Cocktails for OS X iPhone Demo. Great example of a well-designed iPhone app. ¶
37signals: Learning from “bad” UI. Wise words from Ryan Singer. ¶
Ignore the code: Disabling Inactive Menu Items. Use tooltips for cases where disabled menu items may cause confusion. ¶
Theocacao: Thinking Like a Cocoa Programmer. I’d say 99% applies to web development too. ¶
Entp: Where did those custom selectors in Lighthouse go? “[...] we’ve run into a few brick walls with the usability of the assigned user selector [...] As accounts and projects grow, those lists are getting long, and now you can use that keyboard to sort through the list or jump straight to a user.” ¶
Boston.com: The Big Picture. Awesome. Can’t believe nobody thought of this before. ¶
Ralf Herrmann’s Typography Weblog: Kerning and OpenType features in Firefox 3. The kerning is great, the support for ligatures is broken. ¶
Subtraction: Spacing Is Everything. “[...] by normalizing the space between like elements, aligning elements along similar spatial planes, moderately increasing the space between stacked items and paying attention to how elements are framed by negative space, we can get what is, in my opinion, a significantly more attractive Gmail interface.” ¶
Wordle: Beautiful Word Clouds. Very nice layout engine. ¶
Graphic Design Museum. Opens tomorrow in Breda. ¶
SOFA: Design, Interfaces & Software. Lovely website redesign from the makers of Checkout, Versions, and Disco. ¶
Subtraction: Go Speed Racer Go. “In spite of the plethora of three-dimensional computer rendering, the cinematography is essentially flat. That is, the directors treat every object in the frame as reductive shapes, to be juxtaposed, overlapped, intercut, transitioned — in effect laid out, much like on a pasteboard, as expediently and impactfully as possible.” Also see the VRMAG speedracer coverage here, here, here, and here. ¶
Hicksdesign: Graphics Editor or Text Editor?. “It’s easier and quicker to move stuff around in a graphics editor.” ¶
37signals: Web designers should do their own HTML/CSS. They really should. ¶
37signals: Why we skip Photoshop. “HTML/CSS is real in a way Photoshop will never be.” Never used Photoshop for web design, and I never will. ¶
Daring Fireball Linked List: ‘But That’s All’. “I don’t think iPhone brings anything new to the table. It has a great user experience, but that’s all.” That’s corporate IT. ¶
Graphicology: New Bond Hardcovers. Indeed stunning. ¶
The vanishing design. Lovely. ¶
Veerle’s blog: Does Flash irks me? “This makes me think about the WYSIWYG applications and the promises that you can create a site without even touching a single line of code. This approach is broken in my humble opinion because if you want to call yourself a true web designer you got to have an understanding about what is beneath the graphical layer. A machine, how good it made be, will never have the capability to think like a human. It already starts with separating content from presentation. When I start the web development process I always start with thinking about structure first and the implications it may have.” ¶
Daring Fireball Linked List: I Box in Yellow Gox Box Socks. “In print, you’ve got two boxes at a minimum: the page, and the text itself; on the web, you’ve got the browser window and the text. That’s enough boxiness for anyone. The key is to remember that a column of text, by itself, forms its own box.” Couldn’t agree more.
¶
Textism: Embedded video is broken. “I find myself at Youtube or Vimeo or Brightcove or wherever, begin watching something interesting, and immediately start looking for a way to put that in a corner of my screen so I can continue working or doing, um, research and cast my eyes back to it whenever it requires I do so. This evidently can’t be done using any of the popular embedded video gear, so I end up resizing the browser window, which inevitably results in some sort of layout chaos, and opening up a fresh window to resume what I was doing before.” Happens several times a day to me too. I’m hoping to convince a client to give you the option to launch video in an external player if you prefer that above watching the video embedded. Stay tuned. ¶
Subtraction: Great Numbers, Not So Great Design. “Design doesn’t scale well, in my opinion, or at least it doesn’t do so easily.” ¶
Opera Developer Community: Stop using Ajax! “[...] the emergence of Ajax techniques has inspired a whole new wave of applications, but in many (if not most) cases, these applications don’t actually need Ajax to work [...] we can cherry-pick the best ideas – we can build Web 2.0 applications without using Ajax.” True. ¶
The Royal Mint: New Designs Revealed. Very clever and very beautiful. ¶
Seed Conference. Lovely piece of web typography. ¶
tapedeck.org: Analog audio tape cassette nostalgia. I suddenly feel very old. ¶
Ask Edward Tufte: Interface design and the iPhone. “To clarify, add detail.” ¶
Ask 37signals: Why did you restart Highrise?. “As you can see, these lessons are nothing new. We’ve been preaching these ideas for a long time, but living them is so much harder. When we let the core principles of Getting Real slide, not even we could produce software worth a damn.” ¶
Astheria: The Elements of Design Applied to the Web. Nice examples. ¶
24 ways: Transparent PNGs in Internet Explorer 6. Good overview of what you can and can’t do. ¶
Graphic Design on the Radio. Interesting interviews. But why Flash? Why no podcast feed? Why no downloads? Why can’t I copy-paste the text? Why can’t I link to individual episodes? Why don’t these so called ‘graphic designers’ read DWWS? ¶
Thomas Fuchs: Consulting for Web User Interfaces and JavaScript. Great interaction and visual design, love the personal yet professional tone. ¶
Surfin’ Safari: Downloadable Fonts. The latest WebKit built supports downloadable fonts. Let’s hope this makes it into Leopard. ¶
Westciv: XRAY. Handy for adapting stylesheets to Internet Explorer 6. ¶
Monoscope: Proof that Adobe is turning into Microsoft. “What happens when asstard PM’s think they know better.” ¶
Smashing Magazine: Best of August 2007. Convenient. ¶
Airbag: Rolled. No more tabs at Amazon. ¶
Subtraction: Form of… a Book about Forms!. The Book looks interesting and the PayPal credit card type recognition is very smart. I strongly disagree about the Mint form though; it’s too busy. ¶
JazzMutant Lemur. Unbelievably awesome. ¶
Art. Lebedev Studio: Matryoshkus. I’m double-pleased. ¶
furbo.org: Does your app icon suck?. “It’s really pretty simple when you get down to it — the key elements are Color and Shape.” ¶
furbo.org: One line of code. Useful iPhone web development tip. ¶
gedblog: The Real Thing. Clean Coca-Cola packaging redesign. The sans-serif ‘classic’ below the logo is especially nice. ¶
Dario Taraborelli: The beauty of LaTeX. Using XeTeX with the fonstpec package. ¶
Typographica: Our Favorite Fonts of 2006. Anyone got some print work for me? ¶
Smash’s world: 10 Things that “Absolutely suck” about the iPhone.. Don’t agree with all, but 2 and 7 really need to be fixed. ¶
SpiekerBlog: Dummy generators. Great alternatives for lorem ipsum dolor. ¶
Apple: iPhone keyboard. Very intelligent user interface design. Can’t wait to try it myself. ¶
iPhone: A Guided Tour. It’s all about the interface, baby. ¶
Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: E-mail is not a platform for design. I agree. However, ASCII really means you’ll have to say sorry to someone like Håkon (and with him the majority of the earth’s population) for not being able to write his name with the right characters. Better use the term ‘text-only’. ¶
A List Apart: Educate Your Stakeholders!. “Although such people may be very well meaning, they are often blissfully unaware of the factors that should and do influence decision making on the web.” ¶
A List Apart: The Web Design Survey, 2007. Take it. ¶
Make the Logo Bigger. \m/ ¶
Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: Where are the Women? Where are the Links?. “Information architecture. Usability. Accessibility. Web standards. If you don’t know about these things, stop designing websites until you have learned. Competence in graphic design is merely a baseline; it does not qualify you to create user experiences for the web.” Sigh. ¶
Proposal to Adopt HTML5. Yes. Please. ¶
A List Apart: Articles: Setting Type on the Web to a Baseline Grid. Finally a baseline grid article that just uses pixel sizes. I really see no need to define the header font size as 1.66666667em instead of 20px when you’re using a base font size of 12px anyway. ¶
Social Suicide – storytelling with men’s bespoke suits. I never owned a suit, but now I want one. Or two. ¶
Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface. Free some time to read this. It’s great. ¶
White- (or green, or blue, or yellow) label Dabble. You upload your logo and Dabble automatically creates a color scheme for you based on the colors in your logo. Very nifty. ¶
Deal With It. Using the number of elements you have to deal with as a measure for perceived user interface complexity is a really, really good idea. ¶
Letterhead Fonts embraces DRM. We always make sure we’ve paid for the fonts we use, but I’m never ever going to buy type that tries to enforce its license terms using technical measures. ¶
The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web. So, why is the title an image? ¶
WhatTheFont. Handy. ¶
What do you want to know? Read the comments. ¶
Web 2.0 Tutorials Round-Up. Over 65 tutorials, references and related resources for creating Web 2.0 graphics. Gradients, gradients, gradients. ¶
Don’t Judge a Book by it’s Cover. Great idea for adding credits and copyright information to images that only gets shown when the image is downloaded or passed around on the web. ¶
Alphabet26. I wrote like this for the first few years. ¶
swfIR: swf Image Replacement. Nice. ¶
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