I was thinking a lot this weekend about web design and the difference in how many of my clients approach their designers and how they approach their developers. I subsequently thought about some more technical issues but let me start with this first idea.
Most people don’t understand what it is a designer does nor what [...]

Categories: design

I came across this very interesting piece on the distinction between useability and discoverability the other day. It’s brings up some really good points and is well worth a read. He defines discoverability to affect how long it takes a new user to perform a specific task and he defines useability to be how efficiently [...]

Categories: design

This BBC article has usability guru Jakob Nielsen talking about the problems with Web 2.0 from a usability perspective. I always find him interesting and insightful, but I’m wondering if he’s missing something this time around. I agree with the general position that Web 2.0 causes some problems - I think people use whizzy flashy [...]

Categories: design · web2.0

While in general I don’t love using CSS for the broad layout of a site. If the site is simple enough it makes sense and can really simplify the structure of the page. Typically this involves looking around for the latest tricks to columnify something that resolutely doesn’t wish to be made into columns (which [...]

Categories: css · design · geekfindr

I love this site, it shows a bunch of really cool stuff - blog style. Right now I like Zumo light and the Vertikal Vodka bottle (although it reminds me of the Voss water bottles). Until recently I was always frustrated because above the blog there’s a “checkout” and “cart” button implying a purchasing option [...]

Categories: design

I was thinking about web safe fonts, what with my last Geekfindr about those font utilities and I began to wonder about the old initiative to get fonts embeddable into the web experience. So a website could add a little header to their html and the browser would download a font that it could use.. [...]

Categories: design

I was reading this insightful post on FranticIndustries about making things simple on your website. To me, this is a huge design issue, your website and UI have to be very friendly to the end user. It can be very difficult to accomplish, though, because many sites provide a lot of complex functionality. However, whenever [...]

Categories: amazon · design

Continuing on with my design theme this weekend… there are no shortage of times when I’m faced with needing to figure out what fonts to use and in white size, weight, etc.. to use them. Often, to some degree there isn’t that much involved, but every now and again you need to get a [...]

Categories: design · geekfindr

I came across this article a bit ago about how Jakob Nielsen did a study on the usability of news pages. Participants in the study were given tasks and he used eye tracking technology to watch what areas of the pages they looked at. There were two designs to the various pages and you can [...]

Categories: design

UPDATE: So, I just came across this recent post with another great tool. Here he talks about Kuler, an adobe online tool that’s a palette picker and browser of other’s color combo’s (web2.0 style with highest rated/most popular/newest lists). The picker is pretty sweet, I haven’t spent a lot of time with it yet [...]

Categories: design · free software · geekfindr · software · web2.0