“Exercises in Style was inspired by a work of the same name by the French writer Raymond Queneau. In that book, Queneau spun as many variations as he could — over 100 — out of a mundane, two-part text about two chance encounters with a mildly irritating character during the course of a day. He started by telling it in every conceivable tense, then by doing it in free verse and as a sonnet, as a telegram, in pig latin, as a series of exclamations, in an indifferent voice… you name it.”

“Q: I tried to apply CSS to my hyperlinks and the hovering didn’t work. How come? Is this another case of browsers being stupid? A: While it’s always possible that you have a stupid browser — that’s not really for me to say — it is more often the case that the styles have simply been written in the wrong order.”

“Design techniques for static information are well understood, their descriptions and discourse thorough and well-evolved. But these techniques fail when dynamic information is considered. There is a space of highly complex systems for which we lack deep understanding because few techniques exist for visualization of data whose structure and content are continually changing. To approach these problems, this thesis introduces a visualization process titled Organic Information Design. The resulting systems employ simulated organic properties in an interactive, visually refined environment to glean qualitative facts from large bodies of quantitative data generated by dynamic information sources.” (This is Benjamin Fry’s Master’s Thesis, MIT Media Lab Aesthetics & Computation Group, Professor John Maeda, 8.6M PDF.)

“This article is for anyone involved in Web site design, not just engineers, so it avoids addressing every low-level technical nuance of cookies. Instead it explores technical considerations, interface design challenges, and — perhaps most importantly — ethical issues.”

“Design techniques for static information are well understood, their descriptions and discourse thorough and well-evolved. But these techniques fail when dynamic information is considered. There is a space of highly complex systems for which we lack deep understanding because few techniques exist for visualization of data whose structure and content are continually changing. To approach these problems, this thesis introduces a visualization process titled Organic Information Design. The resulting systems employ simulated organic properties in an interactive, visually refined environment to glean qualitative facts from large bodies of quantitative data generated by dynamic information sources.” (This is Benjamin Fry’s Master’s Thesis, MIT Media Lab Aesthetics & Computation Group, Professor John Maeda, 8.6M PDF.)

“What do people do on the Web? Most of them spend a lot of time looking for things. A Web site is like any other public place where people come to look, to learn, to search, or to experience. And as in any public place, visitors will succeed in what they came to do only if the site gives them a clear indication of: *where they are; *where they can go; *what they will find there. There are many ways to accomplish this, but one design strategy underlies every successful navigation system: it is a visual model of the hierarchy that’s inherent in the content. Another way of saying this: A good navigation system uses the site’s information structure as the basis for a visual hierarchy that guides the user experience.”

Includes useful samples and descriptions of Navigation (Bread crumbs, Double tab, Meta Navigation, Outgoing Links, Sitemap, Split Navigation, Matrix Navigation, Repeated Menu), Page Elements (News box, Home, List builder, List browser, Tabbing, Paging, Wizard, Parts Selector), Searching (Search, Advanced Search, Search Area) and eCommerce (Shopping cart, Identify, Registering).

“A few interfaces to traversing a space are the standard Windows GUI, a Nokia mobile telephone menu system, a text adventure, DOS. Put aside what the entire map looks like and how it’s presented on the screen — whether it’s a network or a hierarchy. Put aside how the memory of navigation is presented, other windows open in the background, or a numerical crumbtrail in the corner. What remains? What remains is for each node there are a number of exits and a number of items attached to it.”