc.co.uk Standards & Guidelines - Home Page
BBC Online Technical, Design & Editorial guidelines
April 2006
Vitamin Features » Making Popular Layout Decisions
Every time you make a layout decision - fluid vs fixed, scaled vs percentage, a few more people hate you. How do you make the right decisions and when?
March 2006
badboy.media.design :: articles :: Niceforms
by 23 others (via)Web forms. Everybody knows web forms. Each day we have to fill in some information in a web form, be it a simple login to your webmail application, an online purchase or signing up for a website. They are the basic (and pretty much the only) way of gathering information on the web.
Simply Accessible: Required Form Fields
by 2 othersOver time a standard seems to have emerged for denoting required fields: changing the style of the label making it bold and/or red, and often including an asterisk beside the input text form control. Often times this asterisk is placed to the right of the input box, and consequently after the text box when examining the source order.
December 2005
Subtraction: The Funniest Grid You Ever Saw
(via)An in-depth look at the complicated layout grid behind The Onion.
Five simple steps to designing grid systems - Part 4 : Journal : Mark Boulton | Information design
by 2 othersLayout seems to be a hot topic at the moment, mostly prompted by the ALA redesign and the numerous discussions of the choice by Jason and the ALA team to go 1024 for a fixed width. I'm not going to go into my thoughts on ALA in too much depth here, there's been a lot of that already, but it seems like the right time to get this article out.
August 2005
Mac Mini for Mom
My Mom’s old EMachines Win98 box wasn’t actually broken, but it was tough to support remotely and the camera-company software that came with her digicam was really lame. So I ordered her a Mac mini and now it’s up and running. This gave me a (rare) chance to watch the OS X experience through a novice’s eyes.
June 2005
My first 48 hours enduring Ubuntu 5.04
by 1 otherInteressant description, analysis, list of the most important design flaws in Ubuntu.
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